Susan started to rise from her chair and then stopped, sat back down. The girl on the beach had fallen, her hand slipping from her father’s, but she was already on her feet again, clumsily brushing the sand from her legs and arms. The man looked like he was laughing. “I don’t know why I told him to come over again. He wasn’t particularly good in the sack, you know. Competent, I guess.”
“Sometimes that’s better than nothing,” Lindy said. She took another bite of the pastry, this time daintily, and the fruit kept its juices off her face. “How’s Bert?”
Just the name of Susan’s grandfather put a smile on all three women’s faces. By the time the girls were in high school, Bert had sold his medical practice and started his second career as a farmer. They’d worked part time at his orchards during the fall, high school girls helping the migrant crews, running the cider press, ringing up bags of U-Pick apples, and making fresh apple cider doughnuts in the small store. Bert had never remarried, and despite the fact that Susan’s dad had sided with Susan’s grandmother in the dissolution of the marriage, her dad hadn’t stopped Susan from spending time with Bert. Part of the reason all three of them liked Bert was that he seemed young for a grandfather, in his mid-sixties and energetic when Susan was in high school, and part of it was simply that he was a good man, the sort of man, his failed marriage notwithstanding, who was an almost comically perfect grandfather. Susan liked to tell the story about how, when she was ten or eleven, they’d been out hiking on the island when they saw a wild horse.
“I’d never seen a horse just out and about like that, and I’m still not even sure if it was somebody’s escaped pet or if it really was a wild horse — are there even wild horses on the island? — but he grabbed my arm and held me still and did this sort of clicking thing with his tongue, and the horse came over to us. And the thing that still blows me away, but seemed so incredibly normal to me at the time, like, this was just the kind of guy my grandfather is, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sugar cube and put it in my hand. He spread my fingers flat and then the horse lipped it out of my palm. I mean, he just happens to have a sugar cube in his pocket? Did he always carry a sugar cube in his pocket? How did he know we’d see a horse? And what’s funny is that it wasn’t until years later, probably when I was already at university, that I figured out that it was kind of an amazing thing that he was somehow prepared for us to find a horse while we were out walking. Like he always expected something magical.”
Susan spread more jam on her toast. She hadn’t known what it was when she ordered, but the jam was strawberry, sweet and sticky. “Remember when he tried making that batch of apple butter and didn’t put any sugar in it? And you,” she said, looking at Mai-Lin, “were too polite to say anything. You just ate the whole biscuit, trying so hard not to look like you were eating, well, butter with apple chunks in it.”
“And then he took a bite and spit it out all over the table,” Mai-Lin said. She finished her glass of water and glanced around for the waiter. “God. It’s only ten and it’s this hot? What’s it going to be like in the afternoon?”
Susan looked out at the beach again. The girl was sitting on the sand now, digging with her hands. Out in the waves, just up to his waist in the water, the man leaned down and dunked his head into the ocean. Susan lifted her hair up and twisted it into a makeshift bun, sweat already beading on her neck.
While Mai-Lin and Lindy were at the spa, Susan sat on the veranda outside her room, still groggy from her nap. The hotel fell into the boutique category, and the women had taken three adjoining rooms in one of the dozen or so semi-detached six-unit cabanas that had been carefully curated on the beach, separate from the main building. Fork had already come and gone, giving her another half-hearted effort in bed and taking some money so he could return with his friends, some wine, and what he promised were local delicacies only he could locate.
For some reason she couldn’t understand, despite the assurances of the tech support person she kept on part time for the business, her mobile didn’t work overseas. The cord on the hotel phone was long enough that by arranging her chair just so, she was able to sit on the veranda while the lonely digital chirp of her call rang through at her grandfather’s house outside Victoria. After the fifth ring, just before the answering machine usually kicked in — her grandfather continued to refuse to get voice mail — she heard her husband’s voice.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s me. I didn’t expect you to be there.”
There was a pause, just long enough that it was not clear if it was an actual hesitation or a transatlantic delay, and then her husband spoke: “I didn’t either. I brought her back after dinner and there was a hell of a rainstorm starting to blow up. Bert convinced me I’d be better off spending the night than trying to drive back to the city.” He didn’t say anything about the way the driveway of the farm became thick with mud when it stormed, or how the wind could blow apples loose so that they knocked dents into cars that weren’t parked with sufficient foresight.
Susan reached out with her feet, but she couldn’t quite escape the shade from the roof of the veranda. “You’re going to be late for work.”
“No. My appointment with the lawyer’s this morning. And I figured I’d drop her off at school as long as I was still here. We were heading out the door. She’s already out in the car.”
Susan stood up, the base of the phone cradled against her chest. She leaned on the doorway and looked out over the beach. It was almost empty, the heat and late afternoon sun burning out the tourists. On the path from the hotel, she saw Fork turn the corner. He had canvas grocery sacks in either hand. They looked heavy.
“I don’t have to sign the papers, Susan.” She didn’t say anything. She just watched Fork amble toward her. He looked at ease with himself, despite the bags he was carrying, and as he spotted her his face broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Susan? Are you still here?” She hugged the base of the phone tighter against her breasts, but still she didn’t speak. “Susan? I’ll sign if that’s still what you want. Are you there? I’m still here.” His voice faded a little as he said the words.
Fork paused at the bottom of the steps and cocked his head to the side, but in the bright sun, he suddenly looked older than he had the day before, in his late thirties or forties, instead of Susan’s age. He smiled again and then came up the steps. Susan heard her husband’s voice one last time, asking, “Are you still there?” before she carefully placed the receiver back on the base.
“Your husband?” Fork said. “Back home?”
Susan crouched down and put the phone on the floor. “How did you know?”
