Then my father spoke. My father is seventy-four and has said maybe three hundred words to the family in public in my whole life, and most of them were about the weather.
He looked at his granddaughter, soaking wet and laughing, and he said, “Well. Take it anyway.”
Mom turned and stared at him.
“Lou,” he said, “in fifty years nobody’s going to remember a dry picture.”
And Mom laughed. Just like that. The careful look broke apart and she laughed, and Claire laughed harder, and I heard myself laughing too, standing on that hot deck with wet knees and a sister-in-law I could have cheerfully strangled.
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Claire dropped the towel. She climbed back down two steps into the pool, because she said if she was going to be wet she was going to be all the way wet, and then she climbed out again with water pouring off her, grinning, and planted herself next to her grandfather.
“Okay,” she said, pushing her black hair back off her face. “I’m ready.”
The photographer looked at me. I nodded.
“Three,” he said. “Two. One.”
On “one” Claire started laughing so hard she had to grab my arm, and that is the picture. The sun on the water. Mom and Dad in white and khaki, both of them gray as winter and smiling like kids. Me in navy, holding on to my soaking wet daughter in her yellow sundress, her hair in black ropes down her back, laughing at nothing and everything at once.
He took about thirty shots. Then he lowered the camera and said, “Now everybody,” and Dad turned around and said, “Milo. Christine. Perry. Get in here.”
Christine did not move.
“Christine,” my father said. “In.”
She came. She stood on the end, a little apart. Milo put his arm around her. And Claire, still dripping, reached over and grabbed Christine’s hand and pulled her in close and said, “You have to get wet too, it’s only fair,” and wrapped her soaking wet arm around Christine’s waist.
Christine yelped. And then, for the first time all week, she laughed, really laughed, with her head back and her eyes shut, and the photographer caught it.
I did not know that yet. I saw it the next morning.
The rest of that day was strained in the way family days get strained, where everyone is polite and nobody says the thing.
Claire went to change. Her dress was not ruined, exactly, but the chlorine left a pale streak down the front, and she said she would never get it out. She shrugged when she said it. Claire shrugs a lot more than I do.
Christine stayed away from all of us until dinner. At dinner she sat at the far end next to Perry and talked to him about the water slides.
I went up on the open deck that night after everyone was in bed. I could not sleep. The ship was humming under my feet and the wind was warm and smelled like salt and diesel, and the wake behind us was white in the dark.
Milo was already there at the rail.
We stood side by side for a while without saying anything, the way we used to stand on the fence at the farm when we were kids and had gotten in trouble.
“She’s mad at me,” I finally said.
“She’s not mad at you, Rosalie.”
“She pushed my kid in the pool.”
“I know.” He rubbed his face. “I know. And she’s going to make that right. I’ll make sure. But she’s not mad at you.”