The Winters(12)

“I’ll drive you there.”

“It would take you longer to drive me than for me to just cross the highway.”

A line of frustrated drivers began honking behind him.

“I have candy.”

“Oh well, in that case . . .”

I got in. He smelled nice, like clean water. He asked me where I was taking the truck and I told him I had an errand on the other side of the island.

“Let me take you. I won’t charge you much. Mileage at most.”

“It’s actually pretty far.”

“Even better.”

Instead of making the U-turn into the parking lot, he continued down Esterly Tibbetts. The trip to Laureen’s on Sea View Road could sometimes take forty-five minutes, depending on traffic. Warning him of that didn’t deter him, and so the white marble of Laureen’s gaudy house became the backdrop against which we would conduct the majority of our heady affair.



* * *



? ? ?

That became our near-daily routine. I texted him when I was off work and about to trek to the staff parking lot. I’d meet him next to Laureen’s truck, which never left the lot. Any night we weren’t enjoying takeout on the iron bistro table in her sunroom, we ate at the same small fish shack on the other side of George Town, where no one from the touristic part of the island was likely to spot us.

That’s where we found ourselves nearing the end of our second week together. I remember the sunset was particularly pretty that night. My eyes were drawn to an armada of small cruise ships, like a dark ellipsis along the horizon.

“You went away just now,” he said, following my gaze. “What are you thinking? That you’d like to be on one of those boats?”

“No. Not at all. I am happy right here. Happier, I think, than I have a right to be.” My face flushed. I worried I would say too much, and yet I couldn’t stop myself. “In fact, I wish there was a way you could press rewind, not to change the past, but to experience a moment exactly as it was—just once more—even if it meant it could never become a memory.”

“What would be among your reruns?”

I wanted to say This moment, right now, with you. “Oh, I don’t know. Swimming with my mother. The day before the last one I spent with my father. I suppose a day or two this week.” I shrugged. “It’s been quite fun. For me anyway.”

He smiled, reached across the table, and placed a warm hand on my slightly colder one. It was the first time we’d touched.

“Thank you for saying that. Very few young people have craved my company lately. I’d forgotten what it’s like to even be mildly popular.”

He was talking about Dani, who had called a few times while we were together. Their chats were warm but short. She seemed to be checking in rather than initiating meaningful conversation. He’d startled me the other day on the boat when he replied to a question of hers that included casual mention of me. “Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m with her now,” he had said, practically yelling over the noise of the sea.

The waiter arrived. Max ordered our usual: two fish specials, two glasses of white wine. Feeling unqualified to elaborate on the trials and tribulations of raising a truculent teenager, I asked him instead what memories he’d relive once more then never remember again.

He thought for a moment. “I would like to mirror your lovely sentiment and say the time we brought Dani home. But I want to remember that day again and again. So I would game the system. What I might do is choose to relive my very worst moments, if only to be allowed to erase them forever. A small price to pay, in my experience.”

“Which ones?”

He turned to face me fully, his mood shifting. “Well, for starters, the day Rebekah died. And quite honestly, almost every day after that.” He took a final gulp of wine and signaled for another. I regretted guiding the conversation here. What did I think a widower would choose as his worst memories? He seemed to sense my embarrassment, and rather than pull back, he closed in on his statement, sealing it off with a taunt.

“You’re looking at me all doe-eyed and surprised. You think it’s cruel to want to rebury my wife so I never have to think about it again. Selfish, even. But it’s true. I wish I could forget it all.”

The subject of Rebekah’s death had dented his voice and shifted his features. This is what it does to him to think about her. I hated the way he looked at me in that moment, as though I were to blame for reviving her memory. She might as well have been sitting at the table with us, slowly drumming her fingers until I took a hint and left them alone.

“I think I understand—”

He snorted. “What do you understand? You’re just a child who’s lived on a pretty little island all her life.”

I began to tear up, confirming that I liked him too much already, and that in the face of potential rejection or humiliation, I would choose to be unkind. I couldn’t lash out at his grief over Rebekah, but fewer things angered me more than the assumption that I lacked depth because I was young, or that I couldn’t possibly struggle in a place that was, to him, a paradise. So I snapped back, not caring what it might do to the mood of the evening, or us. I will wreck this before it wrecks me.

“I understand a lot more than you give me credit for, Max. You don’t have a monopoly on grief, or strife,” I said. “And if I’m such a child, why are you spending all this time with me? Why do you pick me up every night to go on these stupid errands, and then bring me here for a meal when you could be doing so many other more interesting things with much more important people, older people, older women, with better clothes and lives and money, who don’t have to sneak around like I do? And Lord knows it can’t be for the sex, because you don’t seem to even want to touch me.”