“Are you going to come up to Gloucester?”
“Looks good. I’ll call this afternoon.”
Joyce watched Frank drive off. She sat in her car and promised herself that she would write every single day that Nina was gone. She would walk the beach with Kathleen every day. She would start Nina’s room this afternoon. And she wouldn’t wait for Frank to make the first move. She’d ask him what was going on. She’d do it tonight.
Or maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe he would show up at the house with flowers and they would make love every night for a week. Maybe things would be fine.
FRANK DIDN’T COME up that night. He called at four to say he’d just been informed of an evening teleconference with a new set of potential buyers. He called at eight-thirty the next morning to check in. “I should make up it there tonight.” But at four, when Joyce was at the supermarket, he left a sheepish message about a programming bug that might take all night to correct. In the morning he said he probably couldn’t come up that evening since they had a 7 A.M. meeting the following day and that it was possible he’d be stuck working through the weekend.
Joyce let that bit of news hang on the line between them.
“Joyce? I’m really sorry, but it’s crunch time here.”
“I know,” she snapped. “What about Sunday? Can’t you at least take off Sunday afternoon?”
“I’ll try. I’m sorry. Is it nice being up there?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said icily.
“Are you getting work done?”
“Yes.”
“You seeing Kathleen?”
“Yes.” Joyce wasn’t going to let him off the hook by making her life sound pleasant.
“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Fine.” Joyce slammed the phone down. Son of a bitch, who needs him anyway? She was enjoying the physical labor of painting. She was sleeping ten hours a night. And her time at the beach with Kathleen was wonderful.
They seemed to have an endless supply of things to talk about. Headlines, bathing suits, books, and story by story, themselves. As soon as she caught sight of Kathleen at Good Harbor, Joyce became aware of the clenched tightness in her jaw and noticed how it eased as they walked together.
“I think I’m relieved Nina is gone,” Joyce said as they started across the beach. “In fact, I’m so relieved that I don’t even feel guilty.”
“It’s probably good for you to have a break from each other.”
When two women stopped Kathleen to ask about how her treatment was going, Joyce stared out at the horizon. By the time they reached the end of the beach
, she marveled at the change in her mood. “I can’t believe how much better I feel already. Why is that?”
“I think it’s the emptiness,” Kathleen said, rolling up her trousers. “Or that straight line between the sea and the sky. Or the size of it all. I don’t know, but it does put things in perspective.”
As the week progressed, Joyce and Kathleen permitted longer silences into their conversations, confident that the lulls would end in new territory. Like troughs between waves, Joyce thought.
After a few minutes of quiet, Joyce said, “You’ve told me a lot about your sister, but I don’t know anything about the rest of your family — your father, your mother . . .”
“My poor mother,” Kathleen said, shaking her head. “Pat, my mother, and I lived with my gran, my father’s mother, after he walked out on us. My grandmother decided it was my mother’s fault that he was a drunk, which was terribly unfair, but there was no challenging Gran.
“My mom worked for an insurance agency to support us all. Gran stayed home with Pat and me, and she was good to us — as good as she knew how to be. But she made my mother’s life miserable. My mother bore it in silence, as far as I know, and I suspect she did blame herself for my father’s desertion. I was fifteen when we heard he died.
“My mom and my gran died within a year of each other. Strokes, both of them. Neither one lived to see my boys.”
“I’m sorry,” said Joyce.
“Yes. And what about your mother, is she still alive?”
“My mother is alive and well on a golf course outside of Prescott.”