The line landed in his chest like a hand laid gently on his shoulder.
“Thank you,” Darius said quietly.
She walked to the door. He watched her go. He didn’t know why he was watching her. He was a man with three pizzas on order and a family settling into a house at the end of Bay View Drive.But he watched her anyway. The door swung closed behind her with a small bell-tinkle.
Darius turned back toward the counter.
A small dark sedan rolled past the front window. He glanced up. He saw her, profile turned away from him, hair lifted slightly by the open window. She didn’t see him. The car turned at the corner and disappeared.
Darius stood for a moment with the warm yellow light of the pizza place around him and the smell of yeast and tomato in the air, and he didn’t know what had just happened to him. The woman had looked familiar in some way he couldn’t place. The smile she had given him at the door had done something to him he hadn’t been prepared for. The welcome she had offered, simple and warm and freely given, had landed somewhere inside him that he hadn’t known was waiting for it.
Darius gave himself a mental shake. He’d been driving for hours. He was tired. He was a man with two properties to acquire, a sister to settle and a great-niece to mind. He was not a man who noticed women in pizza places.
The old man called him forward. Darius collected the warm boxes and the small slice of plain cheese in its own little paper plate, paid the bill, and thanked Mr. Carlucci warmly. The old man wished him a pleasant evening and told him to come back soon.
Darius walked out into the soft blue-gold evening with the stack of pizza boxes warming his arm.
The streetlights had begun to come on along Shell Street. The warm air had the bay smell he remembered from when he was a boy. Somewhere a dog barked in the distance, and somewhereelse a screen door slammed cheerfully. The day was settling into evening, and the small community at the edge of Sanibel Island seemed to wrap itself around him in a welcoming embrace that almost felt like he’d just returned home from years of absence.
He stood for a moment beside the SUV, the boxes warm against his arm, and let himself feel the strange, small disquiet that had settled in him in the last twenty minutes.
Linda flashed into his mind. He didn’t know who she was. But the smile she had given him at the door had done something to him.
And the welcome she’d offered, “welcome to Sweet Blossom Bay for the summer,” she had said, had made him feel like he’d just been accepted here.
He shook his head at himself. Darius couldn’t believe how fanciful he was being. He took a deep breath in. Boy, he really did need some time off.
Darius opened the back door of the SUV, set the pizzas carefully on the seat, and climbed in behind the wheel.
He turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb. He drove slowly back along Bay View Drive in the soft blue-gold dusk, with the gulf darkening to indigo on his right and the lights of Hearts Hotel coming on softly in the distance ahead of him. The pizzas warmed the seat behind him. The bay smell came in through the open window. The first stars were beginning to show above the water.
Darius gripped the wheel a little tighter than he needed to.
He had the small, undeniable, unfamiliar feeling that this was going to be a summer to remember. He didn’t yet know how much he was going to mean that.
LINDA
Linda walked back into the hospital with a paper cup of cafeteria tea in her hand and a heaviness in her shoulders that had nothing to do with the day’s driving. The kids were settled at Heart House. Rosa had them at the kitchen table, with the pizza box between them, and Buddy, Uncle George’s golden retriever, under Jake’s chair, his head on the boy’s foot. Linda had kissed them goodbye and stood for a moment on the porch listening to their carefree chatter before she made herself walk back to the car.
Now she was here again. The corridor was hushed and dim, the lights lower for the evening shift. She made her way to the recovery wing, found the door to Uncle George’s private room, and stopped in the doorway.
He was asleep.
His face was soft in sleep. The lines of his jaw eased, and his white hair feathered against the pillow. The cast on his hip and leg was propped up on a soft cushion. The monitor beside the bed beeped quietly. The bedside lamp threw a warm yellowcircle across the bed and the night table, where someone had set a glass of water with a bent straw and a folded napkin.
Linda’s eyes filled with tears.
She crossed the room and laid her hand over his on the white blanket. His fingers stirred faintly. He didn’t wake.
“I’m here, Uncle George,” she whispered. “I can’t believe you did what you did while on your own. What were you thinking?” She sucked in a shaky breath. “If it wasn’t for Rosa, who knows how long you could’ve been there in pain.” She shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.” She straightened the hair on his forehead. “But I’m here now and I’m going to ensure you are well taken care of while you recover.”
She stayed bent over the bed for a long moment, then straightened and lowered herself into the visitor’s chair. The day pressed down on her all at once. She set the tea on the night table, pressed her fingertips into her closed eyes, and let out a long breath she hadn’t fully exhaled since six o’clock that morning.
A small image flickered through her mind. The man at the pizza place who had opened the door for her. He had seemed very familiar to her, and she was still trying to place where she’d seen him before. Linda had also not been able to get him out of her mind for some reason. When his eyes had met hers, a strange sensation tickled her stomach, and her heart had lurched.
She set the thought aside. Linda had a lot on her plate already, with a wounded uncle, two grandchildren for the summer, a job to find, a new place to live, and a hotel that had clearly been hiding something. There wasn’t room for anything else tonight,much less for her to have weird butterfly stomach flutters every time she thought of that tall, handsome man with his easy smile and friendly demeanor.
Linda pushed the thoughts of the newcomer to town from her mind and let her mind wander to the practically empty parking lot at Hearts Hotel, which sat in her chest as she opened her eyes again. Seven cars. She counted a total of seven cars in the hotel’s parking lot on the first weekend of June. That parking was usually full at this time of year
