“I’m sorry you had to find those things,” Grace said softly.
“I’d give anything to get them back.”
An older woman, dressed in a colorful sari, appeared at the top of the stairs. “Excuse me,” she said. “Do you know where I can find the manager?”
“I’m the owner.”
“Sorry to interrupt. I’m interested in a zebra print.”
Harper looked at Grace, who hadn’t taken her eyes off Harper since her apology. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
Downstairs, in front of the striped horses, Harper answered several questions about the expedition her parents had been on before wrapping the print up for the woman, a bohemian from the East Coast. She wanted it shipped overnight to a Manhattan address.
After she left, it was customer after customer—one wanted Harper to get a picture down, another was interested in showing Harper’s work in her Vancouver gallery, a man with a bushy beard bought the biggest purchase of the night: a forty-inch by thirty-two-inch framed portrait of a young aboriginal boy washing his sister’s feet riverside.
Grace finally gave up and came downstairs. From a few feet away, as she was changing the credit card machine tape, Harper told Grace she was sorry. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging.”
Grace disappeared into the backroom, surfacing with a piece of paper. “What time are we leaving tomorrow?” she asked, handing Harper a folded note.
“Noon.”
“All right.” Grace raised her eyebrows. “I’ll be at your house at eleven forty-five?”
“Great. See ya then.”
Harper watched Grace leave through the open door while
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she continued fixing the tape. When she was out of sight, she stopped and read the message. It was simple, only three words.
Please forgive me.
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“You Still Move Me”
Dan Seals
The next day, Harper was packing items into a red cooler when Grace arrived. Standing with a brick of cheese in her hand, she heard Grace say a muffled hello to Alex, who was in the driveway loading their Land Rover.
At full tilt, Harper burned from the kitchen to the dining room window where she’d have a full view of the driveway. Ever so gently, Harper pulled back the side of the curtain and spied.
“You must be Alex,” Grace said. A deep breath followed.
Just like she had at their tennis first match, Grace stuck out her hand.
“Hi,” Alex said. “It’s nice to meet you.” She fumbled a bit as they shook hands. “Harper told me you guys grew up near each other in Arizona. You used to play tennis against each other?”
“Yeah,” Grace said, a smile pushing through. “And we went to college together, were sorority sisters and kinda roommates for a while.”
“Sorority girls? Roommates?” Alex paused. “Huh. She never mentioned that.”
Peeping in on their conversation, Harper cringed.
“Here, let me help,” Grace said.
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“I’ve got it.” Alex loaded a suitcase into the backend.
“Thanks.”
“It’s gonna be a fun weekend. You already met Juliet?”
“Yeah, the other day.”
“She and Sabrina will be joining us later tonight.”
“Awesome,” Grace said. “Thanks for the invite.”
An awkward moment passed as they smiled at each other.
“Harper’s inside. We’re just about ready.”
“Okay,” Grace said, turning toward the house.
When she headed up the stairs, Alex looked twice at Grace—
a lingering double take—before reaching for the next bag.
Rushing again, Harper ran back to the kitchen and pretended to be busy when Grace rang the doorbell. “One minute,” she said, taking a fast look at the microwave’s reflection. She tousled her hair.
“Hey.”
“Good morning,” Harper said, opening the screen door.
“You’re right on time.”
In her Mercedes Coupe, Grace followed Harper and Alex to the coast.
The beach house Harper’s parents had left her was a luxury she didn’t take for granted. They’d lovingly named it Seasmoke—
an homage to the movie Stealing Home—and had its name painted on a piece of driftwood at the front door. Situated on the sand in an exclusive coastal community, Cannon Beach, the cottage was loaded with charm. The clapboard had been partially replaced and the electricity brought up to code, but Harper had refused to sanitize it any further with upgrades.
After a lazy afternoon on the beach, right before sunset, Harper headed inside to start dinner. It was her night to cook.
From where Harper was standing in the kitchen, she could see Alex and Grace chatting outside by the fire. As she minced scallions, she wondered what they were discussing. She couldn’t imagine they had much in common. Alex had grown up on a farm.
As Harper moved to the stove, she caught Grace watching
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her through the window. It was a look she’d seen before—a look, in fact, that had many times brought Harper to her knees.
This time was no different.
Grace wasn’t casually watching Harper make dinner through the glass—instead, she was a melting candle too close to a fire, suddenly bending into Harper without even realizing it.
“Can I help?” Alex startled Harper when she came up from behind.
Harper scooped a bite of paella. “Does it need anything?”
she asked, blowing on it before sliding it into her mouth.
She stole one more look at Grace as Alex chewed. “Um. A little more saffron. And some garlic salt.”
Alex’s breath was balmy when she whispered, “I like your friend.” Her breast pressed against Harper’s arm. “Why haven’t you mentioned her before?”
Harper let her gaze go back to the fire where Grace was sitting in a worn Adirondack chair. Illuminated, her face had an amber glow as she continued watching them inside. In the firelight, she was even more beautiful than Harper remembered.
It was a good question. An important one.
“We lost touch for a while,” Harper said as she sprinkled saffron threads into the sauté pan.
Some time passed before Alex set the table and fiddled with the stereo. Harper watched Grace talk to Sabrina and Juliet, who’d just arrived from the city and let themselves in through the back gate.
Grace’s accent was subtler than it used to be, Harper thought as she mixed the corn bread. But she knew, like she knew her own alcohol limit—one she was getting close to drinking through—
that with each sip of wine, the Brit in Grace would eventually overpower the watered-down American drawl.
Still healthy and firm, the physique you get from the right genes and two decades of training, Grace was still in impeccable shape. She was taller than she was in Harper’s fantasies, but her embrace had been the same as she enveloped her body days earlier, an impossible moment she’d imagined a thousand times.
Alex grabbed two glasses and the pitcher of sangria before heading for the door.
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“Wait,” Harper said. “Come here.”
In a robin-egg blue yoga suit and flip-flops, Alex walked to where Harper was standing at the chopping block.
“I love you,” Harper said, reaffirming for herself. She stepped closer for a kiss.
“I love you, too.”
Watching her walk out of the kitchen, Harper let out a private sigh as she put the bread into the oven.
Grace was mid-story when Harper finally stepped into the summer night. An ocean wind flirted with the flames, and even though the sun was down, the gulls floating over the crashing surf could still be heard in the darkness. Sabrina and Juliet had gone inside to change.
“After they separated us,” Grace said, “Harper started a food fight.” Her laughter was effusive, bigger than the ocean, the soundtrack of Harper�
�s childhood.
Alex looked at Harper as she sat down. “How come you never told me you were a debutante?”
“What?”
With an impish grin, Grace shrugged.
“I never told you?”
“No.”
“It was years ago.”
Curiosity was still on Alex’s face. “I’m sure learning a lot about you today.”
“It was just a small blip on my radar screen,” Harper said. “I didn’t realize I hadn’t told you.” She looked at Grace. “And it was you that started the food fight that day.”
They all had their secrets.
Alex pulled a strawberry from her sangria. “So,” she said,
“how long have you guys known each other then?”
Grace did the math. “Twenty-five years.”
“Twenty-six,” Harper corrected. She knew the answer, had never lost count. “You moved to Arizona right before third grade.”
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“I’m surprised I haven’t met you before,” Alex said, dropping the sliced berry into her mouth. “Where have you been?”
Grace looked at the flames and then to Harper, regret burning along with the fire’s reflection in her eyes. Somehow, thinking about the past, they were both able to smile.
“It’s complicated,” Harper said, “I mean, I don’t even know where you’ve been for the last—how long has it been?”
Grace looked at her glass. “Twelve,” she said, pausing,
“years.” Harper knew that number too.
Just then, the timer buzzed in the kitchen. Harper stood to check on the bread. “She’s here now. That’s all that matters.”
But that wasn’t the truth. Other things mattered.
After pulling out the corn bread, Harper spent the next ten minutes in the bathroom sitting on the edge of the tub. With her elbows on her knees, her drink centered between her sandy clogs, she gave herself a pep talk.
“Don’t you dare do this,” she whispered. “We made a pact.
And worked hard to get here.”
She drew a long breath then lowered her head. Inviting Grace for the weekend had been a bad idea. She wasn’t ready to spend this much time with her.
In the mirror, even in her turtleneck, Harper could see her skin was blotchy—wine always did that to her—and her eyes bloodshot behind her glasses. There hadn’t been a restful night since Grace surfaced.
Why had she come back? Why, of all places, had she ended up in Harper’s backyard? Literally. That day, when Grace had called her name, Harper almost couldn’t turn around, knowing, forever knowing that voice.
Grace was still so striking, Harper thought. She’d fooled all her critics who’d predicted she’d lose her looks—the jealous girls growing up who wished for her slender torso, her button nose and dollish curls.
Earlier that afternoon, as she and Grace were rinsing off the boogie boards, Harper noticed she was curvier, her hips fuller
than she’d remembered—the natural way a woman’s body settles onto its bones with time—and her chest had more freckles than it once did. Sun spots. Her wetsuit was unzipped halfway revealing her red bikini, her voluptuous cleavage. Eyes hidden by her sunglasses, Harper tried not to look, but couldn’t help herself.
Sabrina, back outside in flannel pajamas, was sitting on Juliet’s lap with her broken ankle propped up on the fence. She and Grace were engaged in conversation when Harper finally rejoined them. They were talking about the cabin she and Juliet had bought at Mount Hood, a small A-frame near Lost Lake.
“Remember all those summers we spent at the cabin?”
Grace asked. With Harper’s parents, the two of them had spent innumerable weeks in the woods of northern Arizona at the Alessi’s getaway.
“Of course.”
“And that fort we built.”
Harper sat in between Grace and Alex. “Casa de madera,” she said, her Spanish still within reach.
“We made it out of old logs,” Grace said. “Nailing pieces together with rusty nails we found in the garage. We worked on it for days and even made a chimney out of rocks. I bet some of those logs are still nailed together”—with her smoky eyes, Grace looked directly at Harper—“probably fused into one by now.”
What Grace hadn’t mentioned was what happened years later in the ruins of their fortress. At her beach house along the Oregon coast, Harper could still see the woman’s face, the neighbor who caught them naked in the snow that winter night.
It was years after they built their secret log castle in the woods.
They’d just made love on the bear rug and the drift was to their knees. After a snowball fight, Grace had pinned Harper down.
Neither of them realized she was watching until it was too late.
“Our cabin is pretty rustic,” Sabrina said, bringing Harper back to the beach. The stitches on her face were covered by a butterfly bandage. “But it’ll be fun in the winter. You should come up sometime.”
“Thanks,” Grace said.
Harper refilled her glass and headed back to the kitchen.
Dinner was served on a distressed round table in the dining room, and as they ate, consuming endless pitchers of sangria, Grace and Harper continued reminiscing about the old days, telling childhood stories all the way through dessert, a flaming, chocolate something-or-other Alex, the pastry chef, created.
Beyond her sultry singing voice, Alex had serious skills in the kitchen—something she could always fall back on, she said.
Afterward, the women played board games well into the night. During several heated rounds of Pictionary, the marine wind howled as they scribbled unintelligible stick figures.
“You’re funny,” Grace blurted to Harper midway through.
“You’re still really funny.”
Through the laughter, each time the salty breeze blew into the house it carried Grace’s perfume through the room, tearing through Harper’s armored shell.
“Against All Odds”
Phil Collins
It was late when Harper dug deep in the kitchen drawer for the stashed cigarettes. She waited until everyone had gone to bed.
When she sneaked outside, the fire was barely smoldering and the tide was high, crashing against the mossy boulders.
She scratched the matchstick against the stone fence and lit the cigarette, drawing the stale tobacco into her lungs. She didn’t smoke anymore—had kicked the habit years ago—but kept them hidden for nights like these. Emergencies.
Sitting on the fence, she pulled her coat in tight, buttoning it up all the way, cinching the hood over her head so the down feathers muted the rest of the world. In the muffled distance, she could still hear the waves crashing, the wind whistling, but everything else was lost in the feathered static, the padding between her and her chaotic life.
Barefooted, her feet dangled in the sand as she, again, for the hundredth time, contemplated Grace’s return. She didn’t hear Grace come out, didn’t sense Grace standing behind her. She didn’t know until Grace reached over and took the cigarette, her pinky grazing Harper’s thumb.
“God. You scared me,” Harper said, pulling off her hood.
“Sorry.” Grace’s English accent was extra thick. Pulling the
red quilted coat around her, she took a drag before passing it back.
“You still smoke,” Harper said.
“More than I should.”
We all had our vices, Harper thought. Her own was chocolate.
And the pinot noir grape. And the occasional joint.
She wondered what other vices Grace still had: eating candy for breakfast, drinking lots of coffee and stout, masturbating in the shower.
Behind them, except for the nightlight in the kitchen, the house was engulfed by dark silence.
“I love Alex’s new album,” Grace said, putting her foot on the short fence. They’d listened to it over dinner. Harper looked at the house and then back to Grace as she spoke. “I get what you see in her.”
; With no light from the fire, only the fuzzy moonlight through the passing clouds, Grace looked twelve years younger, Harper thought, just like the last time they’d seen each other at the Dunlop’s front door. Since then, not a day had gone by when Harper hadn’t thought of her, about the life they could’ve had if only—if only things had been different.
“Do you love her?” Grace asked.
“Do I love her?”
“Yeah,” she said, softer now, watching Harper carefully. “Are you in love?”
Harper pulled hard on the nicotine. “Yes.” She blew out the smoke. “I am.”
In bed the night before, Harper had felt compelled to lay her book down and touch Alex’s face while she slept. Her gentle breaths, the way her square mouth was partially open, filled her with guilt. She was lucky to have Alex, Harper thought, crying a little—for her own reasons—as she rolled over and kissed her temple.
“Why do you ask?”
Grace turned toward the ocean. “No reason.”
There was always a reason.
A breeze blew in and they both adjusted their coats. With the wind, Harper felt a surge of audacity.
“What inspired you to waltz back into my life after all these
years anyway?” she asked. “You know. After slamming the door?
Shutting me out? I mean, what made you think I’d even speak to you?”
“All I had was hope,” Grace said.
Silence filled the space between them before Harper, her rage passing, asked another question, one she’d wondered for well over a decade.
“So tell me,” Harper said, handing the smoke back to Grace,
“like Alex said, where have you been for the last twelve years?”
Staring at the burning cherry glow, Grace didn’t answer right away and that was fine by Harper, as a big part of her didn’t want to know. Waiting, she looked at the full moon now peeking from the clouds and then at the minuscule light floating on the ocean’s horizon, a hint brighter than the stars above.
“Getting over you,” Grace said.
Harper kept her focus on the white surf just beyond the beach grass, the breaking waves that stopped, frozen when she felt the weight of Grace’s eyes upon her.
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