Ray pulls off his backward hat. “I did.” He rubs his head, then slides it back on. “I got stuck in traffic somewhere in Delaware and followed a detour. Almost an hour passed before I realized I took a wrong turn and was heading back in this direction the whole time.” He sighs, long and heavy. “I thought about backtracking, but then I remembered that an old friend used to say the signs are always there in life if you pay attention.”
Overhead, the sky spits a light drizzle, but in the distance, the clouds are beginning to break.
“How’d you know I was here?” she asks.
“I saw Birdie’s Jeep.” He points to the parked vehicle. “Took a lucky guess.”
He scoots over on the bench.
“Thanks,” she says and accepts his invitation.
There’s space between them, yet their thighs brush, barely a touch. A tingling sensation vibrates through her body, like when they were young. A bolt of electricity every time their fingers touched. Even the softest, shortest-lived graze enough to steal her breath.
They stay silent like this for a few minutes as more people exit the theater. With grief, Grace has come to learn quiet often feels scary, something empty you long to fill back up. But not this. The quiet feels familiar. Full. It’s like settling back into a cherished memory.
“She ran into my mom at the lighthouse that morning,” Ray says, knowing it’s unnecessary for him to use names. “It was a total coincidence, the fact that either of them were on the island and standing in the same place at the same time.”
Grace doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t ask a question. She just listens and lets him talk.
“Naturally, my mother insisted they go for lunch.” He leans back against the wall. “She called me, said I had to stop by to say hi.” Ahead of them, a few cars coast smoothly up the boulevard. “I popped by at the end of their meal.” Ray takes his hat off again, sets it on his knee. “My mom was going to a store on the mainland that afternoon.” Herolls his eyes. “She kept insisting that she needed to buy me better sheets.” In the sky, one of the larger clouds drifts, giving way to a crack of sunlight. “I told your mom to come by the Dive later if she was free. She mentioned that, like my mom, she was only on the island for the day. I didn’t think she’d take me up on my offer. But she did.”
“And then what?” Grace asks, trying her best to fill in the gaps. “What did she talk about?”
“You,” he says. “The only thing she talked about the whole time was you.” Ray leans forward. “I made her a few Shirley Temples. She told me she was worried.” He presses his forearms against his thighs. “She said some things had been happening in your life that made her think you might need a place to land or—I don’t know—reset, maybe. Like she planned to book the house for the two of you for this week because she anticipated that you’d need to be down here for some reason.”
“Why did she tell you all this?” Grace asks, her question half directed at Ray and half at herself, even though she already senses the answer—hassensed it for a long time but tried to ignore it. Her mother dropped so many clues over the years, always nudging her daughter back to this place.
“I can’t say for sure, Grace,” Ray admits. “I only know she said it felt like a sign that she ran into my mother, and then me, while she was down here for the day. That she’d been thinking about my family—about old vacation memories—a lot in recent months.” He pauses, clears his throat. “And that, at some point this week while you were both down here together again, she hoped to bring you to my bar for a drink so that the two of us—me and you—could find a time to say hello.”
Grace softly exhales as recognition settles over her. Of course Birdie had orchestrated this trip. Not overtly, but in her own gentle way. Knowing that, in doing so, she’d nudge Grace back toward him.
While her mind processes all this, Grace’s thoughts drift back to February and the night of their last conversation, though neither of them knew that’s what it was at the time. Birdie called shortly beforebedtime while she watched one of her silly movies, just like always, to check in. Grace wasn’t having a great day. She’d sat at her desk all afternoon, staring at her computer screen, though it’d been like trying to squeeze water from a rock. Adam was working late in the city again. Earlier, she’d received a catalog in the mail from a children’s clothing company, page after page of other people’s infants dressed in ruffles and pastels.
“You know what I think we need, Cece?” Birdie said, sounding perfectly healthy and happy and like herself. “A trip to the beach. Just me and you. We’ll get crumb cake and clam strips and sit out in the fresh air and reset.”
“It’s February, Mom,” Grace pointed out through a quiet laugh. “There’s a half foot of snow outside right now.”
“I know it, my girl,” Birdie said, and even through the line it was easy for Grace to tell that her mother was smiling. “But let’s both promise to dream about it tonight anyway.”
Now, back on the bench outside the cinema, Ray continues with his story.
“Anyway,” he goes on, “she told me that after she left my place, she planned to go to the rental agency and book the house for this year during your birthday week. She said she wanted to surprise you. That it was a gift. That some voice inside her kept telling her that you’d need it.”
Grace thinks of the lease agreement from Caleb, currently sitting on the coffee table. The one on which Birdie wrote out her daughter’s maiden name. Like maybe she knew which way things were going. Or like maybe she hoped it’d serve as a small way of reminding her of the person she used to be. That none of it—booking the house, getting Grace back on the island—was about pastries or fried seafood. It was an instruction manual. A map.
“She said the past few years you’d been working so hard to try and be everything,” Ray continues. “A writer. A mother. A wife.” Slowly—hesitantly—his hand drifts an inch. His pinkie toucheshers, followed by the rest of his fingers, then his whole hand. “She was worried you’d become so busy trying to hold everything together, striving for the person you thought you were supposed to be, that you’d started to forget how to just be yourself.”
Grace blinks away the tears. “She always saw me for who I really was,” she says, thinking of all the moving boxes back at home, the ones filled with reminders of all her phases and desires, milestones and ill decisions—every piece of it, according to Birdie, worth preserving. “Not just in a moment. Not just one version. But all of it. Every part of me.” She lifts her free hand, wipes her eye, then tilts her face toward him, this man who, through the years, always loved and accepted her at every stage. Whichever version of her showed up on the island each August, she was enough. “Just like you.”
Ray squeezes her fingers. Together, they sit this way, hands locked together, the sound of waves in the distance, breathing in the salt air, just like at so many other points in time.
“I’d better get going,” Ray says at last, the goodbye just one more part of their tradition. He rubs his thumb over her pointer finger, letting his touch linger, neither of them ready to let go just yet. “I haven’t even told my folks I’m back yet.”
Grace nods. It’s time for her to move on as well. To go back to the beach house and pack up her things before her check-out time in the morning. To call Adam and tell him the news and then try to figure out what it means for them. To finally email Mollie back and ask her to meet in the city next week and explain the real story—that sometimes, even when you try, even when you want something so badly, the only way forward is to walk away.
“Me too,” she says. “Today’s my last full day here.”
Somewhere in the distance, the melody from an ice cream truck fills the air.
