Page 98 of Our Last Resort

“I didn’t go into details,” he said. “About…anything.”

“Okay.”

“He was just easy to talk to. Apparently, people care about that stuff.”

They do?

“Anyway, he said he’s going to think about it,” Gabriel said. “The job.”

“That’s good.”

Gabriel smiled. He really was happy. Who was I to ruin that for him?

“I mean it,” I said. “Well done.”

Howard emailed him the next day. He wanted to give things a try. Gabriel was hired on a part-time basis for a trial period of three months.

Howard was inspired. Three months after this initial offer, Gabriel went full-time.

Thus, the three great loves of Gabriel’s life were assembled: First the Romans. Then Howard. And finally, a few months later, Annie.

Gabriel and Annie’s wedding was planned for July 2012, on the first Saturday of the month. I supposed that left time for a trip to Spring Lake later in the summer.

“Maybe,” I said, the night of the wine and olives, when Annie suggested we go to the beach.

“Could be fun,” Gabriel contributed.

That was how he rolled, back then: agreeing with everything his fiancée said. He was young, smitten, silly.

But still.

“Don’t you want to go on your honeymoon by yourselves, you weirdos?” I asked.

Annie took a sip of rosé.

“Oh, we are,” she said, setting her glass down. Annie was the one who taught me how to hold a wineglass properly, with the tips of my fingers around the stem. “We’re going to Cabo for a week. This would just be a little extra.”

Those were the days. Of good times—so many of them. Oflittle extras.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll request the time off work.”

In addition to my classes, I was waitressing at a diner on Seventy-seventh and Broadway. This was my second place of employment. My first, in our earliest days in New York, had been another diner, close to Penn Station. The manager saw me crawl in one afternoon, covered in dirt and despair, and hired me as a food runner. He realized how green I was, meaning he was free to pay me cash, less than minimum wage. The waitstaff, too, saw my situation as an opportunity: I didn’t know they were supposed to tip out food runners, and no one decided to enlighten me.

My new manager paid me properly. And she gave me the time off to go to Spring Lake.

Our rental house (paid for by Annie) was a fifteen-minute walk from the beach. We couldn’t see the ocean from our windows, but we could smell it in the air: briny, salty.

Spring Lake gave me my first taste of a hot, sticky, mosquito-bite-y, citronella-candle-y American summer. I didn’t know this was what the season looked like for thousands on the East Coast. As far as I was concerned, we’d invented the whole formula: breakfast on the deck, afternoons on the beach, ice cream at night from a local store called Fancy Cow, chunks of chocolate and nougat rolling between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. That irresistible ease, bug spray on top of sunscreen, my hair in lazy braids and buns, everything tacky with humidity: our skin, our clothes, the bloated doors of our rented home.

In the mornings, Annie and I walked into town for bagels and takeout coffee, while Gabriel worked. He’d barely taken time off for his wedding and honeymoon. That week in Spring Lake, Howard was revising the first half of a new manuscript, and Gabriel had pledged to remain available.

Still, there he was. There we were, all three of us. At the beach.

I’d never seen the beach before. In the city, I’d never made it to Coney Island—the idea of roller coasters held no appeal for me, and it was far, and I was forever short on time and money. Gabriel and I did know how to swim. We’d made the effort to learn at a public pool, a specialized class for adults, the two of us mastering a hesitant breaststroke.

By the time we arrived in Spring Lake, Gabriel had seen the beautiful beaches of Cabo. He’d told me all about the ocean, his first dip in water that didn’t smell of chlorine.

I was beginning to feel left out.

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