His stomach growled and he wished it hadn’t. She cast an appreciative look his way as she lifted the dome.
Gary, sitting at the head of the table, encouraged her with a loud “Mmmm! Honey, this looks delicious!”
Gary was a liar. On the platter sat a Bundt-shaped monstrosity of opaque gelatin studded with chopped veggies and chunks of cheese. Mom set the lid aside and picked up an ornate cake cutter, holding out her hand for her husband’s plate. He handed it over and rubbed his hands together, watching Anthony.
Before he could stop himself, gripping his plate as if he’d rather sacrifice anything else, Anthony said, “This barely looks like food. What is it?”
“It’s my grandmother’s garden salad aspic,” she said, and although it was slight he heard the hurt in her tone. She covered Gary’s plate in shredded lettuce, topped it with a wobbly wedge of yellow-tinted gelatin, and spooned a dollop of mayonnaise on the side.
“Amazing,” Gary said, taking the plate back from her and scanning the table. “Did you put out the relish?”
“It’s right there.” She held out her hand towards Anthony. “Come on, now, hand it over.”
Anthony held onto his plate, staring at the lace pattern on the tablecloth.
Mom had been making weird food for the past three months - since Gary moved in. The serving platter, he knew, also came from her grandmother, as did the tablecloth. He suspected she was trying to demonstrate her housewife abilities to Gary, and maybe clinging to the memory of her deceased grandmother, a paragon of ‘60s homemaking.
Before Gary showed up, she was a fairly normal mother. He didn’t remember Dad’s funeral but he could recall his surprise when she started wearing clothes that weren’t black anymore. They’d order takeout once or twice a week, and Saturday was family movie night. She’d let him pick out whatever he wanted to watch. But now both the takeout and the movie nights were gone, replaced with this charade of housekeeping, some kind of performance art for Gary’s sake.
“Anthony,” she said in a firm tone, and he looked up at her.
He set down his plate and tossed his napkin on top of it. “I’m not that hungry. I think I’m going to go for a walk.”
“Anthony,” she said again, pleading this time, as he stood up from the table. “Don’t be like this.”
Gary paused in between mouthfuls of aspic to examine the situation. He was busy chewing, the crunch of vegetables loud in the otherwise silent room. He always ate so noisily. He did everything noisily. It was like he never thought about anyone else.
Mom straightened with a sigh. “I’ll put a plate in the fridge for you.”
“Don’t bother,” Anthony said, regretting the words as soon as they left his mouth. He grabbed his jacket from the coat hook by the back door and tried not to slam it behind him as he stepped out into the yard.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and started walking without any idea where he would go. It was barely after sunset, and the gathering twilight cast the neatly trimmed back yard in a pale blue haze.
After ten minutes of walking in the chill and the growing dark, he’d made a decision.
Last summer, he and his friend Reggie had spent hours exploring their small coastal town. There wasn’t much for teens to do, and Reggie loved uncovering hidden and forgotten places. They started by building a fort in the woods. When that got torn down by other local kids, they decided to explore some of the many abandoned and overgrown buildings. Reggie always brought his camera and a bag full of supplies - snacks, water, a first aid kit - and Anthony lightly teased him about being a “non-practicing Boy Scout”. Together, they found the most interesting abandoned place in town: a derelict amusement park on a creaky old pier overlooking the bay.
Reggie moved away at the end of fall, and Gary moved in. Now, gray February filled his senses. Things had changed, not for the better.
Anthony hunched his shoulders inside his jacket. If he’d been thinking before he left the house, he would’ve at least grabbed his gloves or his backpack. The cold was getting to him. He turned towards the bay, reluctant to head home until this mood had left him.
He reached the pier after half an hour of speed-walking. In the dark, he could barely make out the faded letters painted on the archway at the entrance. He and Reggie just called it “Fun Pier”, but as Anthony stood squinting up at the sign, he was able to tell it had once been called by someone’s name, “Mr E” something’s “Amusements”.
Its name didn’t matter now, he thought, passing through the arch and onto the pier. He and Reggie seemed to be the only people to remember this place. The distinct smell of dead fish and saltwater hit him in a gust of wind. He zipped his jacket to his chin and burrowed his hands deeper into his pockets, passing a lopsided carousel, the shuttered ticket booth, and several closed game stalls.
The stalls lining the pier blocked most of the wind from the bay, transforming it from an occasional chilly blast into a thing that whistled and whipped through the place like an angry poltergeist. Anthony pulled up his hood and cinched it tight around his face as the wind grappled with the canvas walls on the closed game stalls and pushed between the carousel horses, making them squeak and turn.
Anthony, busy watching the horses rotate gently in the wind, thumped into the corner of the closed cotton candy booth. His heel hit a slimy patch of wood and he half-slid, half-fell to the ground, his pants soaking up the salty, slimy stuff coating the old boards. He cursed under his breath as he stood. He wasn’t hurt, but now his pants were damp, and the cold shrieking wind pressed them against his legs, deepening the chill.
Reggie told him the place had probably closed down in the ‘70s, but Anthony neither knew nor cared. He cared that it was important to Reggie - because Reggie was important to him - but he didn’t retain much of what Reggie told him about this place. It had belonged to some developer who died abruptly, probably the “Mr E” mentioned at the entrance, and since then nobody had done anything with it. Some of the game stalls were open to the elements and held the rotting remains of stuffed animals and game boards. At this point, Anthony thought, passing a too-tilted Tilt-a-Whirl, “Fun Pier” was a lost cause, probably too damaged by time and saltwater to be resurrected.
He saw the edge of the pier and stopped for a moment. The wind buffeted his sides and tried to pull back his hood. His plan, partially-formed as it was, had been to walk to the pier’s edge and look out at the water, but now that it was so dark and cold he reconsidered. The pier was crumbling. If he lost his footing or slipped on another slimy patch he could wind up falling right into the bay and drowning in the dark. And the wind, out at the pier’s edge, would be at its most powerful.
A metallic shriek made him turn and look back. The road, easily a quarter mile behind him, was a smooth black ribbon in the moonlight leading into the overgrown parking lot. He stood just beyond the cluster of food stalls, windows broken and boxy bodies defaced by graffiti, surrounded by warped and wet picnic tables.
One of the tables was occupied.
At first he thought there were people sitting at the table, and a chill went through him. Squinting, he realized they couldn’t be people because they were sitting perfectly still and didn’t appear to be wearing any clothes. Statues of some kind, perhaps?
Anthony turned away from the pier’s edge and walked towards the occupied table with cautious steps.
There were four humanoid shapes around the table, two on each side. Two of them were smaller than the others, and as he got closer he noticed the smaller ones were both missing limbs. One had no head and there were vulgar words scrawled in spray-paint and Sharpie all over its torso. Next to it, a large, one-armed caricature of a bear slumped staring at the tabletop. Its face was both friendly and idiotic.
He was close enough to touch them, but he warred with himself whether or not to do it. They weren’t statues, he realized, noticing the cables spewing from their broken joints and the chipped, faded paint on their bodies. They must have been functional animatronics at some point.
He seized the bear’s arm and tried to lift its hand off the tabletop. The surface of its arm was wet and gritty with salt residue. He could barely raise it an inch before he had to release it, and the hand thumped against the table and slid to rest with a rusty whine.
Anthony stepped back to look at them. A massive, slouched bear, a catlike woman with pointed ears and paws in place of hands, one headless small child in yellow and blue, and the last one might have been a short rabbit with prominent buck teeth before both its ears were snapped off. Their faces wore sculpted smiles, their eyes wide and cartoonish. The picnic table had a faded pizza painted onto the top, reinforced with carved initials and messy spray paint.
It was a family, he realized, sitting together in the dilapidated food court, enjoying some make-believe dinner.
Someone had to have moved them there, but how? And when? He didn’t recall seeing this before when he visited with Reggie.
They’d found one of the carousel horses wedged inside a game stall. Reggie took a ton of pictures. If he’d seen anything like this he would’ve made a big deal out of it. So who was coming out here in winter to drag these heavy metal bodies around?
Anthony felt tears sting his eyes before he understood what was happening. He couldn’t even take pictures to send to Reggie now. He hadn’t prepared to come out here at all. He hadn’t bothered to write or call; he wasn’t sure what to even say. Just saying “I miss you” or “my life really sucks right now” struck him as childish, maybe selfish. Reggie might not believe him if he told him about this. What if he thought Anthony was making up a story to seem interesting? How humiliating.
Maybe Reggie had outgrown him, and that’s why they hadn’t spoken since he moved away.
Maybe they hadn’t been as close as Anthony thought, after all.
At least Mom had Gary to hang out with. And these stupid robots had each other.
He scrubbed at his eyes with the back of one hand. His throat stung with the effort not to cry.
There was nobody left to have fun with anymore, not for him. How was he any different from this dumb broken-down carnival rotting in the water?
The short double beep of a car horn startled him, and he whirled towards the road. There was a car in the parking lot, headlights glaring through the darkness towards him. It double beeped again and he heard a hoarse man’s voice call, “Anthony? Are you out there?”
He ran for the car without thinking. He ran directly into the light, waving both arms, hurrying towards its safe and hopefully warm confines.
“Thank God,” he heard Gary mutter as he got closer. In a louder voice, Gary called, “Are you alright?”
“I’m okay,” he said, and pulled open the passenger side door as he reached the car.
Anthony threw himself into the seat. The interior of the car was almost suffocating in its warmth. Gary sat down and closed the driver’s side door, turning to look at him.
“I know,” Anthony said, before Gary could speak. “Mom’s probably worried sick, right?”
“A little bit, yeah. She’s expecting an apology about dinner, but really I think she’ll just be happy to know you’re safe.”
Anthony nodded, again fighting the urge to cry.
Gary put his hand on the shifter knob and began to slowly back the car onto the road. “It’s a good thing she knew how much you and Reggie liked this place or we might never have found you. You’d hate to have to walk home. There’s a storm coming in.” After turning out onto the main road and heading towards home, he added, “I used to come out here all the time as a kid, you know.”
“Was it open then?”
Gary shot him a sidelong glance, stifling a laugh. “What? No, that place has been abandoned as far as I can recall. It might have been open in your great-grandmother’s time. The owner was some local hotshot land developer, and when he died there was some dispute over what to do with his properties. I’d guess either the bank or the city owns it now.” He gave him another curious glance. “Are you sure you’re okay? Are you warm enough?”
“Yeah,” Anthony said. He sniffled and wiped a hand across his face. “I guess I just started thinking about Reggie and stuff.”
“Yeah? It’s hard when friends move away. You know you can call him anytime, right? I’m sure he’d be glad to hear from you.”
Gary went to turn on the radio, then hesitated. He cleared his throat. “Listen, bud, I’m not trying to be your Dad, okay? I can’t be your Dad. But I’d like it if we got along. How’s that sound?”
“Okay, I guess,” Anthony said, slouching into the passenger seat. “Can I call Reggie when we get home?”
“It’s a little late,” Gary said, checking the clock in the dashboard, “but I suppose you could give him a quick phone call before you get ready for bed, sure. Maybe set it up so you guys are talking every week or so. I think that’d be really good for you. And, you know, maybe there are kids at school who’d like to be your friend, too.”
“Maybe.” Anthony uncinched his hood and pushed it back. Reggie would believe him, even without pictures. Maybe he’d have a theory about how the animatronics got positioned at the table in the first place. And Anthony could come back later with his camera to see if they were still there. He watched the archway of “Fun Pier” in the side mirror as it receded and then vanished behind them. “Yeah, maybe.”
