“Oh, yeah. Sure, I guess.” He shrugs. “It was going to happen, though, wasn’t it? I mean, at some point.”
W, thinks Nicola. T. F. She opens her mouth, wondering what words will come out of it, but she’s too stunned to think of any, so she closes it again.
They take West Side Road, and they pass the turnoff to the homes Buchanan Enterprises is building, and Nicola wonders about the man she saw Taylor with—where he is, what happened. Jack turns too fast off the main road and onto the dirt road that leadstoward the cove. There’s a yellow Jeep coming out, and the driver, a woman with curly dark hair, glares at them. There’s a teenage girl in the passenger seat and she glares at them too.
“Slow down, Jack,” says Nicola. She thinks of one of her first drives with him, earlier in the summer. It takes two to make an accident, he’d said. That wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. It takes exactly one to make an accident.
There comes a point where you can’t drive down the road any farther, so Jack pulls over to the side and parks and they walk down the dirt path that leads to the beach. Jack bounces on his toes, takes Nicola’s hand, and swings both of their hands between them, so at home in that athletic, jaunty body of his. She pulls away.
The beach is deserted; the log is available. Just after they settle themselves a family comes flying down the path: parents, three kids in varying stages of tweenhood. Nicola starts to move over closer to Jack, thinking they can make room for the new additions, and then she sees that Jack is doing the opposite, sliding away from Nicola. Marking his territory. She rolls her eyes.
A big rock rises out of the water like a humpback whale. One of the tweens has gone into the water and is shouting for the others to join. To the left of them the beach is covered with small rocks, and just ahead the sand is smooth. The sun moves down and down and the sky becomes bruised by reds and purples, with tangerine streaks at the highest point, where there is a little blue left.
Nicola takes a deep breath, readies herself. Now is the time.
But before she can speak: “I’m leaving soon,” Jack says, casually as you please.
Nicola starts. “For good?”
“Week, week and a half. Not sure yet. The Achilles is healed. Heading out to Illinois for the BMW Championship. Your neck of the woods!”
“Illinois doesn’t border Minnesota,” Nicola says shortly. He doesn’t even know where she’s from.
“Close enough.” He flicks his fingers at the log, maybe at a bug. “But I’ll be busy wrapping things up before I go. So I guess this is adios, then.”
Nicola stares at the bruise of a sky. She won’t meet his eyes. She suddenly feels very busy, busy with the humiliation of almost breaking up with someone she’d never been dating, of almost telling someone off who doesn’t care.
And just like that, it’s dark. It happens so fast, every damn day, and yet it’s always a bit of a surprise. The moon is suddenly visible, as though it has just bustled over from stage left and found its mark.
“Okay,” she says finally. The unconcern she fakes is the greatest acting she’s ever done—she, who had one role in one middle school play and then gave it all up for soccer. There was the cousin production ofThe Sound of Music,of course.
There’s a smile in Jack’s voice when he says, “Are you going to miss me?”
“No,” she says, wanting to hurt him, even though hurting him seems sort of like trying to hurt a pillow. “It’s not like I’m staying here forever.”
“Liar,” he says, taking her hand. “Tell the truth, now. Are you going to miss me?”
“No,” she says again, pulling her hand away.
“I don’t believe you,” he says. Nicola refuses to look at him but she can tell by his voice that he’s still smiling. He’s always smiling! “You know,” he said, “you got me, Nicky. You got me right here.” He makes a fist with his right hand and taps his heart twice.
Bullshit, is what she wants to say. But she doesn’t say anything. That’s when she realizes something about Jack. He’s not intentionally cruel, or even truly unkind; both of those characteristics require an element of purpose, and she sees now that, save the effort and thought he must put into his golf game, nothing about Jack is purposeful. That’s where they’re opposites. Nicola is all purpose. Jack isbobbing along, a stick caught in a river’s current. He’ll probably bob along forever like that.
“But you know, if we ever find ourselves in the same place again...?”
“Yeah, then what?” She tries to sound carefree but she knows it has come out snarky.
“Then maybe we can... reconnect. You know?” A euphemism if Nicola has ever heard one.
She lets a long, long time go by before she says, “Maybe.”
She’s quiet on the way home.
“You mad?” asks Jack once.
“No,” Nicola snarls. “What would I be mad about?”
Jack says, “Whoa, okay.”
