She has to go; it’s Heather. “She’s not due for three weeks.”
“Tell the baby that!” Beverly has info, a flight available at noon.
“I’ll be on it,” Chloe says briskly. Heather needs her.
“Work?” Dan lifts his head, bats the mosquito netting out of the way.
“Sorry. I need to be at the airport in an hour.”
“Okay.” Dan gets out of bed, stands at the window and studies the moving leaves, wind direction. “Looks like it’s setting up for a good sesh. I’ll have to pick up the guys and drop them at Ho’okipa first.”
He stuffs his boardshorts in his backpack, grabs his contact lens solution. Chloe is surprised that he doesn’t seem angry.
“Sorry,” she says again.
“It’s okay. I could only afford this place for two nights anyway, so we would have been sleeping in the garage with the guys or the van after today.”
“How much was it?” Chloe says. She had been thinking, last night as he slept and she watched the pops of distant fireworks through the open windows, that this might make a cute first place for them. If they added a bathroom and a shower, put up some screens, and a hot plate for her teakettle…
“I had to sell my old 5.3 sail just for the two nights.” Dan quotes local bumper stickers, “‘This ain’t the mainland.’”
And Chloe’s budding idea, starting an agency branch in Maui, withers and browns. Eleven dollars an hour would be eaten up here like nothing, and they would have to live like all the other surfers, eight people in a two-bedroom, blankets hung for privacy.
Chloe rolls her suitcase behind him slowly on the catwalk. Now what? she worries.
The wind picks up, turning the leaves of the koa tree over, and Dan whoops.
“Setting up for a perfect sesh! Come on, babe!” he calls, hustling her so that she forgets her toiletry kit, makeup, hairbrush, birth control pills, on the back of the toilet in the tree-house garage.
ON THE DRIVE TO pick up Kurt and Paolo, Dan asks her to grab his backpack.
“Open it up. Something in there for you. Sorry about the atmosphere—” He gestures around at the inside of the van, the mildew smell of damp equipment. “I wanted to make it special, drive up to Haleakala Crater or something, but since you’re leaving…”
At the bottom of his bag, among Snickers wrappers, gas station receipts, a moldy towel, and his sunglasses case, there is a dark purple leather box in the shape of a heart. Inside, there is a real ring, a simple gold band with a small round-cut diamond. The fact that she’s been seeing nothing but platinum in the magazines doesn’t matter; it’s perfect.
“So, if you’ll still have me…,” he says as he cuts the engine outside the garage conversion and honks twice. “And we can set any date you want.”
“Oh, Dan, of course.” Chloe clambers out of her seat to his lap, kissing his beautiful face. Now what? she thinks again.
They are interrupted by pounding on the window.
“So it’s official?” Paolo sticks his head in the van, and Chloe realizes his friends were in on it. She climbs off Dan’s lap. “I may now kiss the bride?” Paolo, who has always treated her like a kid sister—60 percent tolerated, 40 percent adored—beams as he climbs in, genteelly kisses both her cheeks.
“I’ve got one for you guys,” Kurt calls from where he is throwing his gear in the back of the van. “How do you tell the wives from the girlfriends on the windsurfing beach?”
“I give up.” Dan sighs, knowing he’s walking into it.
“Easy; they’re all girlfriends, bro!”
And Dan’s friends laugh, Paolo showing every gleaming tooth.
“I’M GOING TO MISS you,” Dan says when they are alone again, after they have dropped Kurt and Paolo at the beach. “Don’t worry about your stuff, at the tree house. I’ll pick it up, and it will be here when you come back.”
He’s really staying, leaving it up to her if she follows. Dan wants her there, but he won’t insist.
“You’re not coming back to Portland,” she says slowly, and when Dan shakes his head, Chloe feels her options narrow, choices looming.
“I’m really stoked about this kiteboarding thing. You have no idea what it’s like to be a guy, how your sense of self is tied to what you do.”
Chloe thinks of her job; does it define her? She loves her coveted upstairs office, her families, her birth mothers. She thinks of the photo album on her desk full of happy endings. Who would she be