Summer Lies Read Online Free PDF Page A

still, shocked. She lifted her tearstained face and put her arms around his neck. “No one has ever said anything as nice to me before. That he’s sorry for what he said to me. I’m sorry too. I yelled too, I cursed you, and I hit you. We’re never going to do that again, do you hear me? Never.”
10
    Then it was the last day. She was flying at four thirty, and he was flying at five thirty, and they ate a quiet breakfast on the terrace for the first time. The sun was so hot that it was as if the rain and the cold had just been an infection from which the summer had recovered again. Then they took a walk on the beach.
    “It’s only a few weeks.”
    “I know.”
    “Will you remember the appointment with the architect tomorrow?”
    “Yes.”
    “And will you remember the mattress?”
    “I haven’t forgotten any of it. I’ll buy a temporary mattress and cardboard furniture and plastic cutlery and dishes. If I have time, I’ll go to the storage place and see if I like any of your parents’ stuff. We’ll furnish it all together, piece by piece. I love you.”
    “This is where we met the first day.”
    “Yes, on the way there. And over there again on the way back.”
    They talked about how they’d met, how unlikely their meetings had been, because it would have been so much more natural for him to be heading in one direction and she in another,how they could have failed to connect in the seafood restaurant that evening if she hadn’t smiled at him, no, if he hadn’t looked her way, how she had found him, no, he had found her.
    “Shall we pack and then open the windows in the corner room? We still have a few hours.”
    “You don’t have to pack much. Leave your summer clothes and your beach things here, then they’ll be waiting for you next year.”
    He nodded. Although Linda and John had repaid him part of the money he’d paid in advance, his credit card charges were way over the limit. But the idea that he would have to buy more clothes in New York to replace what he was leaving here, thus running up his debt further, no longer scared him. That was how things were when you loved someone above your financial station. He would find a solution.
    With the packed suitcases standing by the door, the house felt strange. They climbed the steps as they had done so often. But they trod carefully and spoke in hushed voices.
    They slid the windows open and heard the breaking of the waves and the cries of the gulls. The sun was still shining, but Richard fetched the coverlet from the bedroom and spread it over the double recliner.
    “Come!”
    They undressed and slipped under the coverlet.
    “How am I going to sleep without you?”
    “And I without you?”
    “Can you really not fly to Los Angeles with me?”
    “I have rehearsals. Can you really not come to New York with me?”
    She laughed. “Should I buy the orchestra? And then you schedule the rehearsals?”
    “You can’t buy the orchestra that quickly.”
    “Should I call?”
    “Stay!”
    They were afraid of saying goodbye, and at the same time its imminence made them curiously lighthearted. They were no longer in their shared life and not yet in their individual lives again: they were in no-man’s-land. And that was how they made love, a little shyly at first, because they were becoming less familiar to each other again, and then serenely. As always she looked at him throughout, lost to the world, trusting.
    They drove to the airport in Susan’s car. Clark would collect it and drive it back. They exchanged details of when they would be where and how they could be reached, as if neither of them had a cell phone on which they could be reached anytime, anywhere. They told each other what they were going to be doing in the days and weeks until they were together again, and from time to time they played with ideas of this and that to do together in the future. The closer they came to the airport, the more Richard felt compelled to say something to Susan that