"Oh great," Rob said. "I guess that means I'm stuck here for the duration."
He threw himself down on one of the couches and assumed a martyred air. Along with Mother's slender height and aristocratic blond looks, he'd inherited her talent for self-dramatization.
"Don't be gloomy," Dad said. He stood before the hearth, apparently trying to set the back of his pants on fire. His short, round form and the way the firelight played on his bald head made him look like a mischievous gnome. "Look on the bright side," he added. "After all these years, we'll finally get to see what really happens here during a hurricane!"
"Yippee," Rob mumbled without enthusiasm.
"Oh dear," Mother murmured.
"Don't worry, Margaret," Aunt Phoebe said. She had shed her dripping rain gear and was tying a green-and-orange-flowered apron over her stout khaki-clad form. "We've got plenty of food and fuel. We may have to rough it for a bit, but we'll come through just fine."
Mother looked relieved. After all, she knew better than anyone that Aunt Phoebe's idea of roughing it meant using the checked gingham napkins instead of the starched linen, and that the caviar might be tinned instead of fresh.
"Time we got busy," Mrs. Fenniman said. She had donned a flowered apron identical to Aunt Phoebe's, though it looked odd over her usual black clothes and scrawny frame. The two of them hefted their tote bags and disappeared into the kitchen.
"We can go out on the cliffs at Green Point and actually see the storm hit!" Dad went on. "Won't that be fantastic!"
"Oh, James, you mustn't!" Mother protested.
"Won't that be dangerous?" Michael asked. I looked at him with astonishment and more than a little dismay. He sounded as if he might actually be considering Dad's suggestion. Much as I adored my father, I'd always sworn never to get involved with someone who did the kind of crazy things Dad did. And yet, there it was again: I could see on Michael's face that same look of lovable but daft enthusiasm. Oh dear, I thought. Dad had spread a small map of Monhegan over the coffee table and was scribbling madly on it--apparently trying to calculate the best spot to await the hurricane's arrival. Michael leaned over to watch.
"Count me out," Rob said. "I have to work on Lawyers from Hell."
Mother sighed. The whole family was still anxiously waiting to see if Rob had, by chance, passed the bar exam in July. Since he and his bar exam review group had whiled away the summer inventing a role-playing game called Lawyers from Hell instead of doing anything that even vaguely resembled studying, the odds were slim.
"I really ought to be back in Yorktown working on it," Rob said. What he meant was that he wanted to be back in Yorktown talking about bits and bytes with Red, his new girlfriend, who was helping him turn Lawyers from Hell into a computer game.
"How on earth did you get here anyway?" I asked, taking Rob aside.
"We came over on the ferry yesterday," he said.
"Well, I figured out that much," I said. "I meant, what are all of you doing up here in the first place?"
"Dad called to say they were flying home from Paris and could I meet them at Dulles Airport," Rob said. "Their plane got in very early yesterday morning. And Aunt Phoebe and Mrs. Fenniman hitched a ride up to Washington with me so they could catch a flight to Maine to go birding. But the flight got canceled because of the hurricane, and instead of going back to Yorktown, Aunt Phoebe convinced Mother and Dad to come up here with her. What are you doing here?"
"Looking for a little privacy," Michael put in.
"Good luck," Rob said with a snicker, and slipped out of the room--probably to call Red and indulge in a little long-distance whining. Or heavy breathing.
Well, Rob isn't the only one doomed to disappointment in his love life for the immediate future, I thought, glancing at Michael as I sat back down beside him. Here I was, sitting with the man of my dreams on an overstuffed sofa by a roaring fire, just as I'd imagined in my fantasies about this weekend. But having to share the experience with my entire family took a lot of the fun out of it.
I felt guilty about resenting their presence. They were all trying so hard to make us feel better. Of course, this meant that every five minutes one of them would pop up with either a new remedy for seasickness or a new tactic for preventing pneumonia. And I'd taken a head count and compared it to the number of bedrooms and figured out that I'd probably be sleeping on one of the sofas.
"Now the phone's out," Rob announced, shuffling back into the room and throwing himself on the other sofa.
"Usually happens in a storm," Aunt Phoebe said, shoving a cup of herbal tea into my hands.