Swim

clients. I drank iced espresso and endured the glares of my seatmates until 2:45, when I packed up my laptop and eased out the door. Lonelyguy never came back.
    “Nu?” asked Grandma. “Well?” It was October, seventy-two degrees under a cloudless blue sky. The breeze blowing through the opened windows carried the scent of lemons and jacaranda, and dinner: roasted turkey, with gravy, and stuffing, creamed onions, and cranberry sauce. Most Americans reserved these items for Thanksgiving. My grandmother cooked them atleast once a month, and served them in her gold-rimmed good china.
    I dropped my keys into the blue-and-white-painted bowl by the door and followed her onto the terrace, where she’d draped our tiny metal-legged table for two in a festive orange tablecloth. She’d lit candles, too, and set the food out on platters on the little rolling drinks cart the previous tenants had left behind. I helped myself to a plate. “I think I’ve found a new line of work.”
    I expected my grandmother’s eyes to light up when I told her about Lonelyguy, thinking of the money all that desperation could bring. Instead, she set down her fork and fixed me with a stern gaze that would have been more effective if she’d been wearing something other than a hot-pink kimono.
    “Ruthie, you’re spinning your wheels.”
    I patted my lips and looked at her calmly. “What do you mean?”
    “This classified stuff, it’s nice, you know. A mitzvah.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t be doing it for free. I bet I could get people to pay five hundred bucks for a rewrite. Or maybe I could come up with some kind of contingency scale. Like, if ten people e-mail you when the new profile goes up, you pay...”
    “What about your screenplay?” Grandma asked innocently, her pale eyes guileless under their false eyelashes as she spooned creamed onions onto her plate. She’d only blended her rouge on one side of her face. The other side was a clownish circle of pink. “The movie you were writing?”
    I sighed. “I think I lost my inspiration.”
    “I think you lost your boyfriend,” she said.
    I set my knife down on a pile of green beans. “He wasn’t really my boyfriend.”
    “If you fall off the horse...”
    “. . . you get back on the horse,” I recited. “But guys aren’t horses. I don’t want to meet anyone right now. I’m very happy. Just because I’m single right now doesn’t mean I’m not happy. I don’t need a man to be happy!”
    She pushed herself off her chair and drew herself up to her full height, giving the dragon embroidered across her chest a fond pat before she started talking. “When your mother, my daughter, was on her deathbed, I made her a promise,” she began, her Boston accent turning “daughter” into “dodder” and “promise” into “prahmise.”
    Oh, God, I thought. Not the deathbed promise. That was Grandma’s big gun, brought out once every few years, maximum. “You’ve taken wonderful care of me.”
    “I promised that I could always make sure that you were well taken care of and happy . . .” she continued as if I hadn’t said a word, jabbing the air with her fork.
    “I am happy.” “But you’re not!” she said, dropping her fork onto her plate and glaring at me. “You’re afraid! You think everyone’s staring at you, judging you...”
    “I am not afraid!”
    “. . . and spending your whole life underwater isn’t natural, Ruth Anne!”
    I raised my eyebrows and made a face, as if this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. “It’s not natural to swim?”
    “It’s not natural to hide,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed underneath the rouge, and a vein in her neck was fluttering. “Or to pretend you don’t want love.”
    “I’m not hiding,” I said, and shoved my hair behind my ear, off my scarred cheek, to emphasize the point. “And I do want love. Just not right now.”
    “So when, then?” she asked. “Next year? The year after that? Five years? I’m not going to live forever, Ruthie, and”—she reached across the table to grab my chin in her pincer grip— “nobody else is, either. You should know that. You, of all people.”
    I nodded, pulling my head away. “Okay,” I muttered, sounding like a chastened teenager. “Fine.”
    She pretended she didn’t hear me. “Decaf,” she said, lifting her empty cup. “Please.”
    Later that night, I turned on my computer. There was one e-mail in my in-box, one lonely e-mail from Lonelyguy.