The Responsible Party

By the time Irv and Kath met, the Oberbach Corporation was ankle-deep in concrete, middle-manning the cheap Chinese labor the city needed to build its demonic underground highway along the river. Irv, a third-generation scion groomed to take over for his father, had been banned from the company’s construction sites in 1968, after arriving at a ground-breaking ceremony at the future site of a nuclear shelter, a government contract, with two ounces of weed taped to the underside of his hard hat. After that, Irv’s two kid brothers—boys with moneyed, humiliating names like Jasper and Ramsay—assumed leadership. The younger Oberbachs would helm the business for twenty years, until their indictments for masterminding a Midwest-wide salt-looting scheme wherein the company’s private contractors covertly siphoned three hundred tons of snow-melt salt from the nippled government silos that dot I-80. Irv’s liquid cash had evaporated by his thirty-fifth birthday, but he held onto relics of the good life. For a while, he had a guy on retainer to lacquer his thirty-four-foot Chris-Craft with a high-gloss wood polish. Varnish didn’t keep the boat from sinking. He loved to party, but his coke habit was limited to what he could mooch off others. Property taxes and invasive ivy ate up his mother’s big house on the North Shore, and he was no longer welcome at the Drake, so he rented a condemned lighthouse four hundred yards from the shoreline of Lake Michigan from the Coast Guard for one dollar a month.

Article continues after advertisement

Irving’s lighthouse, built for the 1893 World’s Fair, was salt crusted, wind battered, and timeworn, at once a shithole and a feat of civil engineering. Its ground floor resembled a storybook cottage with a red roof, dragged from an idyll and plopped onto a twenty-foot-high foundation made of reinforced steel, concrete, and riprap rock. A cylindrical turret jutted through the middle of the house, studded with paned windows all the way up to the balconied lantern room. By 1971, most of the column’s rotten tin panels had peeled away like fallen leaves off a half-dead oak, their edges sharp enough to deliver a slice of death to whomever stood below.

Kath sat on a boulder as her seasickness wound down. Someone had left a speckled enamel mug on the rock, and she sniffed its contents. An air freshener–flavored drink. It didn’t need ice. She tasted it, and her best guess was a cocktail of orange Kool-Aid powder dissolved in Seagram’s. She quaffed until the mug went empty. In an age when texting your fake Canadian boyfriend to look busy was not yet a viable option, she busied her thumbs with other projects. She loosened her wet bandage, poked at the bubble wrap blister that had refilled on her palm since the night before, and rewound it with the same dirty gauze. My Lady Clam bobbed in the water, which didn’t look so turbulent from where Kath sat. Go ahead, the boat’s nodding seemed to confirm.

She followed the wooden walkway up to the lighthouse with a half-drunken stride, while the whacking bass from a stereo receiver shook the slats. When she summitted the steps, the lighthouse was only ten feet away on a patch of dead grass half the size of a football field. Its front door was six inches too short for its frame and outfitted with a bathroom push knob instead of a lever handle, almost as if the original slab had been blown from its casing by an internal explosion. Wet heat frizzled her dry lungs as she entered.

Just past the vestibule, party guests undulated to a runaway groove on a fifteen-foot-wide dance floor. Their sodden footprint mazes cropped up then disappeared across the cement. In the center of the room, a few feet from the spiral staircase covered in chili pepper string lights, a dozen people simmered in the navel-high spa waters of a cylindrical tub. Chemical steam rose from the water so that Kath couldn’t see any of their faces. The plastic fronds of a six-foot-tall blowup palm tree shaded the tubbers’ heads, and a folding beach lounger sat unattended nearby. Despite the flow of cold air from the gap in the doorjamb, every first-floor window dripped with condensation.

Four bulbs of a Medusa lamp backlit the makeshift bar wedged underneath the staircase. Its other four necks expanded upward to call attention to a gallery wall. The largest hung work was an aluminum sign illustrating CPR techniques, a relic the Coast Guard hadn’t been able to pry from the wall before they vacated. Next to that, a rusted Oberbach Corporation sign, a family portrait taken in a Wild West photo booth at a carnival, and what looked like a child’s oil pastel drawing of a boat, framed and signed I. Oberbach, 1965. Kath had been expecting glamour, but in ambient lighting, the function’s loucheness seemed romantic. About fifty people writhed alongside her in this room, and they all looked beautiful. She didn’t see Irv or Marcy anywhere. Kath envisioned them disappearing together, and she briefly considered turning around and waiting on the Clam until Uncle Jimmy took another trip to the mainland. But then her hand throbbed once to remind her why she’d embarked, and she made her way toward the unmanned bar. The 1960s were over, which is why Kath regretted plugging her nose and wiggling her bad hand in the air to do the Swim as she cut through the dance floor. A girl at least five years older, wearing a nautical minidress and two black pigtails, extended Kath grace, backstroking behind until they reached the bar. Directly above them, a handwritten sign had been taped to the railing just before the second-floor landing: KEEP IT MOVING.

“Your jacket is hilarious,” the girl told her. The outline of her wet triangle bikini bled through the bust of her dress.

A hive pattern surfaced on Kath’s back in the shape of the tiny pair of jeans. She had not intended the look as novelty wear, but now that every other girl had shed her winter coat, Marcy’s loaner denim seemed babyish and ridiculous.

“What are you drinking?” the girl asked.

“I’m not sure,” Kath said. She picked up an abandoned brandy snifter teeming with brown liquid from the bar and held it out for the girl to sniff.

“Can I have half?” she asked. Kath gave her the okay, and the girl took a long chug.

“Have you seen Irving?” Kath asked when she was finished.

“Who’s that?”

“The guy who lives here.”

“Someone lives here?” the girl said. “That is too wild.”

Kath kept it moving. A small hallway with a sink branched off from the main room, the corridor impenetrable until the gravitational pull of the clouded moon shifted a current of bodies to grant her access to the butler’s pantry. The doors on each cabinet lining the tapered hallway had been removed from their hinges, and the open shelves displayed empty wine bottles like youth sports trophies. Beef bouillon and oregano were the only canisters on a long-forgotten mountain spice rack above the sink. She leaned on the counter, studying each jar’s label, hoping she looked engrossed while waiting for the most recent doses of liquor to hit her bloodstream.

Beyond the butler’s pantry was a kitchen crowded with whooping men. Kath could only see the backs of their bowl cuts. As she read oregano’s ingredient list a second time (INGREDIENTS: OREGANO), hot breath closed its hand around the back of her neck, and she whipped around, ready to fight. Uncle Jimmy, holding two beers and a bottle opener shaped like mermaid genitalia, stood in front of her. He still carried his duffel bag, but he’d removed all of his jackets. Underneath his waders, he wore a short-sleeved T-shirt that showed off a forearm tattoo of a grinning devil in a pith helmet napping under a palm tree.

“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“Having a blast in space,” Kath said, drunk now. She touched her cheek with the back of her right hand to confirm. Hot pink.

“Right on,” he said. “Leave it to Irv, the consummate host.”

“How does he live here?”

“The Coast Guard considers him an employee, I think. The keeper of the lighthouse,” Jimmy said. “He got the boat for cheap, but he can’t drive her, not legally. So I help out.”

He filled her in on some details of the arrangement, though the story didn’t explain why Uncle Jimmy was permitted to pilot civilians with open containers back and forth to the lighthouse in November. It wasn’t what Kath was asking, anyway.

“I meant, how does he survive here?”

Uncle Jimmy laughed. “He can see the harbor parking lot from the second story,” he said. “He’s tougher than he looks, though. He’s got running water, except when he doesn’t. Iodine tabs work fine. I bring him groceries once a week, more if he’s hosting.”

Jimmy rubbed beer foam off his mustache, and Kath thought of the drunken Norwegian boatman who sank Fanny’s ship.

“Is that why they call you Uncle Jimmy?”

The kitchen men restarted their cheering as if someone in there was doing stage magic, and Uncle Jimmy leaned closer so he could be heard. “Nah. When I was nineteen, way before I knew Irv, I adopted my cousin who was fourteen months younger than me.”

“Why did you do that?”

“We both needed a roommate,” Jimmy said. Mysterious. “Listen, I wanted to say this earlier, but we didn’t have time. Last night was an accident, but it’s unacceptable. He gets far too lost in the sauce and often can’t find his way back.”

“It’s fine,” she said.

“It’s really not. I’ve spoken to Irv, and he’s going to make it right. How’s your hand?”

Kath laid her left hand on the countertop and played a coy peek-a-boo game with the bandage. When she peeled back the gauze, her palm resembled a charred personal pan pizza stripped of its cheese. A mossy cushion of gray fuzz had sprouted from the depressions of the scorch marks. In this light, it was impossible to tell if it was sweater lint or a fungal infection. She resheathed quickly, embarrassed.

“Oof,” he said. “Well. I brought you something that should help.”

“You brought me a present?” Nobody had ever done that. “Yeah. It’s not sexy, but it works,” he said, unzipping a side pocket on his duffel and pulling out a tube of paste cratered in the middle with the indentation of a squeezing hand. “It’s silver sulfadiazine. Use it twice a day. It’ll keep you fresh.” “On my teeth?”

“No, don’t ingest it. Tastes like Indian Head pennies. Spread it on the burn,” he said.

“Is it legal?”

He laughed again, but Kath had never heard of such a thing. I have. Silver sulfadiazine is a topical cream made of suspended silver ions that slowly release to kill bacterial cells on burns. Effective, but not prescribed much anymore since the invention of hydrocolloid bandages. Colloidal silver, the suspension of metallic nanoparticles in water that ruined my career, is alleged to function similarly. Invented before modern antibiotics, the tincture has recently experienced a renaissance as a popular antiviral recommendation among the organ meat set. That’s not where I heard about it, though. The cod oil–pushing acupuncturist, who I suppose has gone full MAGA in the intervening years, taught me about it.

“Do you want to play pong?” Uncle Jimmy asked her.

“What’s that?”

The longer Uncle Jimmy elucidated the rules, the more he sounded like Ron. Kath wasn’t an aural learner. She declined.

“You don’t have to be nice to me because of my burn,” she told him. “I’m good. I’m just waiting for my friend to come back from the bathroom.”

“Marcy? You know she’s over there playing,” Uncle Jimmy gestured to the kitchen. “Not much of an arm on her, but her trash talk is really something. She’s hurting everyone’s feelings.”

“She can turn at any time.”

“I do see why you’re pals,” he said, then poked Kath in the squishy part between her ribs and belly button. Liquid squelched aloud in her belly. Uncle Jimmy held out his hand, and she slapped it five with her good one. Their clammy palms suctioned together in the dank atmosphere before they pulled apart with a loud pop!

The curtain of bangèd men parted for Uncle Jimmy as Kath followed close behind. Marcy had her hair tied up with a bow made from nylon cord and was bent over a fold-up kitchen counter rearranging wet garbage. Two of the men, beef-fed and blond, chugged beers on their knees on the other side of the workstation. Ten others looked on. When Marcy had arranged a crooked triangle of Dixie cups and sherbet dishes in front of her, she looked up and saw Kath, then beckoned her over.

“This is Willy and Gareth,” Marcy said, pointing to the guzzlers on the floor.

“Howdy,” one said.

“My name’s Billy,” the other said.

“Sorry, guy,” Marcy said.

“You got my name wrong but remembered Gareth’s?” he asked.

“Gareth sucks shit.”

“I thought it was countercultural,” Marcy said. The guys around her went ohh! “Billy, get up. You’re gonna be Kath’s partner.”

Billy obeyed and stood next to Kath, and Marcy dictated the terms of play. Kath is competitive only about things that matter, like logging steps or shaving her legs, and the game had no bearing on her reality. She participated because, any minute now, she expected Irving to maunder into the kitchen and ask her to stand close to him in a dark alcove. Uncle Jimmy hung back by the drippy windows at the rear of the kitchen nursing a Schlitz.

“Your turn,” Billy said, handing her a wet ping-pong ball.

She overshot the ball every round, but her partner didn’t seem to care. Kath understood something essential about womanhood then, that she was allowed to be stupid about certain concepts because she was a girl, even one with the wrong type of face who hated the outfit she’d showed up in.

“One hander!” she said at one point, like that was a feat, and all the guys laughed.

By the second round, a new set of male athletes had subbed in, but Kath and Marcy got to continue playing. The bush leaguers demonstrated backhand throws and bounce shots and called their opponents homo and faggot years before the reclamation of those words—grown men, not high schoolers, all either dead or doctors by now. Kath had to admit their enthusiasm was contagious, and as the clock ran out and reset without consequence, she shared ideas for streamlining gameplay. They heard her out, let her innovate. She hadn’t procured this much power since the night before when Irv forked over all his money and pills.

At the end of the third set, Gareth whispered into Marcy’s ear across the table, and her face took on a look of revulsion. She set her ping-pong ball down and walked away. The ball rolled to the sticky floor, littered with crushed six-pack carriers and a fine layer of winter sludge, and two competitors dove to fetch it.

Marcy let them scrap on the floor as she walked away from the game, intending to grab Kath on her way out. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. She blinked bright red, fighting tears.

“See ya,” Kath said, one eye closed. She held the ball at eye level with a shrimp claw hand and practiced her wrist flick.

“You’re coming with me.”

“One sec,” Kath told her. “I’m a complete jock over here.”

“We’re going now,” Marcy said. Her voice trembled.

“Marcy, if you give me two minutes to finish up here, I promise to jostle the tampon up in there for you,” Kath said.

All the guys oohed this time instead of ohhing. Kath threw the ball and hit the window. When she made time to look at Marcy, her friend was shoving through the crowd.

Without Marcy, the game wasn’t fun. When Uncle Jimmy’s walkie-talkie mumbled and he declared that he was taking My Lady Clam for a spin back to shore to pick up more guests, he cut a path through the men as she followed him out the same way that they entered. Kath wasn’t leaving. She was just getting started. The time had come for her to find Irving.

“Gotta go, fellas,” she told the pong men. One of them said something about her fingering Marcy in the bathroom.

“You ought to try it some time,” she said.

Everyone cheered. Kath was drunk enough to get the laughs she craved at home, and that was all she needed. Luck was with her as she proceeded through the bulwark of humidity that insulated the hot tub room. Her timing was precise. Behind the bar, the object of her fascination stood in a pair of duck boots, maroon swim trunks, and yesterday’s Fair Isle pullover taut against his tummy. His hands were a nonstop party, shooting finger guns and patriotic salutes to his attendees. Irv’s face read older under the red string lights than it had in the butter-yellow fluorescence of the Oberbach Woods McDonald’s, but Kath thought he looked stately, like a country club lifeguard. She approached head-on.

__________________________________

From The Responsible Party by Claire Carusillo. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2026 by Claire Carusillo. All rights reserved.