“Over by the glade. But I’m closer to the university now.”
“You’re by one of my favorite bars.”
“Dante’s,” we said at the same time.
“My friends just played the venue,” he said. “Last Saturday. The Lily Pads?”
I shrugged. Hadn’t heard of them.
“They’ve got a great sound. Folksy, but you can still dance to it. You should really go see them next time they’re in town. We could go together.”
I glanced at the housewife. She smiled knowingly as she smeared sunscreen over the face of one of her squirming children. She was wearing a modest one-piece that started at her clavicle and ended a few inches above her knees. I could imagine that she was thinking she had been my age not that long ago.
“Maybe,” I said, not wanting to hurt his feelings but not wanting to get his hopes up either.
“I could drop you at home after we wrestle this thing into the trunk,” he offered. “Or you’re welcome to come sailing with me and my friends once I find them.”
“Why can’t your parents help you?”
“My father just had surgery on his back. My mother”—he brought a finger to his lips and lowered his voice, like what he was about to say wasn’t nice—“she’s not a very fit woman.”
“I see,” I said in a clipped voice. “So you sought out the fittest-looking woman on the beach.”
“I suppose I sought out the cleverest,” he replied suavely. There was something aristocratic about the way he spoke, about his slight build and his starched white shorts. I wanted to tell the high school girls that men were not normally this well-mannered when they bothered you, that in fact this one struck me as so odd that I couldn’t picture him with a girlfriend, or even with the group of friends who were supposed to meet him here. I felt bad for him all of a sudden. I wondered if his friends had stood him up. He seemed like that guy in the group, the tagalong.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
His eyes crinkled as he told me. “What’s yours?”
“Ruth.”
“Ruth.” The man extended his good arm. He gave my hand one firm tug, held sustained eye contact.
I pointed. “How’d you do that to your arm?”
“Racquetball.”
I laughed at him. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know anyone who wore white shorts like that, who played tennis, sure, but racquetball? For a moment, I wondered if it was all an act. This was the kind of pretense I thought existed only on the East Coast.
He bowed his head, appropriately cowed. “I learned so that I could play with my boss. Guess I wasn’t very good.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer. Well, I’m studying to be. I’ve got two years to go. I’m a summer associate at a law firm downtown right now.”
“What law firm?”
“Baskins-Cole?”
“Oh yeah. I think I saw an ad for them in the paper before.”
“We’re mostly corporate law.” He shrugged as though this might explain, if I hadn’t heard of them.
I brushed the grass back and forth with the palm of my hand, staring out at the sun dimpling the skin on the lake. The housewife was now moderating an argument between two of her children over who got the last Popsicle stick.
“I was supposed to meet my friends right here,” the man said a bit sadly, “by the picnic tables at Sunset Beach.” He looked around once more, in case they’d shown up while we were talking. “Probably they just ditched me.” He laughed, but he didn’t seem to be joking. I felt a pang for him. He was the effeminate type, a guy who probably had a hard time making male friends. My brother would have made high school horrible for him. CJ too. I thought of the traveling businessman who came into my father’s bar all those years ago, far from home and just looking for a few minutes of conversation.
“You better introduce me to your parents,” I said, standing and tugging the navy dress down over my damp bathing suit. There was still something about him that irked me, and I didn’t want to be too nice to him in case I gave him the wrong idea. I wanted him to understand I was coming along because he needed my help and because he seemed a little rejected, because that Sunday there had been a galactic explosion of sunlight and freedom, because life has a way of staggering its mileposts, and I was certain I had a ways to go until I got to the next one.
* * *
I admitted to myself that something was wrong with him in the car, but through some lethal interaction between denial and decorum, I kept the conversation going at a sparkling cadence.