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Kal steered the car back toward Manitowoc. They had less to say to each other than she’d hoped they would.
She felt different than she’d thought she would.
“You want to get some dinner?” he asked.
“Maybe a little farther up the road.”
He nodded, and they drove on.
They’d dropped Yangchen off at Jigme’s house. There was a baby shower she’d decided she wanted to go to—a convenient baby shower that would keep her in Milwaukee and out of the way for the whole of the next day, keep Kal in Wisconsin with nothing to do but drive Rosemary back to her daughter.
They were alone in the car, Rosemary in the front passenger seat for the first time, with Kal beside her, his hands on the wheel.
She’d made it all the way to security before she understood that she simply couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave things the way she had with Beatrice, leave the country with a vague idea that she’d get back to her daughter when she had the time and space.
She couldn’t leave Kal behind after everything they’d been through together with nothing more than a polite goodbye at the curb.
Rosemary had stepped out of the line to text him, her heart in her throat because maybe she’d taken too long to decide. Maybe he would ignore the text for an hour, two hours, until he was far enough down the road to say, Sorry, I don’t think it’s going to work out.
Twenty minutes later, she’d been in the car, Yangchen already dropped off, the front seat waiting for Rosemary, and an awkward bubble of silence between them that none of her attempts at conversation had managed to disturb.
It wasn’t that he’d withdrawn. He was right there. Now and then she caught him glancing at her, and he smiled every time. His eyes were warm. He was as relieved to have her beside him as she was to be here.
Only, neither of them seemed to know what to say.
They passed a sign for Port Washington, then another advertising nighttime dinner cruises for tourists.
Rosemary imagined being in a boat on the lake. Light spring rain, night air, water stretching out to the horizon.
Or they would keep driving and arrive in Manitowoc, find a hotel, find themselves trapped together in another anonymous room with a television and a bed and all their problems without solutions.
“Would you want to stop here?” she asked. “We could sign on for the dinner cruise if it’s running tonight. Get out on the water.”
“If you want to.”
“It might be different.” She wanted to do something different wi
th him. Go on a date. Eat a steak and prawns on a boat and try to imagine what they needed to do in order to never end up saying goodbye at an airport again.
“Sure.”
A few miles later, the rain had stopped. Kal signaled and followed the sign to the exit, turning left and then right, landing them in a gravel lot by the water, where they learned there was indeed a cruise, there were indeed tickets, they could indeed put themselves at a table with linens and crystal glasses on a boat, the land dropping away behind them.
They made small talk with the other diners at their table—a woman who sold life insurance and her friend who owned a nail salon, a pastor and his wife. Rosemary watched Kal eat French onion soup, learned he ordered his steak medium-rare, that he cut it into small bites and savored them, that he preferred still water to sparkling and didn’t like ice.
They had cheesecake with raspberry sauce, skipped the coffee, and walked out on the deck together. The night was windy, the boat too loud to make conversation pleasant. The other passengers stayed inside, where they could enjoy cocktails and live music.
Rosemary stood beside Kal with one hand on the wet railing, looking out over the choppy water toward the horizon.
“You ever watch Gilligan’s Island in England?” he asked.
“I’ve seen it.”
“I keep thinking, if that were ever going to happen to anybody, it would happen to us.”
“We’d end up castaways on a desert island together?”
He smiled. “First the avalanche, you know, and then we hit a rock and have to learn to live on coconuts.”
