Great Big Beautiful Life(82)

“Yeah,” she says, then adds, a little more softly but still almost chiding, “Charge your phone, kid.”

“I will,” I promise.

She hangs up without a goodbye.



* * *



? ? ?

At our next session, we board the boat prepared. For one thing, I’m wearing a pair of loose linen pants and a light button-up, so my limbs are covered. For another, before we came down to the dock, Margaret doused our hands and feet in some kind of homemade concoction that Jodi swears by.

“She still on vacation?” I ask as we’re climbing into the boat, and Margaret blinks at me for a moment before averting her gaze and settling herself on the seat beside the fan.

“Yep,” she says. “You know how it is. Sometimes you just need a break.”

I try to give her a reassuring smile, but she’s not looking at me, already focused on starting up the fan. I take my position on the seat nearest to her, and we motor away from the dock, into the reeds, the thick air billowing over my hair and skin like thousands of tiny fingers.

We can’t really talk until we get to “The Spot” she’s keen to show me—not over the roar of the fan—and in the interim, I find my mind wandering back to Hayden.

After he finished with Margaret yesterday, we went to dinner at Rum Room, sat on opposite sides of his favorite booth, picking away at our work while eating veggie dogs and fries, our legs tangled together beneath the table.

Every time I got up to use the bathroom and had to walk past his side of the booth, he snapped his laptop shut, as if the temptation of seeing his screen might be too much for me to bear.

I started making a game of it, getting up and walking past him every few minutes. Finally, after four trips to the bathroom in twenty minutes, he left his laptop open, and in my surprise, my eyes actually did go straight to the screen.

In ludicrously large font, on an otherwise blank page of a Microsoft Word document, he’d written, Having fun?

At my snort of laughter, he turned sideways on the bench and hauled me down into his lap, a public display of affection that surprised and delighted me.

Made me feel like he was claiming me as his, like he was openly mine.

After that very long working dinner, he drove me home, walked me to the door, and kissed me slowly, roughly against it until we were both out of breath.

He didn’t stay over, and I understood why. He looked so tired a light breeze could probably have knocked him over, and it had occurred to me, way too belatedly, that the fiveish inches of height he had on me had probably made our night together smooshed on the couch all the more brutal for him. Plus there was my snoring.

I doubted that spending the night in my bed would’ve been any more restful.

So we said good night, and then he texted me from his hotel room, can’t stop thinking about you, and I lay awake a solid hour anyway, regretting not dragging him inside when I had the chance.

The boat’s fan cuts, and Margaret tosses a speculative gaze my way. “What’s got you smiling like that?”

“You know me,” I say. “I’m always smiling.”

“Not like that,” she says, digging a net out of the bottom of the boat and passing it to me. “That’s a secret smile.” She waves an arm toward the shore. “See that little outcropping there?”

We’ve stopped at a bend in the creek, and a sandy gap in the dense curtains of live oak along the shore reveals the charred remains of a campfire and a couple of wooden crates I’d guess someone’s been using as makeshift chairs.

“Yeah.”

Margaret pulls another net out of the bottom of the boat and swings this one over into the water. “That is where the teenagers come to drink.”

“And?” I must be making some kind of face, because she rolls her eyes, as if to chastise me.

“And they litter,” she says. “A lot. You can’t see it here, but there’s a road back that way through the trees, and Jodi says the cops patrol around here because they know kids like to come here to get in trouble.” She sweeps her net through the water in a slow, graceful arc.

She pulls it up, and the water gushes down through the net, leaving behind two green glass bottles. “And either these kids hate the planet, or else when they see the headlights, they throw their shit out here. Maybe it’s both—what do I know?”

“Bummer,” I say.

“There we go,” Margaret replies. “There’s a frown. I’m much more familiar with that expression. It’s comforting even. We’ll make a cynic out of you yet.”

“Good luck,” I say, dropping my net into the water on the other side of the boat. While I’m swooshing it around, she opens up a trash bag and dumps her bounty into it. Under the surface, I catch something too. A little whoop of excitement escapes me.

“Reel her in,” Margaret orders, and I lift the net upward, water pouring through it to reveal…a neon-green rubber clog. A Croc, or an off-brand version of the same thing.

“I hope no one’s missing this,” I say.

“I guarantee they’re not,” Margaret replies, and opens another trash bag. “Here.” She thrusts it toward me. “For all the trash we can’t use.”

I drop the shoe into it. “So should we get started?”