“Your uncle’s moral compass always pointed due north. Even when I was around. He’d have let him.”
Sofia shook her head. “I still believe he joined the force just to make sure you stayed out of trouble.”
Something twitched in my grandmother’s face, but it was gone so quickly I could have imagined it. “What trouble? I swear, the whole town built my reputation around that movie theater eighty years ago.”
“And the boat. You can’t forget the boat.”
Grandma pointed a finger at Sofia. “That one was your fault. You and Anna scared me half to death.”
Sofia turned to me. “Did you know your grandmother was a boat thief?”
I looked at my grandmother. “Honestly, I don’t think anything would surprise me. Did you ride with Butch Cassidy’s gang too?”
She crossed her arms. “Don’t be impudent. They were dead before I was even born.” Then she cocked her head and smiled. “I did meet Paul Newman in the sixties though. Had I not been married, Joanne Woodward might have had some competition.”
I turned to Joe, speaking low. “I’ve heard way too much about her sex life this trip.” He tried to hide his laugh by taking a sip of water. My grandmother may not have been able to hear what I said, but she was watching us shrewdly. She missed nothing. And I wasn’t so sure she needed those hearing aids as much as she pretended to.
After dessert, which Sofia insisted on, Joe excused himself to use the restroom, and my grandmother stood to follow suit. “I’ll take you,” I said, starting to stand.
She fixed me with a withering look. “If you don’t stop hovering over me, you’re going to find the walk home from Massachusetts to be a long one.” And, unsteadily after the wine she shouldn’t have drunk, she tottered into the restaurant.
“She’ll be fine,” Sofia said, leaning across the table toward me. I turned away from my grandma’s progress, suddenly aware that we were alone and equally aware that my grandmother likely did not actually need to pee.
“This was lovely,” I said, but Sofia reached out and took my hand.
“He really likes you.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I really liked him too. But this was his mom. And she seemed to want a reply. I swallowed dryly and nodded, afraid to speak.
“Sometimes family makes things complicated. Sometimes the complicated part is in our own heads.” She patted my hand. “It’s good to see him smiling so much.”
“Mom, stop scaring Jenna.”
I looked up at Joe and pulled my hand reflexively out of Sofia’s.
“Who’s scaring anyone?”
He looked at me. He really likes me, I thought, and I smiled.
Sofia hugged me goodbye while Joe got the car, telling me not to be a stranger, her perfume smelling of honeysuckle, before embracing my grandmother. “You bring her back soon,” she said. The two women exchanged a look, and Sofia turned back to me. “Or you come back yourself.” I was hit again with a sense of foreboding, like this trip was the closing of some chapter for my grandmother.
“I’ll work on Anna,” my grandmother said. “The two of you have so much to discuss now.”
Sofia laughed merrily, and I shook my head as Joe pulled to the curb.
When we got back to the cottage, Joe walked my grandmother up the steps, and she turned to us at the door. “I’m going to watch TV in my room. With the volume up. Then go to bed. You two make yourselves at home. I won’t hear a thing.” Then she stumped past us into the house. We lasted about six seconds before we started laughing.
“We can’t go in there.”
“No,” he agreed. The porch lights provided two halos of light, enough to see that his eyes were fixed on my lips, his body close to mine. “Do you want to come back to my house? For a drink?”
I nodded, and he opened the porch door, leading the way back down to his car, where he held my hand, his fingers intertwined with mine, his thumb tracing electric circles in my palm.
The drive was short along the road parallel to the beach, then a left at the end to the small peninsula that jutted out at the end of the cove. He turned into a long driveway, stopping at an old Cape Cod, the moonlight twinkling on the water behind it.
“You really live right on the water?”
“You should see the view at sunrise. It’s spectacular.” He led me to the front door, and I realized as he put the key in the lock that I was probably going to be there for sunrise. I shivered slightly with anticipation. There wouldn’t be a drink. We would be kissing each other as soon as we were in the door. Then there would be a trail of clothes to the bedroom, and then— Jax came bounding out of the darkness and would have knocked me down the front steps if Joe hadn’t caught me. Joe’s arms were around me, but it was Jax’s large tongue all over my face, and it took me a second to get my bearings.