Free That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo Page A

near the end of their first week, as if to suggest that she couldn’t imagine what was taking them so long.
If the Brownings were tired of Griffin, they gave no sign. Mrs. Browning always had enough sandwiches and Cokes in the cooler for everyone when they went to the beach. Of Italian descent, she introduced him to exotic new foods: fatty, spiced ham and hard salami, marinated mushrooms and artichokes, blistering hot cherry peppers, and a mouthwatering macaroni salad that tasted like nothing that came from the supermarket deli where his mother shopped. And in the evening, back at the cottages, there were always extra hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken on the grill. (Griffin’s father never grilled outdoors, not even on vacation, not since the year the flame from the smoking briquettes climbed up the stream of lighter fluid and torched his eyebrows.) Nor did the Brownings seem to mind that his parents took advantage of the free babysitting, driving into town most nights for dinner, just the two of them. “You should let us return the favor some night,” Griffin’s mother suggested, her insincerity clear even to him. “Give you and your husband a vacation from the kids.”
“We think of it as vacation with the kids,” Mrs. Browning said, and he saw the remark land, but it was only a glancing blow.
“If you pass someplace that sells ice on your way back, you could pick up a bag or two for the cooler,” Mr. Browning told Griffin’s father. “Save me a trip in the morning.” But they must not have passed anyplace that did, and the Brownings didn’t ask any other favors.
Griffin had had friends before, but never one all to himself, and never one he liked as much. Peter was good at things. He knew how to bodysurf, something Griffin had long wanted to do but was too afraid to try. His father, who was prone to minor injury, was so afraid of riptides that he refused to even go into the water. His mother liked to swim, but she’d sidle gracefully through the waves until she was out beyond where they broke so she could do her languid crawl. Peter, a wave aficionado, showed Griffin how to get the maximum ride out of the smaller waves and later, when he grew bolder, how to keep the larger ones from bouncing him on his head. Despite being several inches shorter, the boy was a natural athlete and could beat Griffin at anything that involved hand-to-eye coordination, though he generously explained his victories as owing to genetics. “My dad’s good at sports”—he shrugged, as if that didn’t really amount to much—“so I am, too.” The heredity angle, of course, contained a veiled insult, and Griffin was pretty sure Peter and Mr. Browning, after watching his father’s daily struggles to unfold his beach chair, had sized him up as physically ungifted. “Your dad’s quite a reader, I see,” Peter’s father remarked one day, perhaps searching for a compliment that would have some basis in reality, and Griffin nodded, again glowing with shame.
By the end of their two weeks together, he and Peter had developed an intimacy that was wholly foreign to his experience and made him wonder if this was what love was like. It wasn’t a sexual feeling, though it constricted his heart with a strange, purposeless urgency he didn’t comprehend. When he wasn’t with Peter, he needed to talk about him and, no surprise, his parents tired of this subject quickly, especially when Griffin began to lobby them about renting one of these same cottages next summer, so he and Peter could be together again. Having already sounded him out about the owners’ rotation, he knew that the Brownings would be on the Cape in July. Please, please , he begged, couldn’t they book a cottage right now? If they couldn’t afford the whole month, at least take it for the first two weeks of July, so they’d all arrive together. Otherwise, Peter might develop some new summer friendship before Griffin could get there.
The reason he was so certain his attraction to Peter wasn’t sexual was