the container, pressed it back on with more vigor than was necessary. Quiet, he thought, as if he was lidding his own brain. Once he had it on, he set it down and shifted to mimic her posture—facing the water, knees up, elbows resting on top of them. Between them, the jacket-tablecloth had wrinkled up, a dozing chaperone.
He was trying to concentrate on being responsible, practical, when Nora’s laugh broke the silence—a bright, lilting thing, the grown-up version of the laugh he’d heard all those years ago. It was hard to feel responsible in the face of that.
He looked over, glad he wasn’t two floors beneath her. “What?”
She was still looking toward the water, big smile broadcast in its direction. “It’s . . . this is so neat, that there’s this whole beach here!”
He smiled, shaking his head. Sometimes, when he was around Nora, he could sense—even though he’d never met her—the way her grandmother must have shaped her. She said words like neat with total sincerity. When someone cut her off in traffic on the way here, her only exclamation had been a quiet, surprised “Well!” The night he stayed with her, he noticed all kinds of funny contradictions about her space—the sleek, top-of-the-line laptop set beside an old corded phone on the heavy, ornate console table in her living room. The complicated chrome coffee machine sitting in crowded formation on the countertop next to an almond-colored toaster oven that looked like it’d seen better days. Her fluffy, bright white comforter and pillows, and the flat, frayed quilt that she had folded over an old rocking chair in the corner of her bedroom.
“Wait,” he said, a thought striking him. “Have you . . . never been to the beach here? In Chicago?”
She looked down at her knees, gently digging her heels into the sand, her bare toes wriggling with the effort. “I haven’t. I’m sure that sounds silly.”
“It doesn’t,” he said, but also, it sort of did. He didn’t get here as often as he should, but to his mind, the whole world slept on Chicago beaches. They thought of the city and pictured that shiny silver bean or the Sears Tower or the sign outside of Wrigley Field, maybe the fussy, lit-up Ferris wheel on Navy Pier. But Chicago beaches, they were something else. All through the winter they’d punish you with possibility—gray-beige and iced-over and unwelcoming, and then a sunny day would come and the water would look unreal, blue like you were in the tropics even as the wind was cold enough to make your eyes water, your tears freeze. You felt like the whole world opened up when it turned warm again and you could see it up close.
“Nonna didn’t drive much, not even when I was younger. She stuck close to what she knew, and I stuck close to her.”
“Too bad,” he said. “It would’ve been fun to come, as a kid.”
He’d grown up landlocked, had learned to swim in the rectangular chlorinated pools of the Indiana suburbs. If he’d been a kid in this city, he would’ve wanted to go to the beach all the time, and it’s not like his parents would’ve stopped him. He had a rash, reckless thought: If Donny had taken me. If Donny had taken me, I would have brought Nora here. Every summer she came, I would have.
I would have counted the days.
He was going to need a bigger brain lid, with those kinds of thoughts.
“I’ve been thinking about the apartment,” she said.
So, she’d brought her own lid, then. He looked away from her, out to some spot on the horizon. They were getting to it, then, her real reason for coming all this way. He hated how disappointed he felt, having his suspicions about it confirmed. He’d been having such a nice time.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” he said, and hoped the breeze off the lake softened his tone. He felt hard all over, frustrated more with himself than with her. He should’ve finished this in the parking lot. Now sunset was going to be all fucked up for him, too.
“I was waiting until—”
“Until I wasn’t sick anymore,” she finished for him. “I know.”
He dropped his eyes to his hands, embarrassed again. He hadn’t told any of the neighbors—when he was making his rounds—that he planned to wait. He hadn’t even really known himself, not until he’d gotten back to his own place. He’d sat on his couch and pulled his computer onto his lap and