She would tell her mother that Eli had decided he would rather stay home.
And she would tell Mark, on the phone, on Saturday, when it was too late to change anything, that Eli had come down with a stomach bug the night before they left and the doctor had said he shouldn't travel, and Mrs. Pruitt had kindly offered to keep him.
Three lies, three people. She wrote none of them down. She did not have to. She had always been good at remembering what she had told whom. She had learned it as a child, in a house on Arlington Avenue where saying the wrong true thing to the wrong person at the dinner table could cost you a week of silence.
On Saturday Mark called from Florida. The hurricane season had started early that year; a storm called Danielle had come ashore near Pensacola and knocked out power to two hundred thousand homes, and Mark's crew had been sent south from Texas without coming home in between.
"Twelve more days," he said. "Then I fly from Pensacola straight to Norfolk, rent a car, I'm at the beach house by dinner Sunday. Tell Eli I ordered him something. Real binoculars. Eight by forty-two, waterproof, the ones from the bird store he keeps showing me. They're getting shipped to Pruitt's so he doesn't find them."
Laura gripped the phone. "Mark, those are three hundred dollars."
"Three-twenty, with the strap." He laughed. "He's gonna lose his mind. I want him to have them for the pelicans. Kid's been looking at birds through dollar-store plastic for five years. He deserves to actually see one."
"Yeah," said Laura. "He does."
After he hung up she went into the downstairs bathroom and turned on the faucet and stood there with her hands on either side of the sink, looking at a woman in the mirror she did not quite recognize, and she let the water run for a long time so nobody would hear.
The week went by the way the last week before a trip always goes by, in a blur of laundry and lists.
Laura washed beach towels and packed sunscreen and bought travel-size shampoo. She packed Lily's suitcase with Lily's help, which meant packing it twice. She did not pack a suitcase for Eli. She told herself she would do it Friday night, after she told him, so that he would have something to take across the street to Mrs. Pruitt's. She told herself a lot of things that week.
Eli did not notice. Eli was busy. He had found a website with a live camera trained on a nesting platform at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, an hour south of the rental house, and he spent his evenings watching a pair of ospreys feed two scraggly chicks while he narrated every movement to anyone who would listen. He made a new list, of bird calls he needed to learn before the trip, and played them on his tablet at the dinner table until Lily threatened to throw it in the pool at the Y. He asked Laura nine times whether the beach house had a deck that faced the ocean, and nine times she told him yes.