The Summer List. Amy Mason Doan

bring that to the new neighbors after breakfast,” my mother said when I entered the kitchen. She was scrambling eggs with a rubber spatula, and she paused to point it at a pound cake on the counter. “Good morning.”

      Chore assignment first, greeting second. This about summed up my mother.

      She went back to parting the sea of yellow in the pan.

      So not only was the vanilla smell for some other family, I had an assignment. I examined the cake’s golden surface. It was perfect, but curiously plain. No nuts, no chocolate chips, no blueberries. Not even drizzled with glaze, and it obviously wouldn’t be. My mother always poured the cloudy liquid on when her cakes were still piping hot.

      Next to the naked cake she’d set out a paper plate, Saran Wrap, a length of red ribbon, and one of her monogrammed notecards. A complete new-neighbor greeting kit, ready to go before 7:30 a.m. I read the card silently. Welcome—Christies.

      A stingy sort of note, nothing like the warm introduction she’d written when the Daytons moved in down the shore last year. That had included an invitation to church. Surely my mother could have spared a few more words for the new family, a the before our last name. They were right across the narrowest part of the lake from us. If they had binoculars, they could see how much salt we put on our eggs.

      It seemed she’d already taken a dislike to the new people, and I set about learning why. “You’re not coming with me to meet them?”

      “They have a daughter your age, you need to offer to walk to school together the first day,” she said, like this was written in stone somewhere.

      Shoot me now. The last thing I needed was more complications at school. My plan was to lie low in September.

      I watched the tip of my mother’s white spatula make figure eights in the skillet. How could eggs be so nasty on their own when they played a clutch role in French toast? I’d take a tiny spoonful and distribute it artfully around my plate so it would look like more.

      As if she’d heard my thoughts, my mother mounded a triple lumberjack serving of scrambled eggs onto a plate and handed it to me.

      I carried it to the breakfast nook and sat next to my dad, who was hidden behind his newspaper. I could only see his tuft of white hair. It was sticking up vertically, shot through with sun from the window. “Last one awake is the welcome wagon,” he said. “New household rule.”

      He snapped a corner of the paper down and winked at me. “Morning.”

      I smiled. “Morning.”

      I pushed egg clumps around with my fork and stared out the window at the small brown shape in the pines across the lake. The junky-looking old Collier place, the one everybody called The Shipwreck. The Collier name was legend around Coeur-de-Lune, though the actual Colliers were long gone. They’d been rich, and a lot of them had died young. The small building across the lake where the Collier kids slept in summer had been falling apart since before I was born, and my mother always said they should just burn it. The Colliers’ main summerhouse, the fancy three-story one that had once been a few hundred yards up the shore, had been torn down when the land was split up decades before.

      I’d seen trucks at The Shipwreck since it sold. Pedersen’s Hardware and Ready Windows. I loved the funny little house exactly the way it was, and now the new family would fix it up and ruin it.

      So because they had a daughter my age my mother was totally blowing off the visit? Something was off. In her world of social niceties, frozen somewhere around 1955, new neighbors required baked goods. Not from a mix—new neighbors called for separating yolks from whites. And they definitely called for a personal appearance.

      “Saw their car the other day when they were moving in,” my dad said behind his New York Times, making it shiver. There was a photo of Bill Clinton on the front page, shaking some dignitary’s hand, and when he spoke it looked like they were dancing.

      My mother was transferring patty sausages from a skillet onto a plate. At his words, her elbows really got into stabbing the sausages and violently shaking them off the fork.

      When she didn’t respond he continued, “Saw what was on the back bumper.”

      That did it.

      She dropped the plate between us with a thud and stalked into the dining room to tend to her latest batch of care packages for soldiers. They were arranged in a perfect ten-by-ten grid on the dining room table.

      I forked a sausage and took a bite, burning the roof of my mouth with spicy grease.

      After I swallowed I whispered, “What was on the car?” Maybe a bumper sticker my mother considered racy. Or inappropriate, to use one of her favorite words.

      The day wasn’t blissfully free anymore, but at least it was getting interesting.

      A new girl my age, just across the water, with parents who’d slapped an inappropriate bumper sticker on the family wagon. Maybe one of those Playboy women with arched backs and waists as tiny as their ankles, the ones truck drivers liked to keep on their mud flaps.

      My dad set his paper down and started working the crossword. He did the puzzle in the Times only after finishing the easier ones in the Reno Statesman and the Tahoe Daily Journal. I liked to watch his forehead lines jump around when he worked on the Times crossword. I could tell when it was going well and when he was stumped, just by how wavy they were in the center.

      He tapped on the paper with the tip of his black ballpoint the way he always did when he was struggling. He must have thrown in one or two extra taps because I glanced down. Above the “Across” clues he’d drawn a fish with legs. Ah. That would do it. According to my mother’s complicated book of social equations, one of those pro-Darwin anti-Christian fish with legs on your rear bumper meant you got a red ribbon, but only tied around a no-frills pound cake, and you got a duty visit from her daughter, but not from her.

      My dad scribbled over the drawing and cleared his throat, then sent me a quick wink. I nudged my scrambled-egg plate closer to him and he took care of them for me in three bites, one eye on the dining room entryway as he chewed.

      He went back to his crossword, and I got up to wrap the cake, curling the ribbon to make up for the terrible note. The unwelcome note. But as I was returning the scissors to the drawer I saw the black pen my mother had used. I’d mastered her handwriting years before. (Please excuse Laura from Physical Education, her migraines have been simply terrible lately.)

      Quickly, expertly, I revised her words.

      Welcome—Christies became Welcome!!—The Christies. We’re so thrilled you’re here!

      Okay, maybe I went overboard. It was the kind of note Pauline Knowland’s and Suzanne Farina’s mothers would write, a message anticipating years of squealing hellos at Back-to-School night.

      I tucked the note in my pocket, returned the pen to the drawer, and by the time my mother bustled in again I was at the table sipping orange juice, innocent as anything.

      * * *

      I dipped my paddle, breaking the glassy surface of the lake. I was the only one out on the water this early—the only human at least. The gentle ploshes and chirps and ticks of the lake felt like solitude; I knew them so well.

      It was chilly on the water but warmth spread through my shoulders as I set my short course for The Shipwreck. My dad liked to speak in jaunty nautical terms like this; he always asked when I came home after a day on the lake—How was your voyage? Or—Duel with any pirates?

      He gave me my kayak for my tenth birthday. My mother was just as surprised as me when he led us outside after the German chocolate cake. I’d opened up all my other gifts—two sweaters and six books and a Schumann CD I’d requested and a tin of Violetta dusting powder with a massive puff I’d not only not requested, but had absolutely no clue what to do with. My mother and I both thought the birthday was done.