Grady stood with his hands in his pockets, and after a few minutes—though they faced away from the house, I could tell they were talking by the way their heads moved—he stooped to wipe debris from the pier’s planks with the flat of his hand. Dennis reached down and without bending touched his father’s shoulder blade with his fingertips. When Grady stood again, Dennis’s hand briefly rested at his father’s waist.
Gloria whistled a long, low note and pulled a tea towel from her shoulder, where it had perched all afternoon. She dangled it over the sink and let it drop. “They’re like women, aren’t they?” she said. “The way they chatter.”
I smiled politely. Gloria had given Dennis his slender frame and light eyes. She was two inches taller than I was, at least an inch taller than her husband. I glanced her way and caught her staring: the blunt tip of her nose was pink and her eyes were damp. Unlike my own mother’s face, whose features were broad and suntanned and matted with freckles, Gloria’s face was delicate and pale. Her chin came to a point. Earlier, she’d served coleslaw and chicken salad on the back deck, then filled our glasses with fruity rum punch and returned to the kitchen. In the months I’d known her, I’d learned that she rarely ate a meal during the daytime. She ate breakfast and might nibble on a salad at lunchtime, but eating an entire meal in the afternoon nauseated her. I’d also learned that she thought eating outdoors was distasteful, but agreed to it because she knew other people found it appealing. She took a nap every day and always had, even when Dennis and his younger sister Bette were children. “She just lay down in the playroom while we horsed around,” Dennis had told me, “and a half hour later she got up again.”
Gloria said, “If you were expecting a quiet house, you were mistaken. My men are talkers.” She smiled weakly and turned away, and not for the first time I found myself unable to answer her. She had a dead-end way of conversing; no obvious next step presented itself. But as I watched her walk out of the room, then turned back to the window through which I could see Grady and Dennis standing together on the pier, separated from me by a wide expanse of unmowed green lawn, two thoughts crystallized in my mind. One thought was that, in spite of the fact that she considered it in bad taste to travel hundreds of miles to visit a boy one barely knew, Gloria liked me. The second thought was that Dennis was planning to propose marriage, and soon. This was the topic being discussed outside at that moment, under a sky dimmed by clouds. Dennis and Grady stood looking down into the well of Grady’s lapstrake boat—still the most impressive boat I’ve ever seen, with its polished teak hull and gleaming brass railings—which rested in its slip, laced by bright white mooring lines. Then Dennis stepped toward the house and Grady followed, and as they walked Dennis kept his eyes on the kitchen window—on me—and Grady continued talking, his hands in his pockets. By the time they reached the swimming pool, brief droplets had erupted into a rare winter thunderstorm. I swiped two towels from the laundry room, then greeted them at the back door and ushered them inside.
I’d been fired that week from my job at the bank. I’d missed so much work since meeting Dennis that the manager had called me into his office and asked me, not unkindly, to rearrange my priorities, which I’d promised I would. When I used the shared line in my apartment house to call Dennis and tell him I couldn’t visit for a while, he’d said, “Just come one more time, this weekend.” I suppose I knew then how it would go for us. Before I’d met Dennis, I’d liked my job well enough. I’d liked my small apartment and quiet neighbors and weekly dinners with friends and their husbands. I’d taken long walks on Sundays and spent weekend afternoons helping my mother in her garden. Some nights I opened a bottle of wine and cooked pasta for myself over a burner in the communal kitchen. But when I’d considered where my life was headed, I had not particularly liked the prospects. The men I dated did not woo me, the girls I knew who’d started families did not