I feel a poke in my foot and limp over to sit down on the deck’s edge. My son Hudson asks, “Mommy, what’s wrong?” I yell my sister Lauren over to grab him. A splinter the size of a matchstick is poking out of my skin.
I yank. Some comes out. Is there more? My sister’s husband Keith uses the flashlight on his phone to see.
“Gross,” he says.
Yes. It’s still dark under the pink-yellow of the skin in the middle of my arch.
My father sits behind the sliding glass door of the lake house, behind the reflection of the perfect blue of the lake and the gleam of his reading glasses. He looks up from his laptop.
Lauren gives Hudson a Nestlé ice cream cone. His fourth of the day. Shit.
“I think we use a needle,” I say.
“Like a sewing needle?” Keith asks me.
My brother Zack stands behind him. “Needle?”
“You sterilize the needle with a lighter, and you dig the thing out,” I say. “It might help if we soak the skin first to make it soft.”
“Oh,” Zack says. He leaves, probably to go to his own laptop to hone a Spotify playlist. Or to FaceTime with his girlfriend in Seattle. His supposed girlfriend. Three years they’ve been together, and I’ve never met her.
“I think you draw it back and forth to open a spot, then sort of wiggle it out,” I tell Keith.
My sister sets down the wrapper from the ice cream and walks Hudson to the lake’s edge. I don’t yell for her to get his swim diaper, the swim shirt, the swim hat, the floaties, the sunscreen. Then I do.
My mom motions to my father, who is standing up, not to come out. She knows I don’t want him out here.
“I’ll give it a shot,” Keith says.
After soaking my foot in a big pot of warm water for a few minutes, the area covering the splinter is soft and puffy. Keith has two needles—one from an open safety pin and one from a sewing kit. He draws the tip of each across the flame of his lighter. Then he takes the sewing needle and whittles away at the skin near the edge of whatever is in there. It creates a line, furry with the pink-white of my cells piling up layer by layer. I suck in air through my teeth.
My dad, still behind the glass, argues with my mother. She looks at me.
“Your father really wants to help,” my mom says, after pushing the door open.
I shake my head. “No one will love you now. No one will love you like that,” my dad said a year ago, after I left James, with his sexting the woman from the golf course and his temper. It was stupid to borrow money from him after my divorce, but I paid it back. It doesn’t matter. My dad wants to show he was right and is always right and is in charge. That’s how he was when I was a kid, when he took out all the splinters, aggressive with the needle, going too fast, making things bleed.
Now he’s there on the deck behind my brother-in-law.
“Want to take a shot at it?” Keith says, turning toward my father.
I shake my head. “Please,” I mouth.
“Just bite down. I’ll get this done quick,” my father says. He puts his hand out and takes the needle from Keith.
My son looks up at me from the edge of the water. My sister takes his hand. “Mom!” he yells.
My father lunges in close.
I bite down. “No,” I say.
I grab the open safety pin and pinch it between my fingers. I scream, and I pry the thing out. Two things, two sharp wooden pieces like severed thorns from a rose stem, bloodied and free, visible in the palm of my hand, ready to be tossed away.
