Joyland

parlor while Annie dressed. When she came downstairs, she was back in her jeans and sweater. I thought of the blue bra just beneath the sweater, and damned if I didn’t feel that stirring again.
    “Are we good?” she said.
    “Yes, but I wish we could be even better.”
    “I wish that, too, but this is as good as it’s ever going to get. If you like me as much as I like you, you’ll accept that. Can you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good.”
    “How much longer will you and Mike be here?”
    “If the place doesn’t blow away tonight, you mean?”
    “It won’t.”
    “A week. Mike’s got a round of specialists back in Chicago starting on the seventeenth, and I want to get settled before then.” She drew in a deep breath. “And talk to his grandpa about a visit. There’ll have to be some ground rules. No Jesus, for one.”
    “Will I see you again before you leave?”
    “Yes.” She put her arms around me and kissed me. Then she stepped away. “But not like this. It would confuse things too much. I know you get that.”
    I nodded. I got it.
    “You better go now, Dev. And thank you. It was lovely. We saved the best ride for last, didn’t we?”
    That was true. Not a dark ride but a bright one. “I wish I could do more. For you. For Mike.”
    “So do I,” she said, “but that’s not the world we live in. Come by tomorrow for supper, if the storm’s not too bad. Mike would love to see you.”
    She looked beautiful, standing there barefooted in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.
    Instead, I left her where she was. That’s not the world we live in, she’d said, and how right she was.
    How right she was.

    About a hundred yards down Beach Row, on the inland side of the two-lane, there was a little cluster of shops too tony to be called a strip mall: a gourmet grocery, a salon called Hair’s Looking at You, a drugstore, a branch of the Southern Trust, and a restaurant called Mi Casa, where the Beach Row elite no doubt met to eat. I didn’t give those shops so much as a glance when I drove back to Heaven’s Bay and Mrs. Shoplaw’s. If ever I needed proof that I didn’t have the gift that Mike Ross and Rozzie Gold shared, that was it.

    Go to bed early, Fred Dean had told me, and I did. I lay on my back with my hands behind my head, listening to the waves as I had all summer long, remembering the touch of her hands, the firmness of her breasts, the taste of her mouth. Mostly it was her eyes I thought about, and the fan of her hair on the pillow. I didn’t love her the way I loved Wendy—that sort of love, so strong and stupid, only comes once—but I loved her. I did then and still do now. For her kindness, mostly, and her patience. Some young man somewhere may have had a better initiation into the mysteries of sex, but no young man ever had a sweeter one.
    Eventually, I slept.

    It was a banging shutter somewhere below that woke me. I picked my watch up from the night table and saw it was quarter of one. I didn’t think there was going to be any more sleep for me until that banging stopped, so I got dressed, started out the door, then returned to the closet for my slicker. When I got downstairs, I paused. From the big bedroom down the hall from the parlor, I could hear Mrs. S. sawing wood in long, noisy strokes. No banging shutter was going to break her rest.
    It turned out I didn’t need the slicker, at least not yet, because the rain hadn’t started. The wind was strong, though; it had to be blowing twenty-five already. The low, steady thud of the surf had become a muted roar. I wondered if the weather boffins had underestimated Gilda, thought of Annie and Mike in the house down the beach, and felt a tickle of unease.
    I found the loose shutter and re-fastened it with the hook-and-eye. I let myself back in, went upstairs, undressed, and lay down again. This time sleep wouldn’t come. The shutter was quiet, but there was nothing I could do about the wind moaning around the eaves (and rising to a low scream each time it gusted). Nor could I turn off my brain, now that it was running again.
    It’s not white, I thought. That meant nothing to me, but it wanted to mean something. It wanted to connect with something I’d seen at the park during our visit.
    There’s a shadow over you, young man. That had been Rozzie Gold, on the day that I’d met her. I wondered how long she had worked at Joyland, and where she had worked before.