I have not taken a trip with only Amber in years.

This will not be changing yet.

It was the intention at first, Amber asking if I would like to spend her birthday and our anniversary in Lake George. She hardly needed to wait for my response, even though the ghosts of murder victims do not haunt this tourist town. I cherish our adventures together away from the responsibilities of home, at least enough to have authored a book about them.

Then she suggested we might invite our friends. Less romantic, undoubtedly, but potentially fun. Our friends -- at least those to whom it would not be strange to suggest this -- are few. We invite Daniel (and Kest by implication) and Kristina. The former can come only for a few hours of our final night and to Great Escape in the morning. Kristina, as came as no surprise, was too occupied working to take off three days on a lark.

Amber then proposed that her mom, Julie, might want to meet up with us on the final day to go to Great Escape.

Julie became excited about the idea of a vacation -- she hadn't had one in so long -- and Amber invited her to join us for the whole trip.

I had picked out a hotel -- several depending on our changing needs -- and had to scramble to find one that accommodated our strange configuration, but I managed.

I set to planning activities and asked Julie what she would like to do there. If she were going to be a voting member of this party -- especially as she and Amber could overrule something I wanted to do by dint of being the majority -- it seemed better to enfranchise her early and well.

Amber tells me to stop planning.

"But if I don't plan, you might just sit in the hotel room for the entire vacation!"

"Why would we do this?"

I have no compelling reason to give her.

Julie assures me that she wants to do whatever I want, as long as we check out the shops (which I want to do; it is an essential part of visiting).

I am packing the car when Amber tells me there is blood-soaked laundry on the stone steps beside our apartment. I think of our elderly neighbor, whose blood I cleaned off the other steps a week ago when he fell and was carted away by police and EMTs.

Our neighbor is not present, nor do I recognize the sturdy work clothes as definitely his. The blood spill is startling in its extremity, polluting four steps. I study it, trying to conjure how this could have happened and deciding that it likely wasn't murder, or there would be police present, preventing me from scrutinizing blood patterns as though I had the slightest idea what I was doing. Surely a man who cracked his head open on four steps wouldn't be foolish enough to try twelve.

Anyone suffering this injury could not have gone far without leaving a conspicuous trail, which is absent. They had to have been taken from the scene.

I knock on my neighbor's door. When that goes unanswered, I escalate to shouting his name through his screen window and opening his door to shout in. When I get no response, I call the police for a welfare check. Only after I have done this do I see a different neighbor, who mentions that our elderly neighbor fell again and the ambulance took him away an hour ago, when I was only on the other side of a wall and heard nothing.

The property manager shows up to fix our hot water (then does not). When I tell her about the blood, she is furious. She blames drunkenness -- which was inevitably a contributing factor to both falls, more so than his purportedly terminal and now untreated cancer. I had observed him before walking around with a comically obvious flask of vodka sticking out of his back pocket. As Amber had seen him working in the shed with the power saw earlier in the morning, this situation might have turned out worse. Still, I cannot imagine anyone claiming this was the best result.

There is a direct line between the laundry room and the sliding glass door of his bedroom. He would only have to go up two low wooden steps. Why chance anything other than that? When Amber does laundry, she doesn't climb these steps.

I collect his bloody clothing in a garbage bag and put it inside his front door. I uncover his twisted glasses under some leaves and search for minutes before I find the missing, scuffed lens. I envision how he must have landed to do this damage to them.

This is an inauspicious way to start a vacation. Julie appears, puts her luggage in my car, and we are off before I can prod his blood any further.

When we arrive at the humble motel, the clerk is overjoyed to see me, well beyond what one might expect from professionalism. It is as though I were his lost friend returned to him or a celebrity in sunglasses to try to disguise his fame.

"You haven't stayed with us before, have you?"

I admit I haven't, taking a mini candy bar from a basket near the Plexiglas divider. I'm unsure what it could matter, though I contemplate whether he expects me to understand that this bowl of candy is not for adult guests. I take another so the glucose can help me understand this better.

He insists I take a baseball cap with the hotel's logo, which I proudly wear until we are in our room and then try to put on Amber long enough to get a picture. She refused to let it be a good one.

After settling into our sufficient room -- it has a kitchen which I suspect we will not much use -- we walk into town, arriving just in time for a boat tour. I have already paid by the time the attendant asks if we are over twenty-one.

It happens to be the happy hour cruise. I offer Amber my drink ticket as she complains that the bartender served her margarita in a plastic cup -- she has taken up the banner of a sworn enemy of anything disposable. She declines my ticket, so I make up a nonalcoholic drink to have something to do with my hands.

The captain runs through his spiel about the lake and its historical inhabitant in half the time, with a third the depth as usual, then says he will be quiet until we get back to shore.

"I think he started happy hour before us," I say. Amber postulates he is only tired from doing this all day. We will not be his final tour.

When we are pulling close to shore, he all but orders us to tip the workers as we leave, something that has only ever been a polite suggestion from other captains.

Years ago, Amber told me she wanted us to take a moderate hike up Lookout Mountain. I made the understandably naive decision to trust the website that gave her this information.

It was not moderate. To this day, my fitness band assures me I have never walked more, higher, or burned as many calories in a day. All that for the utter indignity of arriving sweat-drenched at the apex to see that lazy tourists could drive to the peak. More insulting still, they could be so sluggish as to wait for a bus to bring them from the parking lot to the top, maybe five hundred feet. I felt nothing but contempt for these people (aside from those with mobility issues, who are fully entitled to use assistance without my side-eye).

So, we drive up the mountain the next morning. Even doing that is oddly arduous, over fifteen minutes of driving up a twisting road. I don't know how anyone manages to climb it. Hikers must be masochistic lunatics.

When we reach the top, I spring ahead -- the bus, a faded sign assures us, still isn't running owing to COVID restrictions -- but Julie and Amber tell me to slow down and wait for them to catch up. They are not as unnecessarily spry as I am, nor as eager to appease their fitness bands. (I cannot say I do not rush ahead even when it is only Amber and me. She jokes I get so many steps because I must retreat to her side every few minutes.)

Clad in a cranberry dress and oval sunglasses (an ensemble that wouldn't be as fashionable soaked in sweat), Amber seems distant. I had woken early to drive them up the mountain, only to find that mountains have hours of operation and a gate barred our entry. This vexed me, and I told them I would be resting until it opened -- putting in earplugs and shoving a pillow over my face while they went about their morning around me -- so I could have eroded some of Amber's cheer.

I ask Julie if she notices that my wife seems off. She is unable to rule on this. She has known Amber longer, having born and raised her, but I have a decade's priority on her hours. I am also given to being hypervigilant, inclined to overestimate micro-expressions; not the surest witness one might want for other people's moods.

The view is satisfying. I want to say it is less so, having not worked for it, but that would be a literary lie. It is the crisp expanse of Lake George below us, stretching for dozens of miles in any direction, mountains in the distance, the blue ombre of fifty miles of warm morning air. It is no worse for seeing it in dry clothes a few hours after dawn.

We pass hours in town after, perusing the new worthwhile ones and ignoring the malignant strain of conspiratorial right-wing propaganda of the five DILLIGAF shops on the same strip. I do not understand how it is a viable business strategy to have five of the same stores on a single mile, let alone one whose only product is low-quality t-shirts featuring Marilyn Monroe with a bandana over her mouth, dual-wielding handguns, and Donald Trump as a Muslim-killing Messiah who wants to fuck your feelings.

We try an escape room, which we finish with four minutes to spare. We "solve" it in the sense that we, panicked, keep asking the boy on the other end of the TV to give us hints. The woman at the front desk assures us that our secret is safe, and she will tell anyone who asks that we solved the room in ten minutes with no clues.

We have ice cream cones in celebration, listening to a gaggle of Jewish teens debate whether the whipped cream on one of their sundaes is kosher. They cannot rule it is. The boy whose ice cream it is leaves it to melt all over the table, so the workers must clean up his copious sticky mess, which seems less kosher.

Early into our preemptive dessert, I search through menus on my phone to try to appease every member of our party. This is not successful, so I concede to going to the place with the cheapest lobster roll for Amber. It is, at least, an achievable goal. The effort of doing this on my dying phone is exhausting when I would rather focus on my melting, calorie-laden cone.

We arrive where my GPS said the restaurant was. There is a nightclub. It is closed. It may once have been opened, but that was at best months ago, judging by the thin gray dust beyond the glass doors. I collapse to the curb and say, "I'm done. I can't do this anymore." I acknowledge this is not putting forth my best face, but I am hungry and disappointed that we have walked to the other edge of town, past more charming restaurants, only to end up with this.

Amber sympathizes, then wanders around to find the actual location a few hundred feet away.

The restaurant is a porch at a hotel that has no right to call itself otherwise. There is a musician -- and I am already irritated, so he will not improve my disposition. What went from discomfort with his volume -- his type is incapable of understanding this is not a concert, and the sound system doesn't have to go to eleven -- becomes visceral fury when a man who could vaguely mimic Eddie Vedder decides he has any right to sing a full Prince song in a falsetto. Prince could barely manage to sing in that register, and he had the excuse of being Prince. I fight myself not to cry, which is not improved when Amber and Julie receive their meals and I do not. Fine, I think, I do not want this disappointing food anyway. I will return to the room and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which is always dependable and never makes me listen to a man screeching on a porch at grating volume. Peanut butter and jelly would never do this to me.

My meal comes. The restaurant thinks it can make up for mediocre food by heaping on more French fries than two people could comfortably eat. It is hard to go wrong with fries, but it doesn't make up for the Prince of Shrillness. Having food -- and eating too many of the French fries -- tamps the frustration so that I can be civil again before Daniel and Kest arrive that evening. After half a sandwich, I manage to hate a bit less this restaurant to which my phone had nearly -- but did not entirely -- brought us.

When we return to the hotel, I decide to swim. I hardly ever do it -- Amber is no great fan of swimming in anything but lakes and the sea -- but I figure that will set me right and return me to the affable, sweet-natured person I assume I must be at my core, evidence notwithstanding.

Amber puts on a bathing suit and sits in a chair, but she does not want to join me in merrily splashing about and ignoring a smattering of children who faintly bicker at one another about points of shallow-end etiquette.

When Daniel and Kest arrive, I jump from the pool and assure them that I would hug them except for being sodden. Kest says to wait a moment so they can settle into their room, and they will change and join me.

Once we have exhausted our tolerance for the small (yet heated) pool, I ask if they've eaten and if they would like to. I mean to bring them into town, the cheesy/charming hub for which I again have affection. They mention having seen an Indian restaurant on the drive in. In my decades of coming to Lake George, I have passed this restaurant dozens of times, but it never occurred to me as a place at which to stop. It is too far from the center of town, not a walkable distance unless one had a mind to do only this. There is nothing much to see near it beyond a former Howard Johnson, whose carpet remained a third tobacco smoke a decade after smoking was banned indoors.

The way to the restaurant would be a minute by car, but I had suggested walking when I meant to go into town, and they will take me up on that.

The road is dark and without a sidewalk, but it is not much used. One can get to Lake George Village this way, but better options abound.

Daniel and I, longer of leg, walk a little ahead of our spouses. He tells me of his new job, which involves calling companies to ask what is in their product and sometimes being rebuffed by the counter spell of "trade secrets." It is air-conditioned and the best-paying job he has had to date, so he cannot fault it for being somewhat silly. What job isn't, at its core?

We talk a bit about gender -- his partner is genderless, after all. He congratulates that Amber has come out as nonbinary. I do not think Amber ever considered herself in. (Amber states that she mildly prefers "they/them" [causing mayhem] pronouns but is resigned to the familiarity of feminine ones.)

Kest halts us outside Water Slide World. Decades prior, I tell them, this was an attraction, albeit one that so overexploited chlorine that swim trunks would lose color and sclera would gain it. "My mother assures me that, when we went once, she saw a piece of excrement float by. That was it for her. She yanked us out of there, and we never visited again, though I assume someone had probably cleaned it out by the next year."

Kest's greatest urge might be toward urban exploration. It has been closed and overgrown so long that it seems unlikely someone will reopen it. The slides lay fallow, grass protruding. Would it even be alarmed still?

Kest and I marvel at a mermaid on a ship's prow, its face eaten white by weathering. Surely it demands a rescue mission.

The restaurant is empty and so laid back that I suspect it is closed, but no. Daniel places their order (and gets me naan) while I use the bathroom. When I get out, I linger at the vacant counter for a few minutes before, emboldened by the lack of people, peek around at the tablet, showing Daniel has already paid.

I return to the table. "You could have told me you paid."

"I thought you might be trying to get them to reverse the charges and put it on your card," Daniel says.

This had not occurred to me. I simply wanted to pay for my bread. I did pay for their hotel and Great Escape tickets, so I suspect this balances things.

Our food comes in takeout containers, but those sitting on the porch seem indifferent to what happens to us then. We sit and eat there. I politely ask Daniel to dip my naan into their food. I am not hungry, still digesting my spite fries and a little pool water, but how can I decline that experience?

When we return to the hotel, we sit on their tiny porch --- and don't think Kest does not boast of having one -- and eat the anniversary/birthday cake Julie made and brought. It would be challenging to have enough of it; some will make the journey home. We talk avidly, as we might if we did live within walking distance from one another and had a suitable porch and proper late July evening. The topics are ever-shifting, as is the nature of these things, and it is a struggle to pin down long what each was. I know as it is happening that this will be my favorite part of vacation: unhurried, with my people, and with cake at the ready.

We wrap it up at midnight because we are due at Great Escape as near to opening as possible. Amber demands that we gnaw the marrow of every moment at the theme park. She finds it baffling that my family can manage to go there for only three or four hours.

We arrive at the park early. All but Daniel dressed to suit the heat. He is in his customary vampire garb: black formality with pince-nez sunglasses and one of Kest's bird masks dangling from a ribbon around his neck.

"They may not let you in with that," I note, meaning that I cannot fathom why security -- which has hassled me about having ballpoint pens -- aren't going to turn him away.

"Copper doesn't show up on metal detectors," Kest says. This had not occurred to me, but it is serious hardware. Birds are known for pointy beaks. The metal detector is a secondary concern to a visual inspection.

Security stops Daniel at the gate and funnels him into another line. I grip my keys, ready for our trip back to the Twix Lot.

The guard looks at Daniel's bags and motions to him without further comment. Does he cut so singular a figure that the guard's brain short-circuited? Is this demonstrative of Dracula's charisma?

The day is sparsely attended to owing to a foreboding weather forecast. I caution my companions as much, but they wave off the concern and are grateful for the lack of lines.

Kest insists upon a carousel at once, gleeful that they get to sit on their preferred animal. Some child takes my Kitty with the Fish, so I accept a substandard tiger horse.

I next lead them to a river rapids ride, though Julie declines for fear of the potential of getting wet. I can forgive her absence, as I guarantee I will soon be the one holding the bags as the rest of them are tumbled ass over teakettle on more thrilling rides.

After my first rollercoaster, a wooden one called The Comet, I began to feel queasy. I will spend the rest of the day trying to ease it. I half-joke that Amber brought her mother on vacation, so she had someone to join her on the more obnoxious rides.

I don't mind. I would instead enjoy my day with my people than buffet around rides that may nauseate me further. I try a few because I know (or hope) they will be fine, or I don't want to be an utter wet mop.

I check my phone whenever it last suggested it might storm and am relieved to see the forecast pushed back until it hits a wall at 4 PM. When Amber is on Sasquatch, a long drop ride, with her mother, the raindrops start to hit. I mention that we need to think about going soon, but they all brush me off until the rain properly hits. An announcement plays over every speaker, saying that most rides are closed until the storm lets up.

As my meal pass still has a free snack on it, I go to trade it in for a hot pretzel. Amber follows behind, asking what's wrong.

The day has been long, and the lack of sleep has caught up to me. "Okay, I am going to complain for... thirty seconds, then I am going to let this go. I told you all this would happen, and none of you would listen to me."

"We listened to you," says Amber.

"It didn't feel like it since we are now trapped rather than back at the hotel, about to have dinner."

People press through the increasing rain, lightning at their backs. We badly hide at a table beneath an umbrella because my companions hope the rides will open again. Even if the rain stops, Great Escape will need to test the rides, which are soaked. The theme park's management will not take the chance that a car will slip from its bearings and send tourists plummeting into a tree.

Once I have my stale pretzel and some honey mustard and Amber, a bag of kettle corn popped early last week, and we scurry back to the umbrella. The storm at once picks up with a crack of thunder. The rain becomes a torrent, making escape unsavory. The wind rushes into horizontality, making the rain unavoidable.

And it's okay. It isn't that I do not taunt them that I am Cassandra, forecasting the future and being ignored at their peril, but we are in this downpour together. This will be a good memory, even if it is an inconvenient moment.

A teen boy and girl splash in the massive puddle that appears between us and a building. She stands beneath a drain spout such that it pummels her head, then does handstands.

"I love them," I say, meaning it, "though we will have to make a difficult decision soon."

The announcement changes, saying the park is closed and we are to leave. The rain abates enough that escape is less punishing, which I doubt is coincidental.

"We are going to get your car wet," Julie says, but there is no way around this.

When we are on the road, the summer sun bursts through the clouds, melting them.

We return to the motel damp in a way that defies drying from anything short of a full body hair dryer or a towel and a complete change of clothes (even if they appear dry, our clothes contain inherent moisture that cannot be remedied). Kest says they are changing on the other side of my car, and we should look away unless we want to see this. When they return, it is with the irritation of many hours at a theme park punctuated with a thunderstorm.

I ask how they want to do dinner. Kest assures me that they exceedingly do not want to have dinner and will nap somewhere. I look to Daniel but know he rarely needs an excuse not to be social longer. This is an excellent one.

We hug and make our goodbyes.

We return home. I see my neighbor. He sports three inches of stitches on the back of his head to match the two inches on his forehead. He is doddering about as usual, as though alcoholism is not gradually transforming his head into a baseball.

The tap water is still cold, and no one cleaned the blood off the steps, but my bed is accommodating.

last watched: Rick and Morty
reading: Nona the Ninth