Page 46 of Beachfront Pages

And there it was.

"What about him?"

"That's what I'm asking you." Sally fitted a box of saltines into a gap and stepped back to judge it. "How is it, having him around again? After all this time."

"It's fine."

"Mm."

"It is. It's fine."

"You said fine twice." Sally turned around, a sleeve of crackers still in her hand. "You only ever say fine twice when it isn't."

Winnie reached for another can. The soup, again. She turned the label out, squared it against its neighbor, and took longer to do it than the job deserved.

"He had soup with me the other night," she said.

Sally's eyebrows went up. "Did he?"

"It was soup, Sally. From a pot. Nothing more than that." Winnie heard her own voice climb and reined it in. "He'd been out at the lighthouse with Melissa, taking his pictures. It was late. I had supper on. That's the whole of it."

"Uh-huh."

"It was nothing."

"You keep telling me what it wasn't." Sally went back to her crackers, but gentler now, the way she handled things she didn't want to break. "I'm still waiting to hear what it was."

Winnie didn't answer right away. The fan ticked. A truck went by out on the road and rattled the front glass. The light shifted on the floorboards. She stood there with a can of chicken and rice in her hand and tried to find the way to say it.

"It's harder than I thought it would be," she finally admitted.

There. Out loud, in the open, where she couldn't take it back.

"Oh, honey." Sally set the crackers down for good. "Of course it is. After all this time. All that heartache."

"No." The word came out fast. "That's the thing of it. It isn't the old hurt." She shook her head. "I went looking for it. You understand? I sat across my own table from him and went hunting for the part of me that still holds on to the heartache. And it wasn't that."

"Then what is it?"

"It's the hope."

Sally went still.

"I buried that so deep." Winnie's thumb found the sea glass bracelet, the wire warm from her own skin. "I don't know how deep. You bury a thing, and it stays buried, because that's what burying is for."

"And?"

"And then he sat there eating my soup, asking about the second buoy like it was yesterday. And the hope came up out of the ground like it had never been gone." She made a small helpless gesture. "Forty-five years, Sally. It just came up."

"Things do," Sally said.

"He remembered the buoy. Do you understand what I'm telling you? A man with a grandson and a whole life behind him, and he remembered which buoy we rowed past to test the light." Winnie set the can down. "He shouldn't remember that. I'd have forgiven him for forgetting that."

"But he didn't."

"No, he didn't. And that's… It's foolish."

"Now there's a word nobody should use on you."