Windblown and salty from the boat ride, Ruth walked back to Shell Haven buzzing from Tito’s very flattering attention. Although once she was back on dry land, she’d started second-guessing her impulse to invite him to dinner. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but really, was she moving too fast? Did she want to start dating someone in town? Did she want to date, period?
She stopped by the post office to pick up some packages—ingredients for new products she wanted to make—and this further distracted her, so by the time she walked into the house, she’d all but forgotten about the arrival of her ex-husband.
“Ruth,” Ben said, jumping up from the couch. She didn’t know if she was seeing things through the distorted lens of her own memory, but he looked unchanged—as if it were that first summer in Provincetown all over again. Yes, the hair was silver, but it was still all there. Yes, there were the creases in his face, but it was still handsome in a distinctly boyish way. And of course, the same hazel eyes smiled at her.
“Hi, Ben,” she said as he leaned in and kissed her lightly on the cheek. The contact gave her a small shock, a frisson. A feeling she didn’t quite recognize.
Ruth took a step back. It was not their typical protocol to kiss or hug when they saw each other. Had he felt compelled to do it because he was staying under her roof?
Don’t freak out, she told herself. She felt off balance because of the unusual circumstances—seeing him here, in this town. Context was everything. Plus, she’d just spent hours on a romantic boat ride. Also—and this was a biggie—the town had been needling her with nostalgia for weeks now. Whatever she’d felt a few seconds ago was not real. “How was your trip in?”
“Great,” he said. “I drove to Boston and then took the ferry.”
It was unsettling to look into his hazel eyes, familiar and utterly strange at the same time. They fell into silence, and Ruth struggled to fill it. “Is Olivia here or…”
“She’s in her room changing her clothes,” he said. “We’re going for a walk and then an early dinner.”
“Sounds great. Well, I’m just going to…” She pointed awkwardly at the stairs. As she walked away he said, “Ruth, thanks for having me here. At the house, I mean.”
She turned around and forced herself to smile. “No problem.”
Lowering his voice, Ben said, “I’ve been concerned about Olivia and this made the trip a lot easier.”
“Concerned about her?”
“She just sounded bad on the phone. Losing the job was a blow, and I imagine it’s complicated for her emotionally to be spending time with you.”
Ruth crossed her arms. “It’s not complicated. I’m her mother. The fact that we’re spending time together is a positive thing, not something you have to rescue her from.”
The door to Olivia’s bedroom clicked open, announcing her appearance. She seemed surprised to see Ruth—or perhaps just surprised to see Ruth talking to Ben. “Oh, hey, Mother. I didn’t realize you were home.”
“I just got here. Dad tells me you two are on your way to dinner.”
“Yeah,” Olivia said, glancing at Ben.
“You’re welcome to join us,” Ben said.
She hesitated, certain he was just being polite but at the same time wanting to pretend the invitation was genuine, that the three of them could go out and have a friendly meal together. Or maybe, on some level, she wanted to continue the conversation with Ben. About parenting. About life. About everything that had been left unsaid during that phone call a year and a half ago.
“Oh, no, no. You two have fun,” Ruth said, waving them off.
She walked quickly to the stairs, forcing herself not to look back, not to say another word. She told herself the only way to get through the next few days was to just be casual.
But she didn’t feel casual. The day had started with a boat ride with a new man and ended with her face to face with her ex-husband. And she couldn’t deny that she felt a stronger pull toward her past than her present.
After processing the weirdness of seeing her parents together, Olivia needed a drink. Specifically, she needed the frozen rosé served at the Canteen’s waterfront bar. Her father, more interested in food, ordered lobster rolls.
They sat opposite each other at the end of one of the communal tables. The sun was still strong and Ben angled the table’s striped umbrella so the light wasn’t directly in their faces. “This is a great place,” he said.
Olivia put the small placard with their order number in front of her so the waiter would be able to locate them when their lobster rolls were ready. “I love it. I eat here all the time. It’s like my cafeteria,” she said. “Sometimes the house gets a little crowded.”
“So who are those other people again?”
“Elise and Fern own the house. They rented to Mom but then they moved back in because of the baby.”
“So she’s renting a house, but the owners had a baby and then changed their mind about renting it out? I don’t understand. Why didn’t your mother just find a new house?”
“No, it’s…first of all, I don’t think it’s easy to find available places. Look at the trouble you had just looking for a hotel room. And the baby was unexpected.”
“How ‘unexpected’ can a baby be?”
Olivia looked at him. “If I tell you something, don’t repeat it to anyone. Promise?”
“Who would I repeat it to? I don’t know anyone in town aside from you and your mother.”
“Okay, well—it’s not their baby. She just appeared on the doorstep. She was abandoned.”
Her father looked at her incredulously. “Abandoned?”
Olivia nodded.
“Was this reported? I mean, that’s a serious thing.”
“I think Elise and Fern are trying to adopt her. I don’t know—they clearly love the baby. I guess it takes time.”
“This seems like an unusual living situation for your mother.”
“I’ll never understand her,” Olivia said.
“She’s an interesting woman.”
They shared a smile of comradery.
“I’m really glad you came, Dad,” Olivia said. “So, what do you think of the town? Is it what you expected?”
“Expected? I’ve been to Provincetown before.”
She looked at him in surprise. “When?”
“The summer before my sophomore year at Penn.”
“How did I not know this? What made you come all the way out here?”
Her father hesitated, turning his bottle of Whale’s Tale Pale Ale. “I won a spot at the Fine Arts Work Center for my playwriting.”
“You wrote plays? You never told me that.” She wondered, seeing the sheepish expression on his face, what else she didn’t know about her father.
“It was a very long time ago.”
“Yeah, but when I said I was coming out here, you never thought to say, Oh, by the way, I spent a summer there as a playwright?”
He shook his head. “Your trip out here isn’t about me,” he said.
Olivia hated that kind of double talk, and it wasn’t something she was used to from him. “Wait a minute,” she said, something suddenly dawning on her. The realization was like a weird dream intruding on rational thought. “That day at your house—when I told you Mom had moved out here—I asked you if you had any idea why she’d choose this place. I told you it seemed very random. And you never said anything about it.”
Her father took a swig of his beer. “Your mother was out here that summer too. It’s where we met.”
Olivia felt like someone had pulled the bench out from under her. On the surface, there was nothing nefarious about this, nothing odd about it aside from the fact that she’d never heard it before. But somehow, it felt like her father had colluded with her mother in keeping this origin story from her. It was irrational to feel this way—she knew that. But she couldn’t help it.
“You said you met at the beach.”
“We did.”
“I thought you meant at the Jersey Shore,” she said.
He shook his head no.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this place?”
“Why would I talk about it, Olivia?”
“I don’t know!” Olivia said, certain there was some reason he should have.
Her father looked out at the water, then back at her. “Olivia, why are you making a big deal out of this?”
“I’m not. I just don’t understand how we all ended up out here this summer and somehow I had no idea that you two have a whole history here.”
“Two lobster rolls?” a waiter called out. Olivia held up their number and waved at him.
They ate in silence. The song “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” by Wham, played loudly on the sound system, infusing the moment with a bouncy cheer that she did not at all feel.
A group of young people, probably college age, took over the rest of the space at their picnic table. Every one of them held a colorful cocktail, and they were dressed in bathing suits. The women had wet hair. The air filled with a rapid-fire conversation Olivia couldn’t quite make out over the music, and it was punctuated with a lot of laughter. Listening to them, stealing glances, Olivia thought that her parents had been around that age when they met. Who had she been dating in her early college years? Certainly no one significant. The idea of a relationship beginning when you were that young and lasting a lifetime was unthinkable. Yes, some couples made it work. But she could barely sustain something now, at thirty. Maybe it had been inevitable that her parents would split up. Maybe if they’d met later in life, they would have had more staying power. Or maybe, if they’d met at a different time, they would have known better than to get married in the first place.
What difference did it make that her parents had met right here, in Provincetown? Why did she care? She wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because, for as long as she could remember, she’d simply thought of her parents’ relationship in terms of its failure. She was detached from it. Why should it matter how it began? Now she was faced with this new information about where her parents had met and fallen in love. She was walking the same streets, gazing out at the same water. It made it difficult to keep their marriage and divorce in a neat little emotional box. The idea of them as a couple suddenly had a new dimension, and it made her feel the loss all over again.
Or maybe she was letting herself feel the loss for the first time.
“Well, that’s ancient history, right?” she said.
“Of course it is,” her father said. “Let’s just have a good few days and I’ll get you back to the city.”
Olivia nodded. That was the plan.