In the Heart of the Canyon - By Elisabeth Hyde Page 0,33

in the boat, telling herself it wouldn’t be too long before they made camp, where there would presumably be a little more privacy.

Which there had been, but the problem presented itself on Day Two and Day Three: the same setup, only now with the memory of yesterday’s failure adding to her tension. As the day went on, she watched the men casually relieve themselves over the side of the boat, while the women either jumped into the water and floated along with glazed eyes or, as Dixie demonstrated, simply hung their backsides over the edge of the boat. Evelyn couldn’t do either. Every single time, she had to wait until they were on shore; not only that, but instead of feeling more comfortable with the group as the days went on, she felt less so, and she was finding it necessary to trek farther and farther away, just for the fiction of privacy. What was wrong with her? Why, having done so many backpacking trips with large groups of people, was she suddenly so shy?

A hummingbird darted in front of her, hovered, then vanished. Red throat, green iridescence: Selasphorus platycercus. Evelyn kept a bird log and had seen too many hummingbirds to keep track of, but this was the first she’d seen in the canyon, so it warranted a notation. She stood and hitched up her shorts. The underwater rocks were slippery, and she lurched about and finally had to use her hands to crabwalk out of the water. With the sun still hot on her shoulders, she headed back to camp; although it wasn’t her intent, she glanced toward the bushes and happened to see Peter bent at the waist, his pale hips exposed.

Without warning, she thought of Julian, alone in his house, watching a ball game.

It was a complicated breakup. When it happened, Julian cried. But he said that Evelyn couldn’t give him what he wanted in life, which was a partner who wanted to be just that, a partner, someone who shared his interests and wanted to actually do things together, not someone who was satisfied to simply come home at night after a day spent pursuing separate activities. Evelyn liked to canoe; Julian liked to go to a ball game. Evelyn liked bird-watching; Julian liked reading the sports page and puttering in the garage. There was very little they liked to do together, and although he loved her, at fifty-seven, he felt there was someone out there who could offer him more companionship. Evelyn, for her part, didn’t see anything wrong with two people who loved each other pursuing their own separate interests. In fact, she thought it showed a smothering lack of independence when other couples did everything together.

“Lots of people take separate vacations,” she argued. “It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.”

“But I don’t want to take separate vacations,” Julian said. “I want someone to go up to Ogunquit with.”

“But I’m tired of going to your family cottage.”

“Exactly,” Julian said.

In the end, she felt too proud to argue with him. If he wanted to find someone else, let him find someone else. She didn’t want to stand in his way. But she missed him. They had never moved in together—Julian owned a house in Brookline, Evelyn a flat in Cambridge—but her place seemed empty and quiet without Julian. The batteries in the remote corroded from lack of use. The sports page went straight into recycling. She stopped buying beer to have on hand. She spent way too much time perusing catalogues and eating bagged salad.

When she sent in her deposit for this trip, she contemplated reserving an extra space, on the off chance that Julian might change his mind and decide to try a river trip. But it was a big chunk of money to forfeit, and Evelyn told herself that Julian had probably already blocked out his two weeks with his family, up in Ogunquit.

Back at the campsite, the kitchen was bustling with dinner preparations.

“Can I help?” she asked Abo, who’d tied a purple bandanna around his head. He looked like a pirate, she thought, which gave her a little thrill.

“Yeah, make a cake,” he said, and tossed her a bag of cake mix. “There’s a bowl, there’s the eggs, there’s a whisk, go for it,” and Evelyn set to work, glad to have a job. She poured the mix into the bowl and added eggs and water. Why was it, she wondered, that it was always the same people helping in