Free The Vacationers: A Novel by Emma Straub

pancakes being distributed or eggs being cracked. Maybe both. Franny liked to show off for a crowd, to separate whites from yolks with a single hand, to warm the syrup on the stove. His mother’s favorite currency was food. When Sylvia was small and Bobby was still at home, Franny would pour pancakes into the shapes of animals, which thrilled them both, even though Bobby had always felt that it was his duty as the older child to pretend not to care.
    Carmen grumbled and turned onto her side, taking the sheet with her.
    “Good morning,” Bobby said, using his best newscaster voice. Carmen thumped him in the chest without opening her eyes. “It’s late.”
    “How late?” she said, eyes still closed.
    “After eight.”
    “Jesus.” Carmen shimmied her body backward until she was sitting up against the wrought-iron headboard. She was wearing her pajamas: a pair of faded boxer shorts that preceded her relationship with Bobby, now going on six years, and a pale pink camisole that clung to her rib cage and small breasts, her dark bull’s-eye nipples showing through. If you asked the Posts,they would all tell you exactly what kind of body Bobby found attractive: a thickened teenage gymnast, women who looked like they couldn’t ovulate if you gave them a million dollars. He didn’t care. Bobby loved how hard Carmen worked on her body. Her thighs were her calling cards; her biceps were her advertisements. She looked strong and serious, which she was. Bobby respected that she always knew what she wanted, from herself and from her clients. If she told him to drop to the ground and give her twenty push-ups, he’d do it. She had a strong sense of the human body, and of what people could do, if encouraged. It was one of the things Bobby liked most about her.
    “When are you going to talk to them about the money?”
    Bobby had been putting off a real conversation with his parents for months—every time his mother called, he got off the phone as quickly as possible, or else turned the chat around and asked Franny about whatever she was doing, which would get her going for at least twenty minutes, a respectable period of time. He hated to ask for money, and even more than that, he hated the reason he needed it. At first he’d just needed a little sideline business, something to tide his bank account over until the real estate market picked back up. He hadn’t planned to stay at the gym for longer than a few months. When the best membership salesman at Total Body Power approached Bobby about selling the supplement powders, it sounded like a no-lose scenario. Those were his exact words: “no lose.” So far, Bobby had lost every penny he’d ever saved, plus about a million pennies he’d never had in the first place.
    “Soon. I just need to find the right moment. You don’t know them,” Bobby said. “It has to be at the right time.” He leaned back against the wall.
    “Fine. Just remember that you said you were going to do it, and so you actually have to open your mouth, okay?” She got out of bed and stretched. “I think we should go to the beach, don’t you? Or do you need to think about that, too?”
    “I’m coming, I’m coming, yes,” Bobby said, even though the idea of staying in bed, alone, sounded suddenly blissful. He swung his legs over to his side and touched his toes to the cool stone floor. Charles and Lawrence were in the kitchen now—he could hear their voices, and then his mother’s laugh. There would be plenty of time spent sitting around, listening to them all tell the same stories over and over again, Sylvia somehow laughing inside it all. Bobby knew that the conventional thought was that she had been the accidental child, that she was the one born too late, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was the other way around, that he’d been born too early, before his parents got their act together. He’d had to figure out so many things on his own, not that they’d ever acknowledge that. The