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Of course she'd gotten through the homesickness and Rodney had proven to her that the coworker was just a woman who liked to talk too much and act too friendly, and then things had been smooth. Or relatively so--until Molly's mother had found a lump in her breast. By the time the couple had turned twenty-three they'd already seen one another through jealousies, loneliness, family illness, and other assorted dramas. They felt as if they could have taken on the world together, and so that's what they'd started to plan: a time when they'd own their own boat and set out to see it all. Everything. Every place they'd dreamed of. Every land and culture that intrigued them.
"This is not goodbye," Issei said, standing up with some effort after burying the box of ashes beneath the ginko tree with its buttery yellow leaves that rustled in the autumn breeze. "Rodney will be here, with us."
Molly put an arm around Hana's shoulders as they stood there, and for a moment, she felt as though these werehergrandparents. A moment of connectedness passed between the three of them as the waterfall burbled in the background and a handful of yellow leaves fell from the tree's branches, drifting to the ground at their feet.
This was Rodney'sfirstfinal resting place.
Ruby
It's close to midnight as Ruby sweeps the crumbs from the floor of Marooned with a Book and into a dustpan. Book club ran so late that she shooed the women out after eleven, reassuring them all that she'd clean up and that they should just get home.
"Just out back with all this?" Banks asks, holding a trash bag in one hand.
Ruby nods. She had assured him that she was fine for him to take the night off while the ladies gathered in her shop for their book club meeting, but Banks had agreed only on the condition that she called him to come and pick her up in the golf cart, no matter how late it was. So now he's there, helping her gather chairs and reorganize so that the store won't be a shambles when she opens it first thing in the morning.
Molly's revelations had been incredible--Ruby knows she wasn't the only one on the edge of her seat as the colorful words spilled from the older woman's lips. By the time they all cleared out, it was impossible not to imagine Molly as a young woman with a long, blonde braid, sailing her boat bravely across the Pacific. And for a reader like Ruby, the story had conjured up the adventurous works of Jack London and Jules Verne and Jonathan Swift. Never mind that Molly was a grown woman of twenty-six when she set out to sail the world, in Ruby's mind, any version of Molly that was forty years younger than the one she knows on Shipwreck Key was nothing but a child.
"You ready, chief?" Banks asks, standing near the front counter of the empty shop. He's wearing a pair of black sweat pants and a t-shirt with flip-flops, and it's the most casual that Ruby has ever seen him.
She takes one last look around the shop. "I am," she says, setting the broom against the counter and flipping off the lights.
The rest of the cleaning can wait.
* * *
"You're kidding me," Dexter says, his face looming on Ruby's computer screen the next morning. They've set up a time to Zoom while she drinks her morning coffee on her island and he sips his from his own little paradise on Christmas Key. "The lady who runs the coffee shop?"
"The very one," Ruby says, putting her bare feet up on the railing on her porch and lifting her mug of coffee. She has her laptop perched on the table next to her and the camera pointed in her direction. The ocean crashes on the shore just yards away. "Apparently they had a pact to travel the world together by boat, so when her husband died, she took his ashes and followed the course they'd plotted."
Dexter runs a hand through his messy hair. He's sitting at a bistro table outside of Mistletoe Morning Brew and wearing a pair of AirPods as they talk. People are coming and going behind him and Ruby can't help but glance at them to see if she recognizes any faces.
"I wish you could sail a boat," he says, sipping from a paper cup of coffee. Dexter is wearing a dark green baseball hat to block the sun from his eyes. "Then you could come over here and spend the day with me before I head back to New York."
Ruby chooses to ignore the flirtatiousness of the suggestion. "We would probably get a lot of work done that way," she says, tapping a fingernail against her ceramic mug as she holds it with both hands.
"That wasn't why I was suggesting it."
"I know," she says, looking right into his eyes. "Hey, you travel a lot," Ruby says. "Back and forth, back and forth. New York to Christmas Key, Christmas Key to New York. It's like you can't decide between two lovers."
Dexter laughs at this. "My busy, demanding, structured wife that is Manhattan, and my lazy, sun-drunk, island time girlfriend that is Christmas Key." He gives her a wry smile. "You're right. I could never decide between the two. I couldn't live without the excitement and the stimulation of New York--it is, in all ways--my equal. But I also couldn't live without the warmth, the quiet, and the tropical cheer of Christmas Key. Go figure. I'm a man of many tastes."
Ruby smiles as she looks out at the waves. She wants to tell Dexter more about Molly's adventure, but she also wants to talk more about their almost-kiss at her birthday party. Though she knows the wise thing to do would be to leave all talk of romance to the side for now, she hasn't been able to get the feeling of being in Dexter's arms out of her mind since that night.
"So," Ruby says at the exact same time that Dexter says, "Anyway."
They both laugh.
"You first," Ruby insists, hoping that he might be about to bring up the topic himself.
But instead Dexter frowns, putting his elbows on the table as he sits outside of Christmas Key's little coffee shop. "I wanted to take this opportunity to dissect what happened in France a bit."
Ruby can't lie to herself: she wanted him to talk about how much he wants to kiss her, not about how things went with Jack's mistress and their son.
"Right. France." Ruby gives herself a moment to mentally prepare as she takes another sip of her coffee. "Well. I guess we should talk about the fact that, try as I might, I just...don't really hate that woman."
Dexter is jotting something on a notepad out of view of the camera, but Ruby can see him nodding as she speaks, the bill of his green hat bobbing up and down.
"I think Etienne," Ruby says, forcing herself to say her late husband's lover's name, "is a wonderful mother. I think she's classy, and smart, and I guess in some way I can see how Jack loved her." Unexpected tears spring to Ruby's eyes and she wipes them away with one hand, her coffee still held in the other.
