The High Season(61)

“You have six T-shirts. I just stained one.”

“When I knew my marriage was over, I talked to my dad about it. I was back here—my parents moved out to Southold when they retired, have I mentioned that? Anyway, my mom was dying. We were at the hospital and Mom was asleep. I said it was a tough decision, to leave—Henry was still in high school. And I asked him how he did it, how he always seemed to know what to do. And he thought for a minute. And then he said, ‘I never made a decision in my life.’?”

“What does that mean?”

“I never really got it. I was kind of pissed, actually, because it wasn’t helpful. But last night…I got it.”

Wasn’t that just what she’d been contemplating? The whole unthinking rush of it? The lack of decision when she walked through the door? Could that still happen, in the middle of your life?

“I’m sorry to say this, but I have to go to work soon,” he said.

“I’ll find my dress.”

“I will always remember that dress,” Joe said. “It is the pinnacle of summer dresses.”

Only it wasn’t her dress, it belonged to Carole. Sooner or later he’d see her in her own wardrobe, the untailored, unsilked her.

    He gently pulled the neck of the T-shirt down and kissed her shoulder. “Of course,” he said, his mouth against her skin, “I don’t have to leave immediately.”

He leaned in, and she leaned back, resisting the pull, the kiss, the feeling that she was not at all able to control this. “Look,” she said.

“Don’t say that. Don’t say look in that fashion.”

“In what fashion?”

“In that We’re adults let’s talk about this fashion.”

“But Joe—”

“And don’t say but Joe.”

“We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”

“Let’s get ahead of ourselves,” Joe said, scrambling to sit up straight and spilling more coffee on the sheets. The man was going to have laundry to do. “Let’s flirtatiously text each other during our days, and then at the end of it let’s have you come to my bar and let me pour you a chilled glass of Muscadet and lovingly shuck my best oysters and let me make you dinner and let us do all this over again, tonight and all summer, for God’s fucking sake.”

“Whoa.”

“Whoa as in stop, or whoa as in, that sounded really great?”

“Whoa as in, I’m not in a good place right now.”

“What would make it a good place?” Joe leaned back again.

“To have what I used to have,” she blurted. She meant her house, her job, her peace, her place, so that she would feel grounded enough to try this. She saw immediately it had been the wrong thing to say.

“I guess that brings me to a question,” Joe said, looking down into his mug. “Are you still in love with Michael? Do I have competition here?”

It was the name “Michael” that snagged her. She could hear it in Adeline’s cool, cultured voice. It brought her back to what was waiting for her outside the door.

She heard how much he didn’t want to ask that question. So much banter between them and it had all fallen away last night. They had knelt, naked, and touched palms. They had not been afraid. It had been a night so filled with charged touch, with lust and tenderness, that it would make a poet stand up on a chair and cheer.

    Her thoughts moved so fast. In the time it took for him to look down in his mug and look up again she knew she would have to give him up.

She knew this: He was the most honest man she’d ever known. Whatever story she came up with about the watch—a street purchase in the city, a family heirloom—it would be a lie. She would have to pile lie on lie in order to keep her house, and while she had talked herself into the fact that these lies harmed no one, she still had to tell them.

She could tell them, she was almost sure. But she could not tell them to Joe.

“I can’t let go,” she said, and saw his heart fall. He thought she meant Mike, of course, when she meant everything but Mike. To have Joe believe she loved her ex-husband was a lie, but at least she hadn’t had to tell it.

Oh, Ruthie. You parser, you.





36


THE NEXT MORNING at Lark’s, Doe took the side door of the house to the driveway, the family door. The one that looked like a window. She received a blast of panic when she saw Daniel standing in the driveway by the garage—oops, vehicle barn—drinking an espresso. Waiting. He knew she’d stayed over, of course, she had followed Lark up the stairs last night.

“Thank God,” Lark had said when they were alone in the bedroom. “It’s always easier when he knows things.”

“So it’s okay that I’m here?” Doe had hovered by the door, almost ready to go back down the stairs, even though wanting to be with Lark was lighting her up.

Lark had kicked off her mules, sending them crashing into the closet. “He approves of you.” She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “That was awful.”

Then she had folded herself up in the bed, tucking her knees under her chin, covering her head with her arms, her hands in tight fists.

Doe had kissed each finger until the hands uncurled.