Free Miracle Beach by Erin Celello Page A

the table. Then she reached for the saltshaker and spilled a bit onto the napkin. Jack had taught her that trick.
    Ginny looked as though she wanted to ask Magda about the salt on her napkin, but instead marched on. “Yes, I suppose,” she said, lowering her voice, “but do you and Jack still—you know—”
    “Why, Ginny Fischer!”
    “I’m just asking,” Ginny said. “Friends can ask that sort of thing.”
    “They can, but they shouldn’t,” said Magda.
    “Well, Frank and I don’t. Haven’t for years. Years ,” hissed Ginny, shaking her head. She took a long swig of her own zinfandel.
    Magda was intrigued. Talking about someone else’s sex life—or even her own—always made her uncomfortable. It just wasn’t right. But this—Ginny’s situation —this warranted a little talking about.
    “ Years ,” Ginny repeated.
    “Ginny, keep your voice down. I heard you the first time,” Magda said. “It’s just hard to know what to say to that.” She took a sip of her wine. Its sugary sweetness coated her insides like liquid velvet. She wondered why she didn’t drink more often, or why she had mostly given it up in the first place. It felt positively wonderful.
    “Have you tried—”
    “Talking, counseling. Lingerie .” Ginny said lingerie in a whispered hiss, as if it were a swear said by someone who never swore. “You name it, we’ve tried it. Everything. We’ve tried everything. But nothing .”
    Magda shook her head slowly, racking her brain for something to tell her oldest friend. Just when she thought she had the answer, Ginny started in again.
    “And then I found the Viagra in his drawer.”
    “Oh, wonderful!” said Magda. “So he’s taken matters into his own hands. That’s perfect. A man with a little initiative. You sure don’t find those very often.”
    “The bottle was half-empty,” said Ginny.
    Magda looked at Ginny quizzically, her head tilting to one side. She inhaled sharply. “Oh, my,” she said. This was turning into an awkward conversation.
    “He denies it, of course,” said Ginny.
    “And you believe him?” Magda asked.
    “Should I? I don’t know. I want to; I do. But I don’t know if I should.”
    “And you haven’t—you know—at all? Since he got the prescription filled?” asked Magda.
    “Not once.”
    “You’re sure? Positively sure?”
    “I’m pretty sure I’d know, Magda.”
    “Oh, my,” Magda said again. “My, oh, my. Yes, yes. You likely would then, wouldn’t you?” She inhaled another jagged breath.
    “I wish someone would tell me what to do.” Ginny shook her head back and forth and kept her eyes downcast. “Because I don’t know. I really don’t.”
    Magda nodded. She remembered back in high school, on career day, when a classmate’s father, a writer for the local newspaper, said that the most important quality in a journalist was an unyielding curiosity about people, and that everyone— everyone —had a story to tell; you just had to excavate it. And Magda remembered thinking that maybe she could do that eventually; maybe that curiosity about people was something that grew over time. But she knew now, as a middle-aged woman, that she just didn’t have it in her, and she worried sometimes that it made her a bad person. So, now and then, she’d make stabs at it. She’d try to see whether, just maybe, curiosity had grown in her, secretly, down in her inner reaches, like those beautiful flowers she saw on the Discovery Channel that divers had found hundreds of feet underwater.
    But if she were really, truly honest with herself, she’d much rather talk about what was going on with her. She also figured that if anyone else were being really, truly honest, they’d come to the exact same conclusion about themselves.
    Tonight felt different, though. Magda actually felt for Ginny. Or maybe she just agreed with her. As a young woman, Magda had had all sorts of ideas about what it meant to be an adult. She had been wildly off the mark