Robinson Crusoe at the Waterpark: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him. Elizabeth McCracken

brought him to America. That was his provenance. He catalogued manuscripts for an auction house in Houston, other people’s love letters, other people’s diaries. Provenance was everything, and nothing. The point was not to stay whence you came, but to move along spectacularly and record every stop.

      Still, he did hate the seaside. His beloved worked as a PR person for a technology company that specialised in something called Cloud Services, but Bruno was a person of paper, and the ocean was his enemy. The seaside turned books blowsy and loose. It threw sand everywhere. Its trashy restaurants left you blemished, oil-spotted. It drowned children, according to Bruno’s mother. She had few fears but drowning was one, and she had handed it down to her only son, like an ancestral christening gown that every generation was photographed in.

      The fog made them drive slowly, as though not to break their car upon it. A wedding party walked towards them along the beach: bride, groom, six blue-clad bridesmaids, two men in tuxes, all of them overweight, one whippet-thin photographer walking backwards. The lactic light made them look peculiarly buoyant on the sand. Above them, a line of large khaki birds flew parallel to the ocean, heads ducked to avoid the clouds.

      “Pelicans!” said Ernest, and then, in a hopeful, accusatory voice, “A wedding.”

      “Pelicans?” said Bruno. “Surely not.” But there they were, single file and exact, military even, with the smug look of all pelicans. “Pelicans flock!”

      “Well, sure,” said Ernest. “What did you think?”

      “I thought they were freelancers,” said Bruno. “Pelicans!”

      “They looked like brother and sister,” said Ernest, “the bride and her groom. Like salt and pepper shakers.”

      “They did,” said Bruno.

      The three people in the car, on the other hand, looked nothing alike, though strangers could see they belonged together. Strangers were always trying to perform the spiritual arithmetic: the tall paunchy goateed near-senior citizen, the short hirsute broad-shouldered young man, the otherworldly child, who called now, from the back seat, in his thrillingly husky voice, his dreams filled with artificial rivers, “Schlitterbomb!”

      “Bahn,” said Ernest, and Bruno said, “That’s right, darling, Schlitterbomb.”

      Ernest and Bruno had not married, not legally and not, as Ernest would have liked, in a church, or in a friend’s backyard, or on a beach. Bruno did not believe in weddings, though he’d been married once, once for fifteen years, to a woman. He’d been the young husband then. Now when Ernest brought marriage up, Bruno said, “I’m an old hippie,” which was true insofar as he, unlike Ernest, had been alive in the 1960s and had done some drugs.

      Why marry, after all. The boy stirring in the back seat was their marriage, even though, from the first, it was Ernest who had summoned him up, first as a dream and then as a plan and then as a to-do list. It was Ernest who wanted a child, and then specified a biological one, who found the donor egg, and the surrogate, and then offered to Bruno what seemed like a compromise: they could mix their sperm together. “Oh God, how revolting,” said Bruno, and Ernest pointed out gently that it wouldn’t exactly be the first— “But not in a laboratory,” said Bruno, who ordinarily was the one with a sense of humour. And so the boy was Ernest’s child by blood, and Bruno’s by legal adoption. Ernest was Daddy and Bruno was Pop; Ernest believed in vows, Bruno in facts and deeds. The important fact was four years old. The fact was named Cody. The fact had never-cut red hair that hung to his shoulders and was so fair-skinned as to be combustible. Every day he was slathered in sunscreen; the first freckle would be a tragedy Ernest might never recover from. God knew when they’d manage a first haircut. When Cody and Bruno were out in the world together, they were generally taken for grandfather and granddaughter and this thorough wrongness incensed Ernest, though Bruno had learned over the years not to take the mistakes of others too seriously, not when his own mistakes required so much analysis. He couldn’t explain to Ernest the real trouble with a wedding: Ernest’s terrible taste, which he, Bruno, would have to go along with, and smile, and declare himself happy. “I like peach,” Ernest would say, displaying a napkin. Or, “My family loves disco music.” Or, “We could have Beef Wellington.”