Osprey Island

“So, welcome,” Bud said again, “to the Lodge at Osprey Island. We’re glad you’re all here, ready for another busy season. And I know all of you who just arrived this afternoon have your unpacking to do and settling in, so I’ll let you get to that just as soon as I introduce some important folks who keep this place running.” Affability was something Bud Chizek could manage to muster only through great and diligent effort, but he’d found over the years that if he could display something that approached graciousness during these first few interactions with his summer staff, then he could pretty much drop the charade for the rest of the season and keep them all on their toes, afraid they’d disappointed him somehow and scrambling to regain his favor. “I’m Bud Chizek,” he boomed. “I own this beautiful place here”—he gestured to the Lodge and its grounds and up the hill toward the guest cottages scattered around the tennis courts and swimming pool—“been in my family . . . oh, what is it now, Nance? What did we say?”

“Nearly fifty years,” his wife chimed in from the sidelines.

“My wife, Nancy Chizek,” Bud said proudly, and Nancy gave a wave, turning side to side like the Queen Mother on motorcade, and with as little sense of irony.

Bud continued: “And, with us for the past twenty-six of those summers, our chef, Jock. Let’s give a hand to Jock for this delicious barbecue!” There was a wave of polite applause. Jock continued to glower from behind the serving table.

Bud Chizek looked around at the picnic guests. “OK, on with the family: Where are you, Mia?” he asked into the crowd.

“Here!” A voice came from beneath the deck where Squee was frantically pointing at the little girl seated beside him on top of the Ping-Pong table, paddle and ball in her hands, waiting diligently for her grandfather’s speech to be over so they could continue their game.

“Thank you, Squee,” said Bud. “That’s Lance Squire Jr., there—his folks are our heads of maintenance and housekeeping . . . Lance? Lorna?” Bud looked for them, but they had already retreated up the hill. “Anyway . . . my granddaughter, Mia. And somewhere out there . . . is her mother . . . my daughter, Suzy . . . out from New York City for another summer at the family hotel . . .”

He panned the crowd. His introduction was intended as a jab, and both he and his daughter knew it. Suzy was hardly a part of the family business—hardly a part of her family’s life on Osprey Island but for these summers when she accepted her parents’ offer of three rent-free months of vacation with built-in babysitters and maid service. She and her parents had been on speaking terms again only since Mia’s birth. It appeared that granddaughter trumped grudge. Or at least the idea of granddaughter. Mia and her grandparents never seemed to know what to do with one another once they were in the same place, but the Chizeks liked the sound of the phrase We’ll have our granddaughter with us for the summer. Suzy was never entirely sure why she ever agreed to the arrangement, and usually spent much of the summer trying to figure out what in god’s name she’d been thinking. Suzy Chizek thought her parents ungenerous, judgmental, and phony, and she was quite certain they’d have traded Suzy’s life in a fraction of a second to have her older brother back. Chas, she was sure, would have merited a nice room at the Lodge. A room with a view, say. Suzy Chizek was not a daughter who deserved a view. Bud never gave Suzy and Mia a particularly nice room. Those were for the paying guests, not for the wayward daughter and her (for all intents and purposes) fatherless child, the daughter who’d sworn her distance from Osprey Island’s oppressive confines as soon as the Island High diploma was in her itchy hand. That daughter took what she got: a room that looked out over the parking lot, on the kitchen and delivery entrances.

When Bud’s eyes lit on Suzy, seated at a nearby picnic table, he stuck out a hand in his daughter’s direction. Suzy lifted an arm slightly, the gesture of a gesture, and half smiled, her eyebrows raised to the crowd as she tried to share with them, silently, a mutual understanding of her father’s absurdity. She was thirty-six years old and had put up with introductions like this for more of her life than she could bear to think about.

“And let’s see . . .” Bud Chizek looked around again. “Who am I forgetting?” He paused, searching faces, different each summer yet so much the same: the college boys, the Irish girls, the Island hangers-on.