of town, the same way Jimmy and Machine Shop had headed south the day before, and then along the reservoir lakes, lakes to the right, the moneyed communities to the left. He watched to see if she looked over at Hillsborough, in the direction of Butternut Drive. She didn’t. Another ten miles, and she veered off right onto San Mateo Road, the road up and over the ridge of mountains between the Bay and the peninsula towns and the coast.
“I have to be back before dark.”
She didn’t give a reason. He could come up with three or four on his own, and he didn’t want to think about any of them. He certainly wasn’t going to ask her why. He just looked at her, what the wind was doing to her hair, the shifting light to her eyes.
“I never rode in a car with you, you driving,” he said.
She didn’t say anything.
The fields of flowers ended, and the road came out at Half Moon Bay. It was a Thursday. There wasn’t much traffic, local or otherwise, through the main strip of town. Half Moon had been there awhile, had some character, some Western to it. It also had that nobody-will-know-us-here feel.
They went to the beach, parked, and walked down onto the sand. The waves were gentle. And empty. Pillar Point was to the right, a confusion of sailboat masts and The Breakwater. Even that had an unpeopled look to it.
The two of them had a way of not talking in settings like this, a history of unpregnant silence. Back when they were first together they would go out to the beach at Malibu or Paradise Cove or up into the mountains or out to some alluvial plain in Joshua Tree and just be there, side by side, no pressure to talk, no impulse to frame things with words. It was one of the first pop-up signs that told Jimmy he loved her, when he realized that she didn’t need to say anything, especially in those situations when anything either one of them might have said would probably be weak. Or just wrong.
But he spoke now.
“This is where Mavericks is, right? The big waves.”
She pointed straight out. “In the winter months, December. A half mile out past the point. It’s tow-in surfing. I don’t even know what you can see from here. They go out in boats, on Jet Skis. The waves are forty, fifty feet.”
The calm in front of them suddenly seemed like something else that could end abruptly. She took his hand. She looked up the beach in one direction. Someone with a dog was coming, too far away to even tell if it was a man or woman, throwing something to send the dog out ahead.
“Are you afraid of him?” Jimmy said. He meant her husband, Hesse.
She didn’t have a quick answer. Or a defiant one, which surprised him.
She pulled him to her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. Was that the answer?
“What did he say? When you were arguing?”
“This isn’t about him,” she said. “In the end.”
“Of all the city parks in all the towns in the world, I walk onto yours,” Jimmy said, holding her.
She wasn’t going to let him throw movie lines at her. “L.A. is only a few hundred miles away,” she said. “We would have run into each other again eventually.”
“You knew where I was; I didn’t know where you were.”
“You’re the one who used to talk about Fate all the time,” she said. They still held each other. It didn’t sound as harsh coming out of her mouth as the words would look on a page. Or would seem, remembered. “You were the one who always said that we were meant to be together.”
“We were young.”
“What are we now?” she said.
“Together,” Jimmy said.
He wanted to say one more line. He wanted to ask her why she went into the arms of a Sailor, why she married a Sailor. Was it possible she didn’t know about Hesse? Even he didn’t believe in a Fate that blind. Or blinding.
She seemed to sense how close he was to asking the real question about her husband.
“Come on,” she said. “There’s a motel up the way. I called ahead.”
The man with the dog had reached them. Mary didn’t look his way, but Jimmy did. The man didn’t want their eyes to meet, put all his attention on the dog.
“Rex!” the man yelled and threw the stick again.
Mary was looking up at the sun. Or maybe she was