10

On Monday, after I’ve organized Frannie’s books, I head straight to the Beechwood Inn to get the single kayak from the boathouse. It was Linda’s idea that I start kayaking regularly after Pete left. When I came back from my first ride alone in a canoe with my kids, she told me it was time to build myself back up.

The five of us used to take a canoe out on Sundays, and Pete and I would paddle us around the tip of Beechwood Point. Greer would yell, “Faster!” and we would get going pretty fast. The first time we did this after Pete moved out, I could feel their collective disappointment that it was just me paddling. They yelled, “Faster!” until my muscles ached and I had to admit that that was the best I could do. Since then, I’ve been taking out a single kayak whenever I have the chance, and I haven’t been this strong since high school. It’s funny, what you’ll do for your kids but not for yourself.

Linda taught me the basics of technique—the difference between working to the point of exhaustion and doing it right so that it’s effortless. I used to wonder if that was the difference between my difficult marriage and Frannie’s easier one—maybe I was doing it wrong. Like maybe I could have altered my technique and things would have felt right. I certainly should have known how to paddle a canoe because I’ve been out on the water my whole life. My mother used to take me out on Sunday afternoons, and I’d sit in the front and enjoy the view while she paddled behind me. It was fun and it was easy, being carried along by my mother. But she did all the work, and I feel oddly unprepared for being thirty-eight.

This past year I’ve been on the water regularly unless it’s been dangerously windy or cold. In January, the cold air felt like shards of glass, and I liked moving through it and imagining that it made tiny cuts in my skin that pierced through the numbness.

Of course, July is more comfortable and easier to dress for. I launch the kayak into the sound and hop in wearing shorts and a tank top. There’s no breeze today, but I create one as I paddle faster and faster along the shore. I love the burn I feel in my abdomen and my back and the sound of the wake I’m leaving behind. My to-do list evaporates on the water and is replaced by a feeling—strong, forward moving, in full command. It’s a feeling that I remember from being younger and boundless, and it comes to me as I paddle, only to disappear when I’m back on dry land. I try to hold on to it the way you try to grab a dream at first light, but it’s gone the second I get into my dirty car.

Today, as I cut through the water, I am replaying Ethan’s and my urine-soaked meet cute at the dog park, the way he looked at me in the ballpark. I’m trying to hear him say something about my being the one, but I can’t remember the exact words. I’ve been falling asleep imagining myself leaning in to kiss him. And the kiss I imagine is one I’ve never had before, but it’s like him—easy and warm. The palms of my hands seem to know what his hair would feel like to touch.

I find it hard to believe that that guy is Scooter, famous for setting his basement on fire and self-diagnosed as unreliable. For a single mother of three, an unreliable man is as welcome as a lice infestation. But there was a time when it didn’t matter that a guy wasn’t your forever guy. There was a time when I could just dabble and try someone on for a while. What if I was the sort of person who could just go out with someone a few times and maybe run my fingers through his hair, just to know what it felt like, without worrying about how it would end? What if I was a person who could be easy about things for a bit? Such fun, my mother whispers over the waves. A summer romance.

I remember a summer romance that I had with Jimmy Craddock the summer after my sophomore year of college. I was home, working at the rec center camp, and I had two months before I’d be going back to Michigan. Jimmy was tan and a good kisser. For two months, that was plenty. There was no planning for the future, there was no trying to fix him. We could just enjoy it, because it was just for the summer.

I am so lost in this memory that I paddle a lot farther than I intended. I turn around and head back toward the inn, focusing on the widow’s walk, which is the only part that is visible above the tree line. The Hogans never let anyone on the widow’s walk, because when we were in high school, they caught wind of Frannie’s plans for an off-season kegger. They bolted the door to the old stairway permanently. I’ve always wanted to see what life would look like from up there. I imagine it has its own weather pattern, because the inn’s flag flaps in a breeze that I don’t feel down here. I try to conjure a widow as I pass, her hair wild in the wind, looking longingly out at the water.

I myself am a ball of unfocused longing. When I’m quiet I can hear my heart yearning for impossible things. I want a perfectly pared-down home, and I want to hang on to every scrap of the past. I want a break from my kids without missing a single minute of their lives. I long for a partnership, and I long for freedom. I long to be enmeshed with someone without losing myself. I want all of it. Maybe that’s the essence of a summer romance: it’s the impossible thing—a love affair with no reality check. I let this lighter, easy feeling roll over me as I paddle. Jimmy Craddock has been in and out of the penal system for years, but he really was very cute.

When I pull up to the dock at the inn, my body is spent in the best possible way.

“How was it?” Linda asks. She’s standing outside the locker with a clipboard and a zinc-oxide-covered nose.

“Great, but I may have gone too far.”

“You deserve it,” she says. My mother would have said the same thing.