Free The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy

the confessional, and after ten seconds I upped the ante even further by deciding to actually confess, “Forgive me, Father—
deep breath—
for I have sinned—
you’re okay
—I have taken more potatoes…AHHHHHH!” I ran straight out of there, then right out the back door of the Barn, collapsing onto the grass outside in a heap, arms crossed, rubbing away my goose bumps in a patch of sun at the foot of the Cottage.
    The three structures on Mark’s property were arranged in a triangle. The Main House was on the northeastern side, the Barn was on the southwestern side, and tucked at the northwestern corner was the Cottage. The smallest of the three, the Cottage was still twice the size of my Broad Channel boat shed, with a separate bedroom, a combo living/dining room, and a small galley kitchen. There couldn’t have been a more charming guesthouse, but I had little reason to spend much time inside it, with two exceptions: the first was when it rained. Because the Cottage had a thin roof and exposed-wood walls, you could hear the distinct
ping
or
plop
of every raindrop, and as soon as those first drops fell, Mark would have us stop whatever we were doing and rush over there, the three of us sitting in total silence, eyes closed, ears perked, listening to the rain as if it were Schubert’s
Impromptus.
    The second reason was for my personal Wild West reenactments.
    When I finally shook off the willies and got onto my feet, I headed straight into the Cottage for some much-needed, confidence-boosting, cowboy role-play. Nothing in the decor would have suggested that this was the place to do that, save one very important element (the magnificence of which was often lost on the adults who spent any time in there), and that was the pair of swinging saloon doors that separated the kitchen from the living room.
    I started with the slow John Wayne slide through: “Well, howdy, partner.” Then on to the preeminent grab-and-pull, followed by double quick draw: “Stick ’em up!” And finally an anachronistic kung-fu-movie-style ninja pounce, followed by three minutes of Bruce Lee meets grand mal seizure karate chops and rapid-fire roundhouse kicks. All in all, I probably busted through those doors a dozen more times that day, changing up the style with each go before the road called, and with a tip of the imaginary hat, I was on my way.
    —
    For the first year I visited Mark’s country place, from ages four to five, the grassy, low-grade hill that was the communal yard among the three houses held nothing but the twenty-buck vinyl kiddie pool I begged him for—it was the type you filled with a garden hose, about the size of your average round kitchen table, with little cartoon animals printed along the outside, and it was so out of place and scale on this picturesque, roving lawn, seeing it was like stumbling upon a plastic-frosted toy donut on a moor in
Wuthering Heights
. And while Mark found the image of my Power Wheels truck next to his historic farmhouse comical in its absurdity, the baby pool just pissed him off. So one day he decided to put in a real pool.
    Two years and God only knows how many tens of thousands of dollars later, where once there was a little ring of plastic holding a bathtub’s worth of cold water in the middle of a giant field of grass, there was now an entire stonework, lagoon-inspired pool that, as Mark had hoped, most people refused to believe wasn’t a nature-made pond. He didn’t want to level the land, so one side was ten feet high, made of many hundreds of pieces of hand-laid slate, a sort of castle wall built into the earth. In lieu of a standard metal ladder with railings was an intentionally askew pile of descending giant gray stones at one end by which you could get in or out of the water. And he asked my mother to plant all sorts of dangly, weeping flowers around the perimeter, their leaves and blooms grazing the water’s edge as if they had been there for a hundred years. Naturally,