The Idea of Love (6 page)

“That's nice, but trust me, there's much more to this city than I can explain. Places and restaurants and bars I've never been.”

“Yeah? I went to Mulligans last night.”

“Ah.” She laughed. “There you go. That's a place I'd never go to. How many divorced or unhappily married women hit on you?”

“None. They were too busy complaining to one another.”

“And that, my friend, is why I never go to Mulligans.” Ella swirled the straw around inside her iced tea. “Okay. I better earn my drink, I suppose. But I don't know where to start. How about asking me some questions? That'll be easier.”

Blake launched into his topics for the history book that didn't exist. Founding year. Battles. Best beaches and boardwalks. He'd been using that list in the last cities and even he was starting to believe that he was writing a book. They ate and talked, sipped iced teas until they were done and Ella asked, “You don't take notes?”

He dug his fork into the remainder of his omelet. “I remember what matters most and write it down in here.” He pulled out his Moleskine and dropped it onto the table. “But I don't like to write while I'm talking.”

He needed to be careful with this one.

Her hand slid across the table. She picked up the notebook and opened it to the middle. Blake, on instinct, grabbed it back. His fork clattered to the ground.

Ella held up her palms in surrender. “Sorry. That was rude of me. I didn't…”

“No, it's okay. You can look at it if you want. I don't know why I grabbed it like that.” He held it out to her and took the chance that she wouldn't want to see it.

“No. I wouldn't want anyone looking at my sketches. I should have known better. I don't know what I was thinking.” She waved her hand toward him. “Hold on to it.”

The restaurant grew busy around them. Every table was full. Couples holding hands and oblivious to the outside world; young moms in workout clothes with their babies in fancy strollers; a white-haired man alone with coffee and a newspaper. On those tables, small Mason jars were full with gerbera daisies, Queen Anne's lace, poppies, and wildflowers. Blake absorbed the setting. It felt like a movie scene to him, something that needed to be saved. The air was almost like washed linen blowing across his face. The sunlight filtered through the branches, moss and leaves, patterns created on faces and sidewalks. He sat still, and absorbed the moment.

“A drawing,” he finally said, and tore a piece of paper from his notebook. “Try one for me.”

Ella lifted her hand to her cheek and brushed away something invisible, then looked away. “No … I'm not … I can't just do it on the spot like that.”

He handed her a pencil from the bottom of his satchel. “Then show me one of the designs you've already done. Something simple.”

The paper fluttered on the table. It would have taken flight if she didn't put her hand on top of it. She grabbed the pencil from his hand. On the paper, slowly a thin silhouette appeared and then a skirt flowing from the waist. She didn't talk. The tip of her tongue rested in the right corner of her lips, settling there while she drew. She removed her sunglasses and squinted at the drawing, twice making a small noise in the back of her throat, like a whimper.

“Nice,” Darla said as she leaned over Ella's shoulder.

Ella's hand flew from the side of the table to cover the sketch, and with a swipe, she knocked over her glass of tea. A tawny liquid spread across Ella's drawing. She jumped up with a half shout, half laugh. Darla grabbed a napkin and threw it over the mess. “Oh, no. Did you ruin the drawing?”

“It's not good anyway,” Ella said. “I was just messing around.”

Darla looked to Blake, who threw his own napkin over the mess. Ella picked up the drawing and shook it. Her dress, it moved around her small body like it was dancing on her skin. She would make the perfect character; not only would he use her story, but so much about her, the way she moved, the way she dressed, the way she—

“Hunter?”

He startled out of his reverie. “Yes?”

“You ready to go?” Ella asked.

He looked to the left for Darla. “I'll go inside and pay. I'll be right back.”

“She'll bring it out,” Ella said, but he was already gone.

He entered the caf
é
and took a deep breath, winding his way back to the men's room where he quickly wrote some notes. He wanted to remember how this all looked. How it all felt. He used to believe that he could remember every detail. Now he knows that the sooner he writes it down the better the screenplay will be. And this—after all this time—was finally something worth remembering.

*   *   *

The first lie about Sims's death had just slipped out. It had been a defense against the truth, a soft-padded denial of reality. This one? About being a wedding dress designer? It had been all too easy. Hunter didn't need to know that she sold shoes, cleaned the backrooms, and entered orders for her boss-from-hell. Ella dried off her sketch with a napkin. It wasn't the best she'd ever done, but she liked the way the pattern on the waist migrated down the skirt.

And the drowning. Anyone who knew her would have known that she was telling her mother's story. The drowning that had been accidental.

Ella's mom had fallen off the back of the boat reaching for her hat, which had blown off in the wind. It was so simple, Ella's dad told her, like it wasn't real. She reached into the air, the boat running at full speed, when she slipped and fell into the water. She didn't seem to make a splash, her father had said. Just disappeared into the wake. The hat floated away and Ella's mom didn't come up for air. The autopsy showed that she'd slammed her head into the engine as she'd come down into the water. She had been knocked unconscious almost immediately. She never knew what hit her. Ella never knew what hit her.

Sims's death was such a blatant lie that Ella was going to have to stop talking to Hunter. She could only take this so far. And there was no way to back up now.

Hunter exited the caf
é
, squinted against the sun and put his Wayfarers on. He looked like the L.A. guy he was. She wouldn't tell him that he'd fit in much better if he wore a pair of khaki shorts and a Vineyard Vines button-down. His jeans and black T-shirt were good with her. She'd had enough of preppy-Savannah-false-aristocrat to last the rest of her life.

A shrill laugh echoed across the caf
é
and Ella's stomach rolled over in what was becoming an all-too-familiar way. Ella knew that laugh from the time she'd been on the back porch drinking lemonade with Amber and Betsy a long-ago afternoon. She'd made that lemonade herself, squeezing each lemon by hand. Oh, to do that to Betsy's little head. Maybe this was the “anger stage” she'd heard so much about.

Ella turned slowly. If she didn't disturb the air, maybe they wouldn't see her. But her eyes found them just as theirs found her, all at once and with wide surprise. She froze, as if in a dream where she couldn't move. A really bad dream. There was Sims, his hand on Betsy's back, his mouth open in surprise.

They pulled in closer to each other and Betsy placed her arms around Sims, a move of ownership. Ella's world was in turmoil, a twisted metal car accident. But she knew how to save face. She turned away from them and sauntered—she would not run—toward Hunter. “You ready to go?” she asked.

“Ella,” Sims called her name. She heard it. So did Hunter. He stopped.

“Someone is calling you,” Hunter said.

Embarrassment would come later, a sick aftertaste in the back of her throat. But for now, she needed to get out of the caf
é
. She put on her best shaky smile. “Oh, I'm not in the mood for him. He's … kind of annoying. Keep walking.”

“Okay,” Hunter said. Not quite a statement. Not quite a question.

“He's an old friend of my husband's and I don't want to hear any more condolences. I'm done with false reassurance, with prayers and love being sent my way.”

“I get it,” Hunter said. “When my dad died I got more texts and e-mails and letters with ‘prayers' than I'd received in my whole life. I know they meant it, but the words started to sound candy coated.”

“Yes,” Ella said, “exactly.”

They rounded the corner and, brave face or not, Ella was starting to feel sick.

“Are you okay?” Hunter asked as she dropped to a bench. “I thought you had to go to work.”

“I'm fine.” She patted the bench. “So this park square is one of three in the town. The elementary school kids come here from half a block away. Sims and I had picnics here about once a month during the good weather, just to watch people and sit in the sun.”

Hunter sat next to her. “I'm so sorry. It must be terrible to see him on every corner.”

Oh, he had no idea.

“Do you all have kids?” he asked. “I didn't even ask…”

“No.” She shook her head. “We couldn't.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Seems like you're having to say that to me a lot,” Ella said.

“Sorry about that,” he said, and then laughed. “Comes too easily I guess.”

“Do you have kids?” she asked him, twisting to face him.

“I do. A fifteen-year-old daughter.”

“You have a fifteen-year-old daughter? Oh, God. You're in the thick of it for sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was once a fifteen-year-old daughter,” Ella said.

“Ah, so is this normal? The kind of father-daughter standoff that hits at this age?”

Ella closed her eyes for just a moment, imagining those days when she'd been so close to her mom, when her dad had tried so hard to be a part of their closed circle. She opened her eyes and looked at Hunter. “I don't know, really, if it's normal. But I know that you just have to keep being there for her.”

“Are you close to your dad now?” he asked in a voice that sounded full of hope.

“No,” Ella said. “But it's different. Very different.”

“How?”

“It's complicated.”

“Ah, it's complicated. Meaning, you don't really want to talk about it. Got it,” Hunter said.

“Thanks,” Ella said.

“Well, now for the business part of our conversation.” He pulled out his notebook. “Tell me more about your city.”

“Back in the day, whatever that means, the town was originally one square mile sitting on a bluff. They say we started the secession movement.” She spread her arms wide. “So this was the place where defiance was the definition. But still we are so small that both our movie theater and our bookstore closed.”

“So if a tourist came here, what would they do?” he asked. While she'd been talking, he had taken out his black notebook and scribbled in it.

“I don't know. Maybe go out in the boats from the marina. Paddle boarding and kayaking seem popular, too. We have a slave relic museum. Then there is the art—we have about five studios.”

“A slave relic museum? What the…”

“I know. It's odd … especially if you're from L.A. It probably seems barbaric.”

“I have to see this. Now.”

“Really?”

“Yes. It's the first interesting thing I've had to write about in a while. Take me?”

“Well, it's only a block away. We can walk there. But wouldn't you rather run by the city hall and get information and all that? I mean, don't trust me on dates and facts. There's a library with old documents and—”

“I will definitely get all those things, but before I get the facts I'd like to see the city from your vantage point.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

They walked side by side. Twice their hands brushed each other as their arms swung. She tried to see the town from his point of view, that of a stranger who had never walked these sidewalks or seen these houses. The town was like a painting, she'd once said to Amber. She wondered if Hunter saw it this way. The brick sidewalks buckled in places where the oak tree roots pushed upward, groaning against the mortar. White picket fences really did surround the yards; the gardens were riotous in their need for attention. Rocking chairs and hanging ferns dominated the front porches, almost a parody of a Southern street. Every fifth house or so was decrepit, falling in on itself with the weight of neglect. Cars squatted in those yards, grass growing underneath the metal carcasses as if for protection from a lawn mower that didn't exist. Someone would come along and buy this house, see it as a fixer-upper, and the structure would turn into a home, join the ranks of the others with kids in the front yard on plastic play toys, dogs barking, and small boxed herb gardens for the green generation.

They rounded a corner and Ella pointed to an empty building, a painted white brick structure with a crumbling sign hanging sideways:
FOR LEASE
. Above the white brick structure a marquee had three words on it:
You've Got Mail
. “That was the last movie that was here. We keep hoping someone will turn it back into a movie theater, but for now…”

“What is it now?”

“Well, all the seats and equipment were sold in the bankruptcy, so now it's just an empty building. Sometimes it's used for parties or high school concerts, but you have to stand or bring in seats.”

“Can we go in?” Hunter walked to the door and pulled at the locked doors, which made a rattling sound, groaning against being touched.

“Do you know anyone to ask for keys?” he asked.

“I do.”

“Will you?”

“Sure. It's really pretty inside. There's beautiful millwork and stars painted on the ceiling.” She walked away and then looked back at him. “You coming?”

Hunter remained in front of the movie theater, his forehead against the glass, trying to see inside. He looked so young, a little boy wanting to sneak in. He tried the door one more time and then walked to Ella.