“I want you home,” he said. We were at a Tex-Mex place in Chelsea, where the food was so beautiful, blue corn everything and every color pepper you could think of, that it seemed a pity to eat it.

“I can’t,” I said. “I need more time.”

“I need a wife,” he said. Nothing more. I should have known. I didn’t hear from him for three weeks and then he called me at the office. “My lawyer will be in touch with you.”

“Why?” Panic did not begin to describe how I felt.

“I want a divorce.”

“Have you met someone?”

“I want a divorce,” he repeated.

I thought: so it begins, you asked for it, Sally, here it is.

It never occurred to me to try to win him back.

When I told this to Uncle Richard, naturally I left out the sex parts. He kept saying, “Mmmhmm, mmmhmm” until I realized that he hadn’t said it for a while. When I looked over he was fast asleep, his mouth open, the big belly rising and falling gently, one hand dangling childishly over the chaise as if he had dropped off in the middle of reaching for his glass of iced tea.

20

The calamondin was ripe, practically falling off the bush, and the day after my tete-a-tete with Uncle Richard I decided to pick them. In terms of worms and insects they had fared better than the grapefruit—every third one or so was salvageable. Aunty Mabel saw what I was doing and came out to help. It was around three o’clock, nearly one hundred degrees, and I was wearing Schuyler’s T-shirt and shorts, now paint stained, my hair tucked up into a bun under the Derby Lane hat. As we were stooped there, working, we heard a car zoom by the house, stop, back up, and then the spray of gravel as it slid into our driveway.

“Plumber not supposed to come till tomorrow,” Aunty Mabel said.

I didn’t recognize the car, an old teal Oldsmobile, but why would I, I’d never seen Mel out of the hospital, I didn’t know what he drove.

“Christ! You never called, you said you would call.”

“Good to see you, too, honey.” He was slightly smaller than I’d remembered, leaner, and as he removed his Ray-Bans I saw faint laugh lines that surprised me. The gold stud in his left lobe had been replaced by a pale sapphire that seemed especially picked for the Florida light. So neat, everything about him just so. A sight for sore eyes. He leaned to kiss me on the cheek and then he held out his hand to my aunt, who had come up, frowning, fruit gathered in the corner of her apron.

“Mel LaMonte. Mrs. Ding, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Sally’s told me so much about you.”

My aunt fussed with her hair a little, pushed her own sunglasses up on top of her head, shook his hand. How could I have forgotten the pure charm of him, those manners that would have put any of the snide New York boys I’d hankered after as a teenager to shame.

I said, “We’d invite you in, but my uncle’s resting.”

“No problem. We’ll go to the beach. Get your bathing suit.”

I turned back to my aunt, who flapped her hand at us. “Qu,qu, qu.”

“But what about the fruit?”

“One more teeny-weeny bush, big deal, I can do.”

He’d driven two days, stopping the night in North Carolina where a friend of his lived. He had a billion friends, something else I’d forgotten about him.

“How’d you know I was still here?” I asked him. “Why’d you take the chance and come all the way down without calling?”

“You’re never going to believe this, but I ran into your sister.”

“Marty?”

“On Chapel Street, in New Haven. She’s kind of hard to miss, with that sling and everything. She was awfully friendly.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I told you, honey, with her it’s so much surface. With you, on the other hand—”

“Make a left here.”

“Where are we going?”

“My favorite beach. But we kind of have to sneak in.”

“I love it.”

Mel was a graceful driver, maneuvering the tanklike Olds as adroitly as if it were my aunt and uncle’s Toyota. This was his dad’s car, he explained, he was sorry it didn’t have air-conditioning. I didn’t care. It was romantic with the windows rolled all the way down. He had his arm along the back of the seat, right behind my neck, and I could feel all the little hairs there rise in response. I felt like the kind of teenager I’d always wanted to be, the kind that Marty and Darcy had been. The radio was on, a song that was popular that spring, about a girl being the captain of a guy’s heart. Mel hummed along and then he laughed. “I think I’ve heard this idiotic tune two thousand times since I left Connecticut. Why so quiet, Sal?”

“It’s just so strange to see you out of the hospital. Like two worlds colliding or something.”

“You look great,” he said. “Like a Tahitian princess. Like that French artist, what’s his name.”

“Gauguin.”

“Yeah. Gauguin.”

“So how is everyone at Willowridge?”

“Well, the MHs are the same. There’s this new guy, Colin, from England, who’s into Gestalt and makes everyone play these games where you have to say stuff like: I am this Coke bottle and I feel empty. Everyone in our group is gone except for old Doug.”

“What’s up with him?”

“They want to discharge him, but he obviously can’t live with his mom, and his father won’t take him. And you know how he feels about halfway houses.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“I have no idea. He’s going to have trouble finding a job, that’s for sure, with the way he looks now.”

“How about Rachel?”

“Her parents packed her off to some spa in Germany.”

“I can see it. She’ll probably meet a rich Italian count there and live happily ever after. What about Lillith? Has anyone heard from Lillith?”

“Didn’t you get the postcard?”

“What postcard?”

“She sent you a p.c. at Willowridge, I thought they’d forwarded it. She’s out, honey, back at that place she was living before.”

“That’s good, I suppose.”

“I thought about stopping by on my way down here, but I wanted to make good time. I guess I’ll go see how she’s doing when I get back.”

We parked in the lot across from the Don Ce Sar. I’d asked Aunty Mabel which beach we had gone to the time we came down to visit as kids, and she told me that it had been turned into a resort on Gulf Boulevard. Private, for guests only. A couple of days ago I’d cased it out for myself. The main building was huge, sprawling, and pink, in a kind of faux-mission style, like something out of Disneyland. I’d parked on the street and peeked into the glass doors of the lobby. It had seemed almost deserted.

“You better lose those earrings,” Mel said to me, so I took them off and put them in the glove compartment. I’d already changed into my Montgomery Ward bathing suit back at the house. When we strolled through the air-conditioned lobby in our ratty outfits, we got looks from the personnel, but I didn’t care because I was with Mel. Somehow he inspired me to bend the rules. Out back, we took off our shoes and strolled along the water, digging our toes into the talcum white sand I remembered. Seagulls, smaller and scruffier and darker than their northern counterparts, stalked along the waves as we passed.

I could have walked all afternoon, but Mel had the sailing bug. We found a concession stand with boats for hire. He bargained with the guy. A Sunfish was too small, but it was late in the day, how about a Hobie Cat for half price? We would stay in sight, the guy didn’t have to worry. The boat Mel picked was fancy with a striped sail—blue, red, yellow—and as we dragged it over the sand to the water he explained to me that what looked like skis on it were pontoons, for speed.

“How fast are we going to go, anyway?”

“Live a little, Sal. This isn’t the real ocean, anyway, no one’s going to be racing.”

We cast off on a little foamy wave, and there was so much to do, Mel yelling orders and me trying not to get creamed by the boom, that by the time I looked back to shore the red and white umbrellas in front of the resort were the size of mushrooms. I could barely make out the people sitting sipping their drinks. The sea sped by us on both sides with a rushing noise. Mel peeled off his T-shirt and tied it around his waist, and I did the same, since there was nowhere to put anything, no little hooks or holes. He was right, this was a boat built for speed and nothing else, like the greyhounds with their stylized proportions.