by Ann Packer
I pulled my hand away, and at my side he took a deep breath and then sighed. “Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Of course.”
He looked down and colored slightly, then looked up again and his eyes met mine. “Are you back to stay?”
“Yes,” I said, but my throat felt funny, and it came out hoarse and scratchy, hardly even a word. “Yes,” I said again.
He smiled a complicated, inward-looking smile: of warring emotions quieted, if only for the time being. He bent over for a sip of his drink, then straightened up again. “So you’re what, going to fly back for your car?”
I turned and watched a gull perched on a low wall. It looked out at the water, its white neck curved like an S. “I sold it,” I said.
He sucked in his cheek and nodded. “Oh. That makes sense. It must be hard to park in New York.”
“I needed the money. You can’t imagine how expensive it is to live there.”
He scowled a little. “Yes, I can.”
We sat there. A group of five professorial types arrived at the table next to us, each man bearded and serious-looking and each licking an ice cream cone, the pastel flavors of summer. Off to the side, the gull hopped twice and then soared away, wings stretching wide.
I felt Mike’s eyes on me, and I wondered what he could see, if I had Kilroy Was Here written on me somewhere in a tiny, hurried scrawl. Of course I did. Just as Kilroy had Carrie Was Here on him, where it would stay whether he tried to rub it away or not. He was a map of messages, read by no one. I’d felt them with my fingertips, but they’d been hieroglyphic, indecipherable. I wondered how he felt about telling me about his brother. I hated to think he regretted it. Longing for him overwhelmed me, and my throat swelled. After a moment I busied myself with my sandwich: I leaned over the table for a big bite, and the harsh taste of the mustard pleased me. I chewed and chewed, then leaned back in my chair. My left hand was resting on the edge of the table, and Mike looked down at it: at my ring, his ring, our ring. Our eyes met. “Hock it if you want,” he said.
“I would never.” I twisted the ring around my finger, then took it off and put it on my right hand and held it out for him to see. “It’s a friendship ring now.”
“How’d that happen?”
“It just did. Presto change-o.” I smiled at him. “The ring, it has changed.”
“If you say so.”
“I do,” I said, and then I realized what I’d said—I do—and our eyes met again and we both laughed: awkwardly at first and then happily, chortling together over a joke only the two of us could fully appreciate.
A bit later we went back to the van. Instead of heading for the Mayers’ I turned the other way and drove up past the observatory, then swooped down toward the hospital and past it. By the time I’d parked he had to know what I had in mind, but he didn’t say anything. I cut the engine and helped him out.
The path was wide and smooth, and we moved side by side through deep shade and into spots dappled by sunlight. There were no other people around—no joggers, no picnickers, no kids playing hookey on one of the last school days of the year. How tall the trees were, making it an expedition by green tunnel, unseen water on both sides.
For a while Kilroy was there, too, walking a pace or two behind us. I wanted the anguish I felt to stay with me—knowing it would fade was the saddest thing in the world. I kept looking over my shoulder but saw only the path, running back the way we’d come, winding through the trees. Six weeks later I would get a postcard that I’d know only by inference came from him, blank but for my name and address. The photograph showed a sunny field of lavender in front of a row of silvery trees. “A hillside in Provence,” it said on the back in three languages. And, in the ink ring that canceled the French stamp, the word “Var.”
That was still ahead of me, though. Today, Mike and I moved along the path. The little clearing off to the left, where we’d lain on my beach towel—we passed it, neither of us commenting. It had been there long before we had.
A songbird trilled from high in a tree. A little later Mike looked up at me. “We never would have gotten married, would we?”
I reached over and pulled a glossy leaf from a bush we were passing. I ran my finger across the surface, then let it fall. “I don’t know,” I said. “It was beginning to seem like maybe not the best idea.”
“I think I know why,” he said. “It was like we already were married—we’d gone too far.”
I nodded. We would say more about it later, both of us. For now I looked around, at the trees, at the sky high above. I breathed in the clean smell of pine. The path grew shadier and twisted to the right, then to the left again. We ascended a slight rise, and a blackbird beat its wings as it settled on a branch.
“Here we are,” he said, and we entered the final, sun-filled clearing, the water pale blue and all around us, visible between the limbs of trees. He stopped moving and smiled up at me. “Well, what do you know,” he said. “Mike Mayer returns to Picnic Point.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Packer is a past recipient of a James Michener award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and other magazines, as well as in Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards. The author of Mendocino and Other Stories, she lives in northern California with her husband and two children.