The wedding isn't for a week, and there are really no wedding preparations me and Nat could help with for a few days. Exploring the island with Luke, walking on the beaches and running down the sand dunes on the North shore, I see he is happy here. We're staying with Gramps and Gran Webb, where Luke has lived for six months now. After a cantaloupe and bagel breakfast, me and Natalie walk to Montauk, to the little shops. I buy an iced toddy and we head to the beach, where the sun is bright and hot. I start playing in the waves and Nat laughs at me when the riptide swallows my sunglasses forever. Great. I owned them a whole ten minutes. We lay like lizards on the warm sand, gratefully soaking up the rays after a long winter.
After a few hours, we go back to help Luke start moving his stuff, packing it into his giant white Ford F-250 and Ashley's little blue Subaru. They are moving into a little cottage in Amagansett, by the church they'll be married in. The trees are tall and the grass is short and soft. It sits on the the corner, a quarter mile down the street from Indian Wells beach. He keeps texting me. He wants to talk. I kick my sandals off and shake them wildly so the sand falls out of the treads and from underneath the straps. My blue shorts are dry now. They are Patagonia, which means they're expensive, and cool, I guess. I bought them on sale so I don't really care. I put on my orange Camp Barnabas shirt Nat gave me, which now has been to both the West coast and East coast. It's a bright orange. Not hunters orange, but more of a neon peach. "Give me a few minutes, I gotta get out of the house first." I send.
I grabbed more coffee from the kitchen and went outside to walk. The driveway is painful and bumpy on my feet, which have been babied and smoothed by the white Long Island sand. I'm holding a little white mug of reheated coffee. If you asked, I would say no, I don't like him, and I don't care and he hardly knows me. But even then, I smile when my phone starts vibrating. It plays a drumming sound and I wait four rings before I answer it. I sit on the curb for a few minutes and we chat, then I make my way down the private street, where it dead ends and the tall, tangled bushes part into a doorway. The gap leads to the tennis court.
The court is pale green and faded brick red, warped and washed out by east coast weather, and the lines aren't very white. Gramps built it in the '70's. It's surrounded by the wall of bushes. I sit on the smooth ground for a moment, but I can never sit still while talking, so I pace like a tiger and throw an old tennis ball at the chained link fence. I ask him about his interview and we talk about coffee and the new job and his trip to Cambodia and how he might go to New York with Yvonne next year.
I try to describe how surreal and romantic it is here, the cottage with wooden shingled siding, the church with the tall ceiling and wooden pews, the family here, the white beaches and wild hurricane waves. How everything is a little back in time and in a bubble that is both sweet and priveleged, detached from the rest of the world. I throw the ball and it bounces back to me and I throw it again. I keep missing the fence, so I have to crawl through the thick, thorny bushes bushes to fetch the damn ball and he laughs at me and has such good responses to all the dumb things I say. He knows when I roll my eyes, even though he can't see me. "I wish I was there!" He said. And I realize- I wish he was here too.
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