"Johnny asked to have a graduation party at the lake house, week after next," Roberta Lawson told her husband over breakfast early one June morning. "I said that I was sure that would be fine, but I'd have to run it by you first."
Ray Lawson looked at his wife over the top of his newspaper. "Glad you said that. Absolutely not." He pretended to return to his reading, hoping that he'd ended the matter. He knew better.
"Why ever not?"
Ray sighed and put the paper aside. He'd have no peace until this was settled. "For one thing, if anything happens up there, it's our property and we're liable."
"Spoken like a lawyer." Roberta's tone was equal parts amused tolerance and barely disguised frustration. Ray heard that in his wife's voice more and more often of late and it grated. To his mind, it wasn't right for her to challenge him on matters like this.
"Yes, and as an officer of the court, I think we ought to maintain some standard of civic responsibility. Enabling the kids of this town in their carousing is asking for trouble. You know they'll want to drink-"
"-They're all eighteen, and it'll be a private party-"
"-They'll want to drink and God knows what else. At the very least it looks bad."
"'It looks bad.'" Roberta mimicked. She wrinkled her nose and stuck her tongue out playfully, trying to deflect his irritation. She didn't understand why her husband bristled at the slightest little thing, these days. He seemed to look upon any disagreement as a personal affront.
Ray's increasing intransigence wasn't limited to differences of opinion about everyday matters. With Johnny being an only child and about to graduate high school and go off to college in the autumn, Roberta had been looking forward to what she'd hoped would be new freedom for them to explore life again together. For years they'd talked of pulling up stakes and traveling; now, whenever she broached the subject Ray responded only with terse objections about the expenses and risks.
At forty-five, Ray Lawson behaved and was even starting to look much older than his years. That unnerved Roberta. She'd begun asking herself what kind of life lay ahead, now that it would be just the two of them alone in the house again.
"Dear, it'll only be him and a few of his soccer pals and their girlfriends," she pressed. "We know these kids. We're friends with their parents. Like the Gables."
"And Luke Gable is exactly the kind of trouble I'm talking about," Ray countered. "I don't care how many goals he kicks or how popular he is, he's a punk. He has no respect for his elders."
"He's always very considerate and nice to me," Roberta objected.
Of course he's nice to you, Ray thought. Approaching early middle age, Roberta Lawson was still a knock-out. The fine smile lines that now accented her beautiful features, as well as the strands of silver threading through her long waves of blond hair, just made her more alluring. He knew she fretted about the few pounds that the decades had inevitably added to her five-foot-three frame, but Ray liked that little extra meat on her curves. She looked now like a centerfold from the old men's magazines he'd furtively collected in his teenage years.
In his heart, Ray knew that much of his problem with Luke and some of his son's other friends was the way that he'd seen them look at Roberta when visiting the house. Well, she was gorgeous and they were adolescent males. Ray feared that to make an issue of the matter would make him look foolish and insecure. So he said only, "I'm telling you, that whole gang is more trouble than they're worth."
"They're not a gang. They're our son's teammates, and his best friends." Roberta suddenly stopped in the middle of stacking the breakfast dishes in the washer. She walked up behind Ray and hugged his shoulders. "They'll only graduate high school once, sweetheart. Let Johnny have this one thing."
Let him have this one thing. She makes me sound like a petty bully. "All right. Fine. They can have a barbeque. Off the property by eleven."
"With a bonfire?" Roberta sounded as giddy as if she were planning her own graduation party.
"A small one. But no booze." Ray picked up his newspaper again. I'll regret this, he thought.
†††
Greenleaf High's graduation ceremony took place at the town's absurdly modern civic center, a marble-faced cube that looked like a giant's child had just dropped it randomly across the town square from the Neo-Georgian courthouse. Ray could never look at the façade with its tall gun-slit windows without wondering how much of his property tax was tied up in that monument to small-town grandiosity.
Proud, tearful hugs and congratulations were exchanged. Thousands of images of hundreds of gowned graduates, classmates, and their families were snapped, most fated to disappear into cloud storage and never be viewed a second time.
And the Lawsons hosted a beach party and barbeque at their vacation place by the lake.
Ray had to admit that just opening the place up for the season lifted his spirits. The modest fir-and-cedar cottage, with its floor-to-ceiling windows looking down on the beach from atop a wooded hill, had been his favorite place since he and Roberta had purchased it some twenty years before. Then, it had been his reward for his early career achievements. More recently it had become a refuge from a world he believed was growing more hostile every day to men like him, old-fashioned men with old school values. The first group of kids to arrive in the mid-afternoon were pleasant and polite enough, a few couples who joked around a little with Ray and Roberta up at the barbecue pit before withdrawing to swim and play spike ball with Johnny on the narrow sandy beach below.
His mood darkened when Johnny's closest friends—Luke Gable, Bobby Tilson, and Keith Stewart—came rolling up the gravel access road in that beaten-up old Escalade that Keith had bought on eBay. Just seeing the piece of junk bouncing and rattling down the path on its busted suspension annoyed the hell out of him. It was loud, ridiculous, and, to his mind, a public danger. It exemplified all that he disliked about the gang Johnny chose to run with.
Soon noise was blaring from the wireless speakers that they set up on the tailgate. Ray couldn't stand rap.
