Free Late in the Season by Felice Picano Page B

Riviera.
    “I’m not too early, am I?”
    “No, fine. Come in.”
    He held a bottle of white wine in one hand. Naturally. He would never—even unconsciously—do the wrong thing; she’d already expected that. He offered the bottle to her, label up.
    “You didn’t say white or red,” he apologized.
    “This looks exactly right,” she said. He was still waiting in the doorway. “Please come in.”
    He did and she felt more comfortable.
    “I just discovered we have almost nothing in the way of liquor,” she said, hoping it was spontaneous. “So I can’t offer you a drink. Should I chill this?”
    “Serve cool,” he said, looking around the living room.
    She couldn’t recall if he’d ever been inside the house before. His scrutiny made her edgy: as though he were evaluating her through the house. She hoped not.
    “It looks different,” he said. “Nice.”
    “Not like your place,” she said, but felt relieved. It was the simplicity and rich texturing of the lovers’ house that had inspired her own patchwork redecoration. “Correction on the drinks. We have sherry and a little brandy.”
    “Soda? Tonic? Lemon?”
    “Yes. I think so.”
    “Good. I’ll throw together a brandy cocktail I know how to make. Everyone eventually ends up drinking the cooking sherry, you know.”
    “This is delicious,” she said a few moments later, sipping the tall, fresh drink. “What’s it called?”
    “Brandy and tonic, I guess. The British drank it in the Orient, to ward off malaria.”
    She led him out onto the deck, where he held his drink up and tapped its rim against her glass.
    “To your decision.”
    They clinked glasses again.
    “You don’t even know what my decision is yet,” she said. “I don’t think I do either.”
    “No. But I support it. Whatever it is.”
    Earlier in the afternoon, Stevie had pictured this very moment: the two of them here on the deck, having cocktails before dinner, the Milky Way stretched across the sky above them, the soft pounding of the surf. Several times while thinking of this moment she had panicked, wondering what they would talk about. Today, on the beach, hadn’t been a particularly illustrious beginning, she thought.
    But there was no problem. At ease here, as he must be anywhere, it seemed, Jonathan immediately began to speak of Sea Mist and its residents. He’d spent several full summers here, and seemed to know the people of the resort far more fully than she or her parents. He talked about the community, the ecology of the island, with a sense of pride and an evident pleasure that made her regret having only perceived it as a beach. Jonathan seemed to know everything about Sea Mist. He knew the various birds and flowers, the incredibly varied insect life. He knew which buds on which bushes opened in May or June, which insects were attracted to their blooms, what week the flowers fell and the leaves began to turn, which birds passed over them migrating south. He’d revived birds that had flown into plate glass windows and doors, had seen those very birds return later on in the summer, and then, the following summer with their families. He’d nursed back to health during the early spring cats and dogs lost out here the summer before, who’d managed somehow to survive the brutal island winters. He knew all the constellations wheeling majestically overhead, and as he pointed them out, he could make Stevie see terribly clearly for the first time in her life why they were called Archer, Whale, Swan.
    Over dinner, he continued talking—about the history of Sea Mist from its earliest days as a lookout station for shipwrecks, to the free port era in the middle half of the nineteenth century, when the China trade clippers dropped half or more of their cargo here, hiding it until it could be transported across the bay. Then they sailed into New York Harbor, where they naturally paid much lighter duties fees than they would have had they shipped in fully laden. The Ginkgo