Marisol shook her head. “Friday was enough for me. I can’t even imagine Sunday.” She looked at her husband. “When are you going back?”
Eric tilted his head back and forth as if he were trying to calculate a tip. “Tuesday? Maybe Tuesday. I’ll have to check and see.”
Marisol nodded and pulled the style section out of the paper. “Well, I get an extra day. I came out a day later than you did.”
Jonas arrived in the kitchen wearing green swim trunks and a T-shirt. “Can I just have coffee for now?” he said, squinting against the morning light. “I’m going for a swim.”
Franny had so much to say, but in that exact moment she was distracted by the writer’s swim trunks, stunned by them. “Where did you get swim trunks?”
Jonas looked down at himself. “These? I don’t remember. REI?” In the T-shirt, in the bright light, he looked no more than twenty.
“They’re yours? You brought them here?”
They were all looking at her now.
“I brought them here,” he said. He plucked at the fabric with two fingers. “Are they okay?”
“You brought extra clothes?”
He caught her line of questioning and came back at his hostess with an ill-prepared defense. “I get carsick. And I don’t like to ride in cars at night. Astrid said it was a big house.”
Franny had been at the market when they arrived. She hadn’t seen him come in with a suitcase. She would need to wash the sheets in his bedroom unless he wasn’t planning to leave. The phone started to ring and Jonas, in a gesture of independence, poured his own coffee and went out the back door.
“I want to talk to my father,” the voice on the phone said.
“Ariel?”
There was no answer, because the answer would be that Leo had three children and two of them were boys and only the girl was speaking to him these days, so if a woman called asking for her father, then, yes, it was going to be Ariel.
“Hold on a minute,” Franny said. “He’s out in the back. I’ll have to get him.”
Eric gave her a look to inquire as to the nature of Ariel’s call but Franny ignored him. She crossed through the wet grass, beneath the cherry trees and past the pool where Jonas was already lying shirtless on the diving board, the cup of coffee beside his head. When she got to the cabin door she didn’t knock.
“Ariel’s on the phone,” she said.
Leo was stretched across the single bed with a volume of Chekhov in his hands. He looked up at Franny and smiled. “Would you tell her I’m working? Tell her I’ll call her back.”
“Not on your life,” Franny said.
“I can’t talk to her now.”
“Well, neither can I, so I suggest you go down to the kitchen and hang up the phone.”
She walked out of the cabin and to the back of the property. She knew where there was a break in the hedge and she took it: through the neighbor’s yard, down their driveway, and out onto the street, her flip-flops slapping against her feet. She wished she had her bicycle, a hat, some money, and at the same time she wished for nothing in the world but to be alone. Franny couldn’t help but believe that she had brought every discomfort she experienced down on herself. Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person. She could feel good about being kind without continually wondering if she were anything more than a nice-enough-looking waitress. She wished, as she approached thirty, that she had figured out how to be more than a muse, or, as her father had put it the last time she had seen him in Los Angeles, “Being a mistress isn’t a job.”
Her father hadn’t readCommonwealthbut her sister had.
“There’s nothing particularly libelous about it,” Caroline said to Franny. “He’s covered his tracks.”
“I’m grateful that you don’t review for theTimes.”
“I’ll put it another way: I didn’t enjoy it but I’m not going to sue him.”
“You’re hardly even in the book.”
Caroline laughed. “Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.”
“Well,” Franny said, “that would be one way to get us all together again.”
