“Sarah!”
She’d smiled at him. “Do you know, this is the first time I’ve seen you with a shirt on?”
He looked down at himself, then did a model’s spin. “So what do you think?”
“Blue is definitely your color.”
“Are you here for the summer?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Want to go canoeing again?”
Sarah tried not to smile as widely as she wanted to, tried not to show how delighted she was that he’d remembered her, and wanted to see her again. “Sure.”
Owen told her how to find his house from the land, instead of the water. “Turn left off Route 6 right before Moby Dick’s on Rose Road. There’s a dirt road on the right-hand side. It’s pretty bumpy and rutted, but if you go slow, you’ll be fine. Just follow it around until you see the Camp.”
He told her he was also working, as a counselor at the Provincetown Yacht Club, the sailing camp he’d attended, and as a bar back at a restaurant with an expansive outdoor deck right on Commercial Street, a place that did a booming business from brunch, which began at ten a.m., through last call at two in the morning （“the food’s not great, but they’ve got cheap drinks,” Owen said）。 Between their jobs, Owen and Sarah didn’t have a lot of free time that overlapped, but whenever they did that summer, they would kayak, or ride their bikes along the path into Eastham or Orleans, or walk the paths through the dunes, gathering cranberries and wineberries and wild blueberries. They swam in the pond, and in the bay, and in the ocean. At night, they’d build bonfires on the beaches and roast hot dogs and clams and ears of corn. Their romance unfolded, slowly and sweetly, each milestone marked in Sarah’s mind: the first time they held hands, the first time Owen kissed her, and the first time she felt his hands on her breasts as she lay on a towel on the cooling sand, with a bonfire warming her face and the wind whispering through the dune grass.
Two weeks after their reunion, Sarah brought Owen home for dinner on the Fourth of July. She led him past the pool and through the front door. She pulled the sliding door shut, calling, “Mom! We’re here!” and walking upstairs to the kitchen. When she realized Owen wasn’t behind her, she turned around to find him standing perfectly still, with his eyes closed and an expression suggesting he’d just seen the face of God.
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “What?” she asked.
“Air-conditioning,” he whispered back ecstatically. Sarah saw that he was standing right over one of the vents. It had been hot and humid all week, the temperature soaring into the upper eighties every day, rarely dipping below seventy degrees at night. Every evening, heat lightning would illuminate the sky in flashes, but the rain never came, and the weather never broke. Sarah was used to the air-conditioning. From his expression, she could see that Owen, clearly, was not.
Then her mom called, “Come on up! Dinner’s ready!” and Owen left his spot over the vent and came upstairs, where he joined the rest of the guests, two other families that had homes near theirs. Sarah watched as he introduced himself, shaking her mom’s hand, then her dad’s. At sunset, everyone gathered in the living room. Sarah’s mom pressed a button to roll up the blinds, kept down during the day so the room would stay cool, and they sat on the couch for the ritual of oohing and aahing at the sunset. Her dad grilled steaks and Vidalia onions; her mom steamed corn and served her watermelon and feta-cheese salad. Owen spread his napkin on his lap. He cut his steak into slivers and talked to Sam about sports, and answered all her parents’ questions, telling them he was going to Duke, where he planned to study history and play lacrosse, where he’d live with other freshmen on the East Campus, in a house called Pegram. Sarah could see him looking around, at the bookcases that lined the living-room wall; at the paintings on the walls, at the gleaming kitchen. She guessed it was different from his house, if the insides matched the outsides, and wondered how her house looked to him, whether he thought it was pleasant or ostentatious.
At the end of the night, Owen and Sarah walked down to the beach and sat together on a blanket, watching as the waves came foaming gently onto the sand. Owen was in a quiet mood, staring out at the sea, stroking her hair almost absently.
“What?” she finally asked. “Is something wrong?”
He shook his head and gave her a tight-lipped smile that was nothing like his usual easy grin. “I was just thinking how long it’s been since I sat down at a table for an actual meal where nobody yelled at anyone or threw anything.”