It smells fantastic in that house, garlic and butter and wine, the holy culinary trinity, in Isabelle’s opinion. She’d eat that smell if she could. She can’t remember the last time someone cooked for her. Maybe Jessa, back in Seattle, who was the last in a long line of friends who drifted off after having a baby. The only thing Evan could make was Kraft macaroni and cheese from a box, though truthfully, Isabelle loves the stuff.
Henry wears a denim shirt, and his brown hair is ruffled and relaxed, and he hasn’t shaven, and Isabelle likes that look. He’s all Sunday morning, but wearing cologne or some clean-smelling soap.
“Can I take your purse?”
She hands it to him along with her sweater. He sets them on the couch right next to where he stands and gives an apologetic grin. “The former renter turned the coat closet into some strange storage unit with long hooks.”
“For guitars, maybe? He was a musician.”
“Guitars! Well, if you’d brought one of those, I could hang it up.”
Isabelle forgot what a view this place had. She used to come here to babysit the Greggory girls when she was in college and home for summer break. It’s still light out, and she can see the waters of the sound stretching to forever. The house is glass and more glass, and its wide deck extends out over the bluff. There’s a trail, too, which hugs the hill, but you can’t see it from there. It’s all coming back, though—how exposed you could feel with all those windows, in spite of how secluded the house is.
“That view,” she says.
“Right?”
“Everything looks so great. I can’t believe you’re all unpacked already.”
“Oh, I barely had anything to do. Put my clothes in a drawer. Plugged in my laptop. The house came furnished. Previous tenant left all this, apparently. Can you imagine?”
“I think he was a musician-slash-dot-com guy. Lots of money. He painted the porch black and Remy kicked him out, and so he just left.”
“Does everyone know everything here?” He grimaces, but he’s joking.
“Island? Small?” She laughs. “So, tell me. You just popped a few clothes in a bag and took off? That sounds amazing.”
“Well, I got rid of a lot before I moved, and then I stuck the rest in storage. Why drag your old life behind you?”
“Ah. I envy that. Just picking up and going. It sounds heavenly.” Isabelle’s old stuff and her mother’s old stuff live together like spinsters. Most of her former life is now jammed into her mother’s garage. She wishes she could be free of all of it. Imagine how weightless you’d feel, ditching refrigerators and old outfits, small appliances and Christmas decorations. Things, she suddenly realizes, that have all been merely of use, or else burdened with false sentimentality. “You’ll be returning, though? Sabbatical, you said.”
“Well, sabbatical loosely used. I quit.”
“Oh, wow. Were you tenured?”
“Tenured, unhappy…So, why stay, right? Life is short.”
“Bold move.”
“Bold moves are necessary sometimes, don’t you think? I’m sure you get a lot of that—people starting a new life in a place like this? People flying in with a bag and a credit card…”
“Not really. We get families with multiple suitcases and guys with romantic intentions who forget their wallets.”
“Are you a pilot, too?”
“I’m not, but my mother was. It’s funny—I’ve been around the planes all my life, but I never really got to the point in my thinking where I understood they’d be mine one day.”
“Lucky you.”
“I guess so. The jury is still out. I may need my own bold move.”
“Wait. I have wine,” he says.
In spite of the black porch incident and the guitar coat closet, the musician had done great things with the house. His furniture looks beautiful. Remy’s floors are aged oak, and there’s a white rug and a black leather couch in a stylish, comfortable L. It’s sparse and contemporary, more mature than she’d expect from the guy, with his ripped jeans and retro Nirvana T-shirts.
Henry North hands her a glass of red wine. Music is playing at a tender volume, and the singer has the sort of raspy, moody voice that makes Isabelle feel as if she’s unfurling, like a fern in a thicket of moss. Well, it’s the wine now, too. Henry’s eyes are a little sad, yet he’s confident, and it’s the lethal combination. Why is that? Just one without the other would be too much of the thing, but like this—protector, needing protection—it entices. Kinda like Evan? her mother pipes in. Isabelle shuts her up with another sip of cabernet.
“It’s a little warm in here.” Henry slides open one of the large glass doors. She hopes he doesn’t go out on that deck, though. It looks like you could step right through the rot in some places, plunge to your death, or at least break an ankle.
“It smells amazing. What are you making?”
He sits beside her. The life-is-good, deep-water smell of the ocean wafts in and takes a spin with the garlic and butter. “Mesclun salad with burst tomatoes? Lobster capellini with leek sauce?”
“Oh, my God, really? I may just give you the car.”
“The car! I forgot all about it.”
“I drove it over, so you can see it and decide.”
“Wonderful.”
He rises again to bring them a cheese-and-charcuterie plate. The meats are laid out like a mosaic, and the wine loosens everything, and the sun begins to set, turning the sky gold and then pink. Isabelle has barely cooked for herself since she’s been back. The time spent on feeding her—it shows a kind of care, she thinks, a care she’s unfamiliar with.
“I think I may be in shock,” she says, gazing at the plate. “I was married before, briefly, and my former husband…He could throw together a tuna sandwich on a good day.”
“I’m glad this is a new experience. Wait. Something else I forgot.” Henry lifts his glass to hers. They clink a toast. “To us,” he says.
He has a great sense of humor. It almost surprises her, because he’s a little reserved. Maybe it’s the wine, but they laugh to the point of doubling over at his story about the first time he tried to ski. She confesses her general lack of athletic ability, bravely shares the incident with the hockey stick during high school PE. He tells her about his brothers and lacrosse; she tells him about her mother chasing her father down the street with a golf club. He laughs so hard that he slaps the table in hilarity, causing the silverware to jump and the lit candles to flicker. It’s an unexpected gesture, a regular-guy thing, and she likes him more because of it.
Isabelle knows this is a funny story. She uses it at parties and changes the details for effect (a nine iron, a rainstorm), and hauls it out during first meetings like this, because it’s old and reliable, but also because it says something about her. Something important, if anyone notices.
It’s not just a funny story for Isabelle, of course. She remembers the door slamming and the windows rattling, and her mother yelling, although she doesn’t recall exactly what was yelled. She remembers being afraid. Very afraid. She was scared that the golf club might do the same thing to her father’s head that Justin Frankle’s baseball bat did to their jack-o’-lantern the day after Halloween. Those slick pieces of pumpkin skidded across the asphalt of their cul-de-sac and splatted against the curb, and right then, her father gripped the sides of his own skull as he ran, in a feeble effort at protection. As soon as her parents’ fight began that day, Isabelle fled to her room. But when she heard the garage door slam and the screaming outside, she peeked through her venetian blinds. At the sight of the raised golf club, she actually hid in her closet and sat on the toy box and plugged her ears. She rocked and tried to name the fifty states. A few months later, her father moved to Florida. He’d finally had enough, because, of course, if a person threatens with a golf club, it isn’t their first time being threatening. She didn’t see her father much after he left. He fled. And then he died when she was in college.
Henry senses the layers, it seems, because he quiets. He stands then, and squeezes her shoulder and says, “How about dessert?”
It’s another good sign, this astute empathy. And now he brings in the dessert, presents it, as if they are celebrating a special occasion. It’s a chocolate torte, and it’s gorgeous, a perfect chocolate hat for a chocolate queen. “Tell me you didn’t make this, too,” Isabelle says. “Or I’ll have to slink home in shame. I can make brownies out of a box.”
“Front Street Market. I had it specially made.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” He offers her coffee, and when she declines, he empties the last of the wine into both of their glasses. “So.” She pretends to count. “You’re a professor of nineteenth-century literature. You’re writing a book. You took classes at Le Cordon Bleu, and you play the piano. What else?”
He slides the cake from the knife onto her plate. “Don’t kill me, promise? Photography. It’s a hobby.”
“Aargh! I read novels. I used to swim. I indulge in bad TV.”
“You run a business. You were an editor.”
“That sounds grander than it is. I mostly shoveled the slush pile. What do you write? Fiction? Let me guess. Something intelligent and historical.”
“Ha, no. Poetry. Clearly, I am not in the writing game for the bucks.”
“Hmm. Probably not.”
“I am…How should I say it? Somewhat of an expert on American Romanticism? I’ve spent years studying the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. Teaching it, writing about it. Quite a lot of critical essays on Pym, Poe’s only novel…Dare I admit? Proud member of the Poe Studies Society.” He cringes for effect.
“So, who’re your influences?” She laughs. “Okay, I’m not going to tell you I edited Best Places to Bring a Date in Seattle.”
“Nonsense. I’m sure you edited many kinds of books.”
“I just realized I should probably call you Dr. North.”
He sits across from her again. “Such a beautiful, intelligent woman, and she gives herself no credit,” he says. He barely takes two bites of his dessert—no wonder he’s in such great shape. He reaches for her hand. Rubs her skin with his thumb.
Oh, God, that’s nice. It’s gentle and lovely, and his eyes are incredible, actually. They stare right through her. Beautiful—though people have called her this before, it’s not a word she connects to herself, with her prominent nose and all her mediums: medium height, medium-length brown hair, medium-brown eyes. But perhaps she could be beautiful, the way he’s looking at her. She remembers her old confidence—at least, she recalls when she didn’t feel as vulnerable as she’s felt lately. Okay, maybe that was a long, long time ago. She felt brazen and sure maybe for a few months of summer back when she was seventeen. Most people, she supposes, feel brazen and sure during those exact same months.
It’s gotten dark out. So dark. It’s a deep dark, sea dark, endless. There’s only the slow, far-off turn of the lighthouse beam, and the twinkle of boat lights across the bay. It could be just the two of them all alone out here.
The candles flicker. Isabelle swallows the last of her wine. Clyde Belle, with his torrid thoughts, who once lived in this very house, has been gone for years. The space between Henry and Isabelle has gotten soft and quiet. Intimate. She realizes how much she doesn’t know about him. Old adages about love taking time and things being too good to be true just seem stingy and scared when hope swirls and hums in your bloodstream. “So.”
“Another so,” he teases.
“Tell me. You’re here on your own? No wife, no kids visiting on the weekends?”
“And we were having such a nice time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no. I just hate to talk about all that, don’t you? Who came before, what happened. How it all went wrong.”
“I do. I hate it.”
“Especially now. First date and all.”
She feels a jab of misstep. A hit of wrongdoing. It’s her old baggage, this sensitivity to criticism, coming from a childhood requiring perfect moves and vigilance. She’s also surprised. First date. Well, of course it’s one. She hadn’t exactly called it that, so it’s somehow strangely shocking to realize what this is. “I apologize. For leaping into the deep end.”
“It’s fine. How about the abridged version? I was married. Not long. No children. But she left me. Just a few years ago. And that’s enough for now, right?” He laughs. “That’s plenty.”
“Oh, heartbreak,” Isabelle says.
“Well, look, if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here.”
He takes her hand.
“And I am liking here very, very much.”
The music has long since stopped and the house is silent. The night is. There’s not a car engine, or a wind through a tree, or a plink of rain on the roof. Just the silence of that house out there on the bluff. Energy begins to fill the space between them, and this energy is so real it could be a sound. First, it’s a low hum, and then it builds to something more, something large. Dear God, she feels it. The big thing waiting, needing only one small move to tip it over to ravage-energy, the teeth-clacking, hair-pulling kind. She feels it right there, and he must, too, because he clears his throat and pushes his chair back, and Isabelle decides it’s time to collect her purse and head home.
“It’s been such a lovely evening,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. Lovely—it seems wrongly prim and gentle after what she just felt.
“It has,” he says, and the moment is gone. “And we forgot all about the car.”
“The car!”
“I’ll come out and see it.”
“It’s pitch-black out.”
“Let’s go.”
The Acura is parked in the gravel spot in front of Remy’s house, and it’s too dark to see a thing. They need a flashlight, at least.
His hand is cupped against the glass as he peers in. “I’ll take it,” he says.
“You can’t take it! You can’t even see it. I haven’t even opened the door.”
He reaches in the pocket of his jeans. He removes a check, which he unfolds and then hands to her. It’s not so dark that she can’t see the figure written there. “Oh, my God, no. This is too much.”
“Not at all. It’s fair. Blue Book. I’ve done my research. Sold! Quit shortchanging yourself.”
“You can’t do this.”
“I can and I did. Now get in, and I’ll drive you home.”
She likes it all—she likes his age, forty-six, and his decisiveness, and his broken heart, and his Ph.D. She likes the way he can handle this unknown car without accidentally flipping on the windshield wipers or popping the hood. She really liked that dinner, but who wouldn’t, after meals of cereal and Marie Callender’s frozen lasagna? She’s nervous, though, because it’s very dark, and far off, there’s the creeping sense that she’s in over her head. She thinks it’s because of the discrepancies in their experience: He knows wine, and she picks whatever’s on sale and has the best label. He’s got the assurance of a man who’s been with fabulous, accomplished women. She’s just her regular self, who spent much of her adult life with Evan, whose finest points, truthfully, were his great sisters and his ass in jeans.
She’s just being insecure. And when he reaches her street and parks and pulls her to him, Henry North’s experience instead becomes a proven asset, because, holy hell, that kiss. Well, damn. That right there is what a kiss should be. Her first thought is how much she’s missed kisses like that. But her next thought is wondering if she ever really had them.
Her breath is gone, stolen. He pulls away. Her mouth is wet.
“Where did you come from?” she whispers. It’s a lover’s question, asked when a person can’t believe their sudden good fortune. But it’s a better question than she knows right then.
“See you soon,” he says.
She hopes so. Already, she badly hopes so.
The car pulls away, and she watches the red brake lights disappear down the road. There’s not even a small bit of regret about selling it. Her heart is doing that rising, soaring thing. It’s all wings and liftoff. She’s taken flight. Regrets are for later, anyway.