“Are you taking a nap?” Declan asked.
“No,” I said. “Just closing the eyes.”
“You can take a nap if you want,” he said, “and then maybe when you get up, me and Allie will be finished with our sandcastle city and you’ll be so surprised with how good it is!”
I turned my head and looked at Allie. “That okay with you?” I asked.
“Of course!” she said. “I think you’re going to be very impressed when you wake up.”
I smiled. I doubted I’d be able to actually go to sleep, but being able to lay there and not have to worry about what Declan was getting into was a luxury all on its own.
And I think I did actually start to doze a little; maybe not quite full-on sleep, but I was definitely straddling that gray area between awake and asleep. Everything sounded a little further away, and it didn’t quite seem like I was totally there in my body.
“How come those guys wanted to know if Dad was your boyfriend?” I heard Declan ask.
“They were just wondering,” Allie replied. “A lot of the time, people assume that if you’re together like this, that you’re boyfriend and girlfriend or married.”
“Are you guys going to get married?”
She laughed. “Me and your dad?”
“Yeah. Most kids at school have two parents, you know.”
“A lot of them do. But not all of them. Some people come from a home with two parents; some only have one. I didn’t really know my dad when I was growing up.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. And that’s okay—that’s just how it works out sometimes. Everybody has a different life experience.”
“I wish I knew my mom.”
There was a pause, and even with my eyes closed, I could tell that Allie was trying to figure out what to say.
“Maybe you could ask your dad about her sometime,” she said.
“I don’t know. I don’t think he wants me to. I tried asking my grandma about her once, but she almost started crying.”
“Sometimes it’s hard for people to talk about things.”
“Why would it be hard for her to talk about that?”
Another pause. “I’m not sure.”
I continued to lay there underneath the hot sun, feeling my skin starting to crisp, despite the sunscreen. I didn’t want them to think that I was awake, that I had been able to overhear every word that had been said. There was a part of me that wanted to just tell Declan everything, and tell him all about it, but he was too young, of course. It wouldn’t make sense to him, and it would leave him with far more questions than answers. It might feel good to talk about it, but I wouldn’t let myself do it, even though a part of me longed to tell Allie; I didn’t want to keep anything from her.
We stayed at the lake for a while, only packing our stuff up when the sun was low in the sky and the mosquitos started coming out. Declan was sound asleep in his car seat before I’d even made it out of the parking lot.
“It’s amazing what a day at the beach will do to a kid,” I said. “I definitely remember being a kid and coming off the beach and just being so tired I didn’t think I’d be able to walk back up to the house. And then just falling asleep in bed, no covers, and waking up the next morning with the sheets full of sand.” As kids, my sister and I would often sleep on the screened-in front porch because it’d be cooler out there than up in our bedrooms.
“I didn’t go to the water much,” Allie said. “My mother, as I’m sure you could tell, isn’t really the outdoors-y type. We did belong to a country club and go to the pool sometimes, but it was so chlorinated it made my eyes burn. And she would never go swimming anyway.” She shook her head. “Sometimes, it feels like I was raised by the completely wrong person. Like I would’ve been much happier with the sort of mom who went barefoot and spent her days outside in the garden. But I guess we can’t choose who raises us.”
“Do you think Declan is happy?” I asked.
She looked at me. “Where’s that coming from?”
“I just...wonder sometimes. And you’re his teacher, and you’re also around other kids a lot, too, so you’ve got something to compare... Do you think he seems happy? Or do you think he feels like he’s being raised by the wrong person, too?”
I had never admitted this before, but sometimes it felt like I was failing. Despite that everyone around me was telling me what a good job I was doing, I sometimes wondered if it was just because they saw me as a guy trying to raise a kid by himself. The bar was pretty low when it came to that—I often felt that people thought I deserved a medal just because I hadn’t abandoned him.