Today, she vowed. Today she would do better. “Did you have a good one?”
“I did. Met a guy.”
“A guy?” Frankie pulled the cord back over the counter. She turned on the stereo—Roberta Flack—and settled on the sofa, with the light blue phone beside her. “More, please. Salient facts.”
“Thirty-four. ACLU lawyer. Divorced. He has two kids—twin boys. Five-year-olds.”
“And?”
“We met standing in line for Shaft in Africa, if you can believe it. We sat together and then went out for drinks afterward, and, well, we haven’t stopped talking since.”
“Wow. That’s a record for you, Babs. He must be—”
“Special,” Barb said. “He is, Frankie. I was starting to think it wouldn’t happen for me, you know? That I was too … militant, too angry, too everything. But this guy—his name is Jere, by the way—he likes all of that about me. He says lots of women have soft curves. He likes my sharp edges.”
“Wow,” Frankie said again. She was about to say more, ask a question about sex, actually, when the doorbell rang. “Just a sec, Barb. Someone’s here.” She kept the phone to her ear, carried the handset with her, and went to the door, opening it.
Rye stood there, wearing his aviator sunglasses and a Seawolves’ cap pulled low over his eyes.
She started to shut the door.
He put a foot out to stop her. “Please,” he said.
She couldn’t look away. “I gotta go, Barb.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Sure,” she said evenly, surprised at how calm she sounded. “Happy birthday again. We’ll talk soon.” Frankie hung up, held the phone balanced in one hand. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You shouldn’t have followed me home yesterday.”
“I know.”
“I saw you on the beach,” he said. “I was hoping to. It’s why I picked Coronado. By the Del. You always talked about it.”
“Did I?”
“Isn’t that where you surfed with Fin?”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Why are you here?”
“I know why you followed me. It means you still—”
“Don’t.”
He pushed his way into her house, took the phone from her hand, set it on the counter. She felt robotic, confused. She couldn’t let him stay but she couldn’t seem to form the words to make him go.
He closed the door behind him and suddenly he was close, touching distance away, taking up too much space in her living room, just as he did in her heart. “You lied to me,” she said, but the words didn’t have the edge she intended. They sounded sad instead of angry.
“Frankie.”
The way he said her name brought back so many memories, moments, promises. She shook her head. “Leave. Please.”
“You don’t want me to go.”
“I don’t want you to stay.”
“That’s not the same thing. Come on, Frankie. I know you know it was real between us.”
“Real and honest aren’t the same thing, either. Are they?”
He reached for her. She wrenched out of his grasp, stepped back, putting distance between them. She needed a drink. “You want a drink? Just one. Then you’ll go.”
He nodded.
She went to the cabinet where she kept the liquor, realized she’d bought scotch for him at some point along the way. She poured two drinks, handed him one. “Outside,” she said, afraid that in here, so close, he’d try to kiss her and she’d let him. She went to the patio door and stepped out into the backyard, noticing the changes Henry had made: a tire swing hanging from the tree, a firepit around which were four Adirondack chairs. An explosion of color along the fence: roses, bougainvillea, jasmine, gardenia. When had she let the grass die?
Rye limped over to the firepit area and sat in one of the chairs. Frankie sat across from him.
“Tell me the truth,” she said.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. She was grateful for that, at least. “I married Missy two months before I shipped out on my first tour. She—”
“Wait. Missy?”
“Melissa. I call her Missy.”
I know who you are, missy, Rye’s father had said to her, all those years ago. He’d thought she was his son’s wife. “Go on.”
“I was young, stupid. I wanted someone back home, waiting for me. And she was pregnant.”
“So it was all an elaborate ruse, the engagement you supposedly broke off. You swore you weren’t engaged. Swore it.”