In Between Frames (6 page)

“I’m sorry, but did you say raisins?”

“They’re like M&Ms to me,” he said.
 
“Why?”

~~~

They laughed about it that night, over a dinner at the local McDonald’s—he had been unsettled that he couldn’t get a Big Mac.
 
“I don’t even like them that much,” he told them, as they sat down and divided the food.
 
“I just think it’s ridiculous to go to McDonald’s and try to be healthy.”
 
A quarter-pounder, though, was apparently the same no matter where in the world you were.
 
But the amount of food on their tray shocked them all—for Sam and Mabel, McDonald’s had never been a habit.
 
For Miles, it’d been a few years, and he’d forgotten that the portions were as huge as they were.
 
“The scary thing is,” he said, “they must be smaller than the American-sized ones.”

Mabel had appraised him seriously when Sam called her back inside.
 
She seemed to sense that Miles was somehow different from Stephan, “Our Greek teacher,” Sam explained.
 
Miles nodded amicably at that, and Sam didn’t realize how relieved she was that Miles didn’t seem to mind until she sighed.
 

As they walked there, Miles told Sam about his studio, and his book project; Sam found herself telling him the horrible manner in which David had died, something that not even his family had known.
  
“They didn’t want to know,” she said, “and I didn’t yet understand how I could tell them these things.”
 
Mabel told them both about the shells she’d found that day, and then skipped ahead of them to pick some wild
purslane
.
  
“She knows all of the wild plants,” Sam had told him.
 
“It really saves us from having to buy fresh produce.”

“I can’t imagine that would be too expensive, though,” Miles had said.
 

“Some days it is, some days it’s not,” Sam told him.
 
“With the economy being the way it is, you really never know.”

The cashier gave them the stink-eye as he slid their tray of food at them.
 
Miles chalked it up to the protests and the austerity measures that made McDonald’s a luxury, but didn’t mention it to Sam as they chose a table.
 
The playground—he was amused to find that, even here, in the middle of some tiny village in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Greece, there were playgrounds at the McDonald’s—was closed, but she was too tired to play.
 
“She goes out all day,” Sam told him as they sat down, “and runs around and plays on the beach.”
 

Mabel was disappointed to discover that her Happy Meal didn’t have a toy, or French fries.
 
Just four chicken nuggets, a small cup of yogurt, and apple slices.
 
Miles was faintly amused by it—he told them about another project he was planning, about morbidly obese children.
 
“But nobody does anything about it,” he told their aghast faces, “because people have this religiosity when it comes to the free market, and they will cling to their right to shove greasy, lard-filled crap down their throats, and down their children’s throats, rather than submit to any regulations about how much lard-filled crap they can eat.”

“To freedom,” Sam said, raising her paper cup filled with Coke.

“To freedom,” Miles agreed.
 

They were a little family in that moment, cups raised in unity.
 
On his way back to Athens later in the evening, Miles was fidgety, almost agitated.
 
He couldn’t figure out why—he’d had a Sprite, not a Coke, and McDonald’s food usually put him to sleep faster than most sleeping pills.
 
He found himself obsessing over Sam and Mabel, remembering every gesture of Sam’s delicate hands, the measured way with which Mabel watched him when he asked her what she wanted, the surprise he felt when she acquiesced to his insistence that he be allowed to pay for it—she did not strike him as being bound by the rules of chivalry.
 
He found himself wondering what it would have been like if he and Nellie had had children.
 
Would they have had a girl?
 
Would she be like Mabel?

It wasn’t until he got back to his hotel that he realized why he couldn’t stop thinking about Sam and Mabel:
 
he was lonely (maybe in love, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves there, Miles my man).
 
He hadn’t realized this because it had been so long since Nellie died, and she’d given him plenty of time to adjust to the idea of living alone, as bit by bit their lives together slipped away until it became his life.
 
The idea of sharing a life with someone again—someone as beautiful as Sam was, and as fun as Mabel—didn’t terrify him, the way it did when he first proposed to Nellie.
 
He actually wanted to do this.
 

The red glow of the alarm clock on the hotel dresser counted up the minutes and hours as he tried to dismiss the idea of being in love again after all these years, with a woman he just met.
 
But the idea wouldn’t dismiss him.
 
Sometime between two and three in the morning, his stomach stopped churning from the overly-greasy McDonald’s fare and started growling properly again, and he reached reflexively for a snack—and this time, he found his bag of raisins.
 

~~~

“I don’t know,” Mabel said.
 

Sam blinked in surprise.
 
She’d asked her daughter, the next morning, if she liked Miles.
 
Sam liked Miles—with him (as with all Yanks) there was a forthrightness in his manner, where he said what he meant and meant what he said.
 
She didn’t have to wonder if he thought she was hitting on him, or worry that she was being “too flirty”.
 
Mabel had liked Stephan instantly.
  
Why didn’t she like Miles?
 
Sam felt a twinge of doubt tugging at the corner of her newfound happiness.
 
If Mabel didn’t like Miles, could she?

Mabel, after a while of not hearing anything from her mother, skipped out of the cottage and ran to the shore, pausing only to pick up her animal- and plant-identifying guides that Sam and David had bought her last year.
 
Sam didn’t know if she ever used them—she supposed a better mother would know, but Mabel seemed happy, and so far she hadn’t poisoned them yet with the plants she brought home for their salads.
 

“Don’t forget that Stephan comes by today for Greek lessons!” Sam called after her daughter.
 
Mabel waved and kept going.
 

Sam sat down at her typewriter, knowing she should be studying verb conjugations, or writing, but her head wasn’t in it anymore.
 
The bleak depression that had settled on her as she and Mabel watched the bus pull away with Miles in it would not lift.
 
She tried to tell herself that he was just a nice stranger, but the idea felt wrong.
 
The vision of Miles standing by the stove frying eggs in the morning—that felt right.
 
He’d instinctively, without thought, reached for Mabel’s hand when they crossed the streets.
  
When their hands brushed—purely by accident—he was reaching for the fries and she wanted more ketchup—it was true that there had been no thrill, the way there had been with David.
 
Instead, it had felt extraordinarily ordinary—as if she’d been meeting with this man and eating at McDonald’s with him for her entire adult life.
 
All of which led to a grey funk when they got back to the cottage, and the three rooms and attic, which had seemed so
cozy
just that afternoon suddenly felt vast and empty.
 

She couldn’t possibly be in love, though, she thought.
 
She’d imagined that, if she were to fall in love again, it would be with a lot more guilt than she was currently feeling, guilt about betraying David’s memory.
 
But Miles didn’t inspire guilt, and it was the total clarity of her conscience that made her realize that this was, indeed, different.
 
She slid another sheet of paper into the typewriter:

I am irritated today because I think I like a man whom I just met, when I think I should be in love with the man who’s been making my life easier for the past two months.
 
The man I just met is the father I want for my daughter, but the man who’s been making my life easier for the past two months is the man I always imagined I would fall in love with at some point.
 
Yet the raisins have stopped appearing.

She tore it out, crumpled it up, and put in a fresh sheet.
 
The raisins made no sense—how to explain that they’d disappeared from her pantry?
  
Then she remembered that the verbs needed conjugating, so she set aside the typewriter and pulled out her notebook, wishing that her handwriting in Greek was less childish, more flowing, like Miles’s hair, and the how he never realized it was falling over his eyes—

Okay, stop it.
 

But it was pointless to deny that she wanted him to come back, to stay with her and win over Mabel.
 
“I want,” she whispered to herself, “The-lo.”

“What the lady wants, the lady gets.”

She looked up to see Stephan leaning against the door frame.
 
“Stephan,” she gasped.
 
“You’re early.”

He shrugged and walked in.
 
Right away, she could tell—he knew, and he didn’t like it.
 
There was a slight slouch to his shoulders, an understatement of the rage that he was holding in.
 
And as if on cue, she felt her temper starting to rise:
 
who was he to tell her who she could and couldn’t date?
 
It wasn’t as if she were his girlfriend.
 
Besides the dinners that he ate with them twice a week, and running into him on the beach every now and then (and she was always wearing a sarong and a t-shirt—he was the one prancing about in his
skintight
Speedos that left little to the imagination) they never saw each other—

“You like men?” he asked, sitting down across from her.
 
“Strange men?”

“Stephan, please.”

“Tell me, am I too boring for you?
 
Do you want to see how I can fuck you?”

“Stephan!”

“Did he—“

“He found me,” she said.
 
“He wanted to show me some photographs that were on the camera that he bought from my late husband, in case I wanted to have them.”

This seemed to stay his temper, but only for a few heartbeats, when he started shouting again, “What is he doing with your photographs?”

“Being a gentleman with them, which is more than you’re doing now,” she snapped.
 

“This gentleman—you like him?”

“For heaven’s sake, it’s not like I’m your girlfriend,” she said.
 
“Stop it, already.”

He fell silent, and for a moment she thought she’d won, but only until he said, “My friend George saw you with a strange man at McDonald’s.
 
What am I supposed to think?”

“What have you been telling your friends?” she asked.
 
“That we’re a couple?”

His face turned red with embarrassment.
 
She’d suspected as much, but until today she didn’t realize how seriously he considered their relationship.
 
What there was of it.
 
“Stephan, in all the three months that I’ve known you, you have never invited me to a discotheque, asked me to dinner, taken Mabel to the pier to go fishing—“