The coffee starts to descend in a sputtering fit. I turn toward Bella. Her hair is down and tangled around her, and she’s wearing a white lace nightgown with a long terrycloth bathrobe, opened, over it.
“You came there?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah. You guys had it until we were like fourteen.”
I shake my head. “We got rid of it after Michael—,” I say. Still, all these years later, I can’t bring myself to use the word.
“No, you didn’t,” she says. “You kept it for like four more summers. The place in Margate. The one with the blue awning?”
I take the pot out. It hisses in anger—it’s not time—and I pour her half a cup, setting it down on the counter in front of her. “That wasn’t ours.”
“No, it was,” Bella says. “It was on the ocean block. That little white house with the blue awning. The blue awning!”
“There was no awning,” I say. I go to the refrigerator and take out almond milk and hazelnut Coffee Mate. Bella remembered and picked it up for me.
“Yes there was,” she says. “It was two blocks from the Wawa, and you guys kept bikes down there and we’d lock them up at the condos with the blue awnings!”
I hand her the almond milk. She shakes and pours.
“There was a dead seagull on the beach today,” I say.
“Gross. Rotting carcass? Snapped spine into bone-popping shreds? Fly-eaten eyes pecked down to hollow sockets?”
“Stop.” I slide her my phone, and she looks.
“I’ve seen worse.”
“You know they fall out of the sky when they die?” I say.
“Yeah? What else would you expect them to do?”
The coffee machine downshifts into maintenance, and I pour myself a full cup, adding a hefty portion of creamer.
I go to sit next to Bella at the counter.
“Doesn’t look like a beach day,” she says. She swivels on her stool and looks outside.
“It’ll burn off.”
She shrugs, takes a sip, makes a face.
“I don’t know how you drink that almond water,” I say. “Why suffer? Do you know how good this is?” I hold my cup out to her.
“It’s milk,” she says.
“It’s really not.”
“It’s me,” she says. “I’ve just been feeling funky all week.”
“Are you sick?”
She swallows. I feel something catch in my throat.
“I’m pregnant,” she says. “I mean, I’m pretty sure.”
I look at her. Her whole face is shining. It’s like staring at thesun.
“You think or you know?”
