Page 29 of The Beachgoers
Jason reaches across the table and strokes her cheek, then tucks her hair behind an ear. “It becomes you, the sun. You look good.”
“Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself, Mr. Barlow,” she softly tells him as she raises her coffee for a sip.
He says nothing. Just watches her across the table. Sees the way the sunlight glints off her hair. Hears the smile in her voice. And wonders how an hour can pass in what seems like minutes. But he’s not surprised. That’s how their dates have gone down. The dinner date on a picnic table in New London. Their walk on the beach—and in the water—last night. And now, this. Time with Maris is too fleeting.
“We should get going,” she’s saying, motioning out the window. “It’s getting late.”
Jason glances outside. The sun is sinking lower in the sky. There’s a harbor across the street, down the block a ways. The pale sunlight glances off its calm waters, on the pleasure boats and sailboats moored there. When he looks to Maris, she’s lifting her denim clutch. “Thanks for coming here with me,” he tells her while pulling out his wallet and leaving a twenty on the table. “For a little date.”
Maris looks at him with a small smile. “It’s not over, though,” she says, tipping her head. “You’ll be my date at Elsa’s, too?”
“With pleasure,” he says, then wipes his mouth with his napkin and pushes back his chair.
“Wait.” Maris reaches over and adjusts the chain on his dog-tag necklace. “The clasp slipped down.” After tugging up the chain, she gives the tags a pat. “Good to go.”
Jason takes those gray tags in his hand. He feels the imperfections in the metal—the dings and scratches that came during war. “These got pretty banged up in Vietnam.”
“Oh, Jason. Your father fought hard in that war, didn’t he?”
When Jason nods, and drops the tags against his chest, he knows. Maris is the only reason he evenhasthose dog tags—which had been lost for years after Neil died. But right before their wedding, Maris found one of Neil’s old journals lodged behind the pinball machine in Foley’s back room. If she hadn’t, that journal would’ve gotten tossed by the crew in the demo of Elsa’s cottage. Instead, Maris gave the leather journal to Jason as a wedding gift. When he thumbed through it, he opened a string-clasped envelope behind the last page—only to find his father’s dog-tag chain tucked inside that journal envelope. Neil must’ve put it there for safekeeping, shortly before he died. So giving Jason that journal right before their wedding, it’s like Maris gave him something of his father, and of his brother, too.
After Jason tucks the dog tags beneath his tee collar now, he does something else. He takes Maris’ hand and kisses the back of it, pressing his lips to her soft skin for a long moment before they stand to leave the bakery.
