Free Dive From Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer

sycamore and left my windows open against the hot evening. Next door, an oscillating sprinkler clicked tighter and tighter and then spun out, throwing water in an arc across a wide lawn. I could smell someone’s compost, the green, fertile scent of it.
    All week at work Viktor had raved about the meal he and Ania were going to make for me and the fun we were going to have, but he’d never mentioned other guests, so I was surprised to see the table set for six. I felt uneasy, thinking dinner was one thing, a dinner party something else entirely. How could I be at a dinner party when Mike was in the hospital? Why wasn’t I at the hospital with him? Why wasn’t I the injured one, he the visitor? A panicky feeling rose in me, and I fought to quell it. I forced myself to smile at Viktor. “Who else is coming?”
    “Carrie, you can’t imagine.” He shook his head mournfully. “Downstairs lives Tom, our neighbor, and we asked him to come, too. Now he has called us one hour ago to say his brother from New York is arriving tonight with a friend, and would we allow them as well? Of course I had to say yes.” He raised his hands dramatically. “Tell me now, how is this called, is it called bold? Very bold?”
    “It’s pretty bold, all right. Forward, even.”
    “Forward, yes! You can’t imagine Ania, she is quite put out.”
    “I am not quite put out,” Ania called from the kitchen. I heard a thunk, as of an onion being split, and a moment later she came in, brushing furiously at her eyes. She was tall and broad-faced, the perfect match for him. “I am not quite put out and I am not crying—it’s onion tears is all. Hello, Carrie. Viktor, you don’t give her a drink?”
    “I do,” he said. “I do give her a drink.”
    “Give her one then. And she should sit in the rocking chair so she can see the lake out the window.”
    Tom turned out to be someone I’d seen on campus a number of times. He would have been hard to miss: tall and skinny, with a headful of unruly blond curls. He was in physics, working toward what he called “a degree so terminal few survive it.” His brother looked like a toned-down Tom: not quite so tall, hair shading toward brown, someone whom it wouldn’t have been hard to miss.
    Tom and his brother were trailed by the brother’s friend, a small, wiry guy in jeans and a gray T-shirt. His hands in his back pockets, he hung back a little, stayed quiet through the introductions. He was called Kilroy, though I didn’t catch if that was his first or last name.
    “So you’re what, Czech?” he said to Viktor. Ania had returned to the kitchen, and the four guys were all still standing. Perched on the rocking chair, I wished they’d sit.
    Viktor’s jaw tightened. “I’m Polish,” he said. Kilroy raised his eyebrows, and Viktor glanced at me, perplexed, then turned back. “You don’t like Polish?”
    “I ‘like Polish’ fine,” Kilroy said. “It’s just that I saw your name on the mailbox downstairs, so it didn’t make sense.”
    Viktor looked offended. “Why not?”
    “Because it would be Viktor with a W, wouldn’t it? In Polish?”
    Viktor colored slightly. “A linguist.”
    “Wiktor!” Tom had been studying a picture over the fireplace, but now he turned, grinning. “It suits you, buddy. Think I’ll call you Wiktor from now on, what do you say?”
    “Now you see why I have the spelling with a V,” Viktor said to Kilroy.
    I stood up and went into the kitchen for another beer. If I’d wanted to hear a pair of guys needling each other I could have hung out with the people I usually hung out with. The evening stretched ahead of me, pointless and unending. The only thing I felt like doing lately was sewing, and how much could I sew? Already my closet was full of things I didn’t really need—things I didn’t even really want. I’d spent most of the day onmy mother’s curtains, cruising down the long seams. What would I make once they were finished?
    Ania was grating