It was after I cut Sammy’s hot dog into tiny, non-chokeable pieces, after I’d kicked a pink ball back and forth with Eliza’s sensitive son twice before he scampered off, whose name escapes me now, that I noticed the hosts were playing “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” on the radio. The radio was propped against the kitchen window’s screen, playing from inside the symmetrical home. I searched for you in the yard but couldn’t find you. I guessed you were inside with the clammy grandparents, shading Sammy from the midday August sun when even the leaves turned from it without a breeze, changing his diaper carefully on the living room carpet as deftly as you did on our sectional, leaving no trace a hazardous exchange took place there. You were capable of great parental feats.

So, I’m there at the aboveground pool, checking the water’s temperature with my hand, listening to the insufferable chorus by Eiffel 65. There were half a dozen children on floats and wearing SpongeBob swimmies on their biceps circling the pool in a juvenile attempt to make it whirl. The water’s color wasn’t clear, but opaque; I thought from too much cleaner. I couldn’t see their tiny legs kicking, or the bottom liner’s decorative faux stones. But, in fact, years before you’d enlightened me on why some water clouds, I’d just forgotten it then. It’s funny because I can see it all now the way I want it: clear water instead of milky, the children’s furious strides. Their laughter was contagious, and I laughed with them. The sun was directly above the grassy yard, and as the friends we’d known only after becoming parents ourselves drank sweaty beer bottles and Eliza’s son kept running towards the street, no one had shadows.

The song, I believed, was on repeat. The “da ba dee da ba daa” continued even after you returned with Sammy on your hip, him sucking on a freeze pop. We lived in Lowell then, and that afternoon we were celebrating our neighborhood block party. The Conway’s were hosting that summer and Debbie, the wife, made BLT macaroni salad. I marveled at the complexity of the salad, the layered bowl of cold pasta, romaine lettuce, halved cherry tomatoes, then a crust of maple bacon on top. I watched you ask Debbie for the recipe, and she said frankly, “There’s no recipe, honey. I wung it together!” You popped Sammy up even higher on your hip and nodded. I wanted to know what you wanted to say there. After Sammy there was no telling what you could’ve said and maybe it would’ve been a good thing if you tried.

I went back to the pool to check on the whirlpool and a hairy man chewing a cigar had jumped in and worked his pudgy body against the children’s work, causing a splashing match but the children were outmatched. You handed off Sammy to me and he had dripped red Popsicle juice on his sailor’s romper. I sat in the grass, Sammy on my lap, and I tempered the soft bottoms of his feet on the sharp blades. He winced and cried but I wanted him to know he’d get used to the innocent grass. You ran back over and picked him up without a word to me and I was left alone getting splashed occasionally by the swimmers. You walked across the yard towards the barbeque smoke of the charcoal grill and the incessant pop chorus and the backs of your legs were tanned. I could smell Sammy’s sunblock on my hands and I remembered the same smell from only a few summers ago, before we became parents.

And I remembered saying something about what you’d do for work, or if you’d go back to nursing school, on the beach in St. Thomas, the weekend of our honeymoon. We got drinks: you a Crabbies with a lime, me a mango Island lager. We hadn’t even gone up to our room yet. Our bags sat behind the reception desk in the lobby while we hustled down to the beach, thirsty and wondering how to behave on such a unique occasion. At least, I wondered. I knew how important the weekend was, and was adamant in pretending I was comfortable in leading us through it. The waves were subtle and a man stood ankle deep with his hands on his hips. You didn’t answer me about what your future entailed, or what you thought it should.

A resort worker came to where we were laying out in the sun, racked out flat on orange plastic beach loungers, and told us we needed to pay to rent the chairs. She sounded American, and after I shielded the sun with the t-shirt I’d removed, exposing my northeast mid-winter white skin, I saw she wasn’t indigenous to the island, and was disappointed. You weren’t, and giggled, buzzed, as we left the beach. We double fisted frozen daiquiris and sat along the wall of the wading pool. Iguanas chewed French fries. We held each other and leaned away from their primeval stride. You tightened as one rubbed against your back like a wanton kitten. Then they descended upon a plate of chicken fingers, left alone by a small boy in yellow shorts, and you explained they weren’t indigenous, either. The lizards came as a Belizean delicacy. Your hair was reddish then, for the wedding. I wanted you to say Belizean once more. I’d never heard it before and didn’t think I’d ever again.

Instead, I asked you if you were hiding any more fun facts. You waited a moment and watched a brother and sister on tubes race across the wading pool, dodging a big-breasted woman with curlers in her hair. You told me the water was cloudy from everyone’s sunscreen and pee. You finally ruined the authentic feel of the island: the iguanas, American workers, Cuban daiquiris. Oh, they’re not Cuban! An American invented the drink in Cuba, you explained promptly. You were knowledgeable in ways I wasn’t.

In our room, we laughed about the free hour we got in the chairs, how my shoulders were already burnt, and I rubbed lotion on your naked back, then your breasts and neck. I wasn’t turned on, not because you weren’t sexy, but because I was enacting a clause in my new authority. I was husband first, lover second. Your tender white skin needed cover. But now, whenever I smell coconut lotion, even on a stranger at the beach, or an outdoor swimming pool at a hotel in Austin, I get turned on, and remember your hot skin, the cold sheets, and our unspoiled laughter. I should’ve made love to you over everything else.

That night, empowered by a late afternoon nap, a second round of drinks,we watched a fire dancer stomp cobalt blue glass, twirl pearl batons ablaze. Her thick thighs wiggled during the dance, destroyable tremors of excitement, and her glow-sticked arms wormed through the island darkness. The eventful daytime tiki-huts now turned down, and the indigenous night workers carefree, joined the hotel patrons, watching the flames dance, collected in a mosaic of the here-forevers, and the here-for-nows.

In the midst of the festivity, my side glances at your face, the fire dancer made her way towards me, juggling batons and twirling her long, braided hair.

“You,” she said and though I didn’t dance nor did I get in front of crowds I took her hand like, years later, Sammy would when he got lost in the grocery store and took the dairy manager’s concerned grip as they found me. I felt small and absent, even in the hype, the tipsy crowd cheered as I made my way into the circle. Men on stilts dressed in floral skirts strutted like mantises, towering mantids stalking me like I were a dumb toad. I wanted to kick out their poles and topple them into the pit dance. Instead, I twirled with the fire dancer, and she calmed me by telling me to put my feet on her feet for guidance, and we waltzed as workers doused the coals in water and smoke stung our eyes.

I danced for you. Later, not much later, but after I danced you held me and we sipped salty margaritas. We were sun-burned worse than ever and you rubbed ice cubes on my triceps. I thought about where we would be residing when we returned home, not because I wanted to leave the island, but because the island couldn’t stay with us. We were so new and unprepared, like your mother warned. You were angry I talked about what happened next, but the island couldn’t be it. You weren’t sorry about being naïve.

We awoke to a breakfast buffet and you ate four waffles, link sausage, and six glasses of orange juice. I counted. I counted it all because you ate and drank in hungover silence. Home ownership is dumb, especially in a shit economy. We should rent you said, and I felt then, as I do now, your ambivalence to anything ideal. Your hair looked greasy in the morning sun. We crushed Bloody Marys at the lobby bar. The slunk eyed bartender with a weak mustache told us a storm would pass at noon, so find a covered place to drink. When he moved to the other end of the bar, we agreed to get drenched, to play in the storm.

Tipsy, we stood on the empty beach and watched the storm clouds come for us. You dug your feet into the sand. You pointed, and I saw a snorkeler emerge from the water; he was a large man in a wet suit, goggles, shaking off where he was and where he entered to.

Our last night we went against heeded advice and took a beat up cab to Red Hook, off the all-inclusive resort. We wanted danger. We wanted to escape the comfort, the falsity of constructed waterfalls and blue-eyed staff. The cabby dropped us off in an empty parking lot, and in a French accent told us to wait until dark. We sat on the concrete and looked off in the distance at the orange sun, the pinkish sky, and didn’t talk. There were cruise ships docking near the expensive resorts we couldn’t afford. One ship sounded its horn to the beat of “We Will We Will Rock You.” You grabbed my hand and we kissed like quarrelers, our teeth grinding and clicking.

A crew of t-shirt and jeaned workers backed in pick-up trucks and began unloading long poles and white tarps. They smoked sweet clove cigars and wore dirty ball caps. Rattling tour busses parked at the far end of the lot for the night. More trucks came in and unloaded folding tables and cases of beer, boxes of liquor bottles. More cruise ships sounded their horns in a battle, and you guessed the faintest one was “Hit Me Baby One More time.” You were right, I believed, but I didn’t tell you. Your grasp was tired. Sometimes I could’ve bit you.

We didn’t want to be the first ones at the makeshift bar, so we waited for more cabs to unload. In the island dark, the strung up Christmas lights along the tarp roof glowed brightly. While we walked, you told me to get drunk. Music played and mosquitoes the size of door keys descended on us. Our first drinks were coconut rum and pineapple juice inside a totem pole glass. The faces patterned up the slim, porcelain glass. A sad owl, an angry bird, a cock-eyed man. I rubbed my thumb along the ridges as I sipped. The bartender advised us to rub napkins doused in gin on our skin to ward off the mosquitoes. You didn’t, saying it was a prank. I did, and scratched the welts well after we landed home.

Sometimes, I get sentimental, but only sometimes. When, in an New York city bar, I get a whiff as a waitress walks by with a Tanqueray and tonic. Or, as now, I follow a man leaving a taxi. I feel like I recognize him from somewhere. Years ago, he could have been the one in the wet suit, hustling by us on the beach, as, I remember it, we drank midday rain from the sky, warm drops. If I could have seen behind the goggles I would’ve remembered his eyes. It would’ve been useful now. You seem to be in a place I could never have imagined. A new wave of perception. So far away. A foreign island yourself. But, and I know in times like this one, I once knew you.

David Moloney worked in the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections, New Hampshire, from 2007 to 2011. He received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he now teaches, as well as at SNHU. He lives north of Boston with his family.

His highly-praised novel, BARKER HOUSE, was written during his low residency Mountain View MFA, where he also received the Assignment print magazine prize. Blurbs for his novel are below. Check out more of his work at https://davidrmoloney.com/.

“At a time when mass incarceration is increasingly a feature of American life, David Moloney’s Barker House isa great and important book. - Tony Tulathimutte, Whiting Award winning author of Private Citizens

“In over thirty years of writing and teaching, I have not witnessed a stronger artistic debut than David Moloney’s; in fact, Barker House does not remotely read like a debut but more as the seasoned work of a writer with enormous gifts.“ - Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

"HERE is a voice to listen to! Moloney's voice is as true as a voice can be. Concise, with the right details rendered perfectly, these sentences come to the reader with marvelous straight forwardness, clean as a bone."--Elizabeth Strout, , Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton