“I was chewing.”
“You calledme,” Maya says, with the patience of someone who has known me for thirty-four years and has very little left to learn, “which means you want to talk about it. So talk.”
I lean against my kitchen counter and look at the ceiling and think about how to describe Hannah Caldwell to someone who will immediately make it larger than it is. “She’s sharp,” I say finally. “Like— actually sharp, not performs sharp. She put out my grill fire and went back to her book and didn’t make it a whole thing and I haven’t stopped thinking about her since.”
Maya is quiet for a moment. This is significant because Maya is rarely quiet.
“How old?” she asks softly.
“Forty-eight.”
Another pause. Then she groans, “Cruz.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to think?—”
“I know what she’s going to think,” I say. “She’s already thinking it. She told me her older daughter is thirty.”
“Subtle.”
“She’s a lawyer. That was subtle, for her.”
Maya laughs, reluctant and fond. “And you’re still interested.”
It’s not really a question. “I put a chair on her deck.”
“Oh, you’re gone,” she says. “You are absolutely gone.”
I don’t argue with her because she’s not wrong. I’m thirty-four years old and I’ve felt attraction before and I’ve felt connection before and I know the difference between both of those things and whatever is happening in my chest when I think about Hannah sitting in her single Adirondack chair looking at the ocean like it owes her something.
This is the third thing. The one I haven’t felt before.
“Just be careful,” Maya says, softer now. “Both of you.”
After we hang up I stand in my kitchen for a while with that word —careful— and think about the procedure scheduled for two weeks after I get home. The cardiologist’s voice, measured and clinical, walking me through what’s happening with myheart and what they’re going to do about it and how the prognosis is good, excellent actually, nothing to panic about.
I haven’t told Maya. I haven’t told anyone.
I came here specifically to not tell anyone. Just to have a month where I’m just a person on a beach and not a person with a thing wrong with his heart that needs fixing. I’m allowed that. The procedure is scheduled, the surgeon is excellent, the outcome is expected to be fine.
I’m fine.
I’ll be fine.
I close my phone, change into running clothes, and head for the beach.
She’s there.
Of course she’s there. It’s a public beach, it’s the middle of the day, she’s on vacation, so she should be there. But I still feel it impact in my chest when I spot her, about a hundred yards down, sitting in the sand with a book that she is, this time, actually reading.
I run past.
I don’t stop. I don’t wave. I keep my pace and look straight ahead and give her the privacy she came here for.
But I slow down.
Just slightly. Just enough.
