Slow Dancing on Price's Pier (12 page)

Thea got up, unsticking her sundress from her skin, and went to the railing of the patio. A hundred pint-sized fir trees were lined up like little soldiers, the evening shadows sinking into the gulfs between rows. The air was heavy, and haze softened the distant hills so they were nearly indistinguishable from the sky.

Dani's words echoed in some deep place within her:
You're divorced now. Life's going to change
. Already, she could feel the primary purposes of her life—her reasons for living—being relegated to the sidelines. She'd felt so comfortable in her role as wife, as mother. But perhaps Jonathan was right. Perhaps she'd been operating on autopilot for a few years too long.

“Irina's been going to see her father every weekend,” she said, her back to the group. “And I'm glad he wants to be with her so much. But it feels so strange . . .”

“Why?” Rochelle asked gently.

“Irina gives me these in-depth reports. What Jonathan ate for breakfast. How the bathroom at her uncle's house has water jets in the walls. It makes me feel so . . . left out.”

“Understandable,” Dani said.

“But there's more.” Thea turned around to face them; it felt good to be talking. She hadn't realized how much she'd bottled up. “Some days she'll come home and say, ‘We all went kayaking down the river in Providence,' or ‘We all played Yahtzee and I won.' And I realize, she's talking about
all of them
—my family. Everyone getting together, but not me.”

“They can't very well invite you.” Claudine put out her cigarette on the bottom of her flip-flop. “You're split up. It would be weird.”

“Hush,” Rochelle said. She turned to Thea, her doe-brown eyes full of compassion. “Have you tried talking to them about how you feel?”

“They
must
know,” Thea said.

“You gotta speak up for yourself.” Dani's voice had gotten louder. “Are you still not talking to your husband?”

“I saw him yesterday. It . . . didn't go well.”

“Hmm,” Lettie said.

“So,
no
. I guess we're still not talking.”

“But you must see him when he comes to get Irina,” Dani said.

Thea shook her head. “Garret picked her up again this morning. Which means Jonathan's back to giving me the cold shoulder. I think it's meant as punishment. The silent treatment, with the added bonus of making me deal with Garret—who is not exactly my biggest fan.”

“The brother? Is he a jerk to you?” Rochelle asked.

“No more than could be expected.”

“Still acting like a child,” Lettie said, shaking her head. “And after all this time.”

Thea laughed a little to herself. “He once said marrying me was the worst decision Jonathan ever made.”

“Good Lord,” Dani said. “The man's a beast.”

“No,” Thea said. “Just hurt. The point here is that the whole situation feels terrible. To know that the family—my family—is going on these outings without me. It makes me feel so alone. There's a gap in my life—a pit—that used to be filled up by them. But that's not the worst of it.”

“What's the worst?” Dani asked.

Thea scrutinized a spot in the center of the table. A breeze rolled over the hillside, but did nothing to cool her down. “The worst is knowing that as hard as this has been for me for the last few weeks, this is how Garret must have felt
for years
.”

“He thinks you stole his family from him,” Lettie said.

“Yes.” She looked over her shoulder, where the orange of the sunset was fading to blue. “And maybe I did.”

Thea's mother had never been a gentle woman. When Thea was sick, her mother's voice was like sandpaper on glass. When Thea was upset by something that had happened at school, Thea's mother rarely showed sympathy with kind words and soft smiles.

And yet, a person who thought Thea's mother was gruff would be wrong. Her tenderness came in different ways. On days when Thea was not feeling well, she would go to her daughter with bowls of broth, with strong black tea, with bread that steamed from the oven. When her parents fought, Thea knew she and her father would eat like royalty for at least a week—her mother cooking the richest foods, buying the best cuts of meat, preparing desserts and candies to make her mouth water.

She would not accept refusals.
Take this. Eat. Drink.
Only as an adult did Thea come to understand the deep satisfaction that came from offering another human being the fleeting pleasure of good food.

Newport on a weekend evening during summer vacation had no patience for adolescents who could not yet drive, and so Garret, Thea, and Jonathan had been forced to improvise. The evenings buzzed with an energy Garret hadn't quite been able to put his finger on—something adult and off-limits, something to do with sex and alcohol and jokes that went over his head. On those nights, all he and his best friends could do was watch from the sidelines as Newport swung into high gear, the parties revving up around them but without them.

When they were bored, they sat on the grass in the park and spied on the various groups of people who rented out the fire hall for music and dancing. Different communities showed up on different Saturdays—sometimes Asians, sometimes Latinos, sometimes people speaking a language that Garret couldn't identify. The lights in the hall blazed through wide-open doors—a bright, warm glow against a cooling blue evening—and from across the street, Garret could glimpse the occasional girl in a bright skirt and listen to the cheerful beat of a salsa band. If the mood struck her, Thea would take off her shoes to dance and spin in the grass.

“Why don't your parents hang out with the other Turkish people?” Garret had asked her once.

“Because we don't know any in Newport,” she'd said.

For Garret, going over to Thea's house was always an experience. Her parents were friendly enough, but their mannerisms threw him off. Her father was loud, and he always wanted to talk about the exchange rate—which Garret knew nothing about. Thea's mother was doting to the point that it made Garret uncomfortable, but he'd learned early on never to tell her
no.

At other people's houses Garret got to eat pizza and hot dogs, but at the Celiks, he had to choke down lukewarm, vegetable-laden meals: white beans and tomatoes in olive oil, raw meatballs, wheat salad with onion and mint, and fifty kinds of eggplant. Only the dessert made up for the strange dinners; he, Jonathan, and Thea would wait eagerly for colorful little squares of Turkish delight or baklava.

Occasionally Garret could see the Celiks' culture in Thea's behavior, like when she insisted that he put a knife or scissor on the table instead of passing it directly to her, or when she wore a little blue bead at her wrist to keep away the evil eye. But mostly, Thea was as different from her parents as water from stone. She didn't have her parents' accent and couldn't speak their language. When she got in trouble, her parents accused her of “being too American.” Garret couldn't help but feel she fit in better at his house than she did her own.

“Do you wish there were more Turkish people in Newport?” Jonathan had asked her one night while they sat waiting for the Saturday revelers to begin filling the fire hall.

Garret had held his breath.

“Nah,” she said. And she punched Jonathan so hard he had to rub his shoulder. “Why would I? I have friends like you.”

There was a long line on Saturday morning at the coffee shop when Garret arrived to pick up Irina—at least three families, and tourists probably, given their shopping bags and amped-up chatter. The small room was warm despite the buzz of the air conditioner, and he listened, sweating, as the people in line before him hemmed and hawed over the menu, running their choices past each other, changing their minds.

From behind the counter Thea caught his eye, and he did what he could not to shift his weight, not to glance away, not to give any indication that she affected him. Her hair had been pulled back at the top, and the rest fell gently around her shoulders in waves. She wore no makeup, but she was beautiful nonetheless—dark eyes offset by darker lashes, the glow of her skin from heat and work. She went about her tasks—a young woman with a pierced eyebrow working beside her—with studied focus. But he knew she was aware of him. She
always
was. He knew because he felt it too—that magnetism that was something more than attraction. A compulsion. A pull.

He closed his eyes for just a moment. When he was a kid, running down the alley to the coffee shop's door had been like falling down the rabbit hole, an escape into some enchanted kingdom. And now, all these years later, he still had that slightly heady feeling of possibility and desire and allure creeping up on him—though it was no longer the illicit thrill of sneaking sips of coffee that compelled him. It was something far more intriguing and disallowed.