Did You Ever Have A Family

June

Outside, the ocean crashes. She is dressed, her linen jacket is still on, and the bed she lies on is made. Something wakes her, and as her body tenses, she opens her eyes long enough to recognize the room, see the faintest light coming from behind the blinds. I’m here, she thinks, and relaxes again into the mattress. She pulls the pillow closer and tucks her legs toward her chest as she falls back to sleep.

The screen door slams. It is morning. The wooden folding chair she has fallen asleep on is now covered in dew. She is damp and her bones ache and he has come back. She stands and stretches and steps out of the tent onto the lawn where she met Luke four years ago when he came to clear fallen limbs after a tropical storm had blown them everywhere. It’s a disaster, she said that day, and he stopped and said, amused but with a gentle authority, as if he were speaking to a child, Oh, it’s not so bad. Not really. She remembers seeing his face for the first time and how thrown she was. How she reacted as she had before with a sculpture or installation or painting so exquisite and so stirring that she could not take it all in at once. It was the same with Luke. Eyebrow, forearm, cheekbone, neck, lower lip, eyes, bicep, mole. And the most beautiful brown skin. She had never been so struck by the physical appearance of a man before. Women, on rare occasion. Some collision of hair and skin and angle of light amid an origami of fabric and jewelry. But in faded green T-shirt and worn Levi’s, this man who had come to clear branches away presented a riddle of bone and skin and eyes that left June speechless. Oh, no, it’s a disaster all right, she remembers saying again, and how before he spoke, he smiled.

Crossing the lawn, she can see them both as they were, standing in a mess of fallen branches, the moment before meeting. Only now, damp with dew and stiff from strange sleep, does she recognize how unlikely and lucky that moment was, how she has until now taken it for granted, remembered Luke’s arrival with a kind of regret, experienced his staying as a disruption, a complication, as if love were an inconvenience thrust on her, uninvited. She had welcomed him as a disaster and she was wrong. She has wasted this time and she has held him away.

When she has crossed half the distance between the tent and the house, she wants to call out to him and nearly does, but it is early and everyone is still asleep. She will be there soon, she tells herself. Through the porch door and into the house — the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, the bathroom, wherever he is. Soon, she will find him, and for once she will not worry or be annoyed or impatient or afraid.

She hears him moving quickly through the house. He has shouted something but she is too far away to hear. It sounds like her name.

She will ask him to forgive her. And she will say yes.