Salt & Flowers: Chapter Eleven

A ten p.m. phone call, a champagne bottle with no glasses, and a moon that's bigger over the ocean. No cameras, no facts reviewed, and one promise made a little too easily.

That Friday night, Samantha once again found herself staring up at the frilly canopy, thinking of unfinished business and ex-fiancés.

There were certain things she was trying very hard not to think of (and failing miserably), such as landscapers with slow smiles and impressively toned arms. She was deliberately avoiding social media, as he had begun to upload teasers of the finished areas of the project, and excitement about the small vignettes was at a fever pitch. Already knowing what the content of the video would be, instead she found herself watching him.

He was really good at what he did. As a marketer, she was impressed.

But she really needed to stop. Soon, the house would be on the market, and he’d move on to… wherever.

As if her thoughts had somehow reached him, her phone buzzed with his name.

Calling her. At nearly ten p.m.

Heart pounding, she answered.

“Tell me the truth,” Murphy said, in lieu of hello. “Were you asleep?”

“Sort of. Is everything okay?”

“Everything is fine. Everything is better than fine.” There was night sound behind his voice, crickets and a tinkling wind chime. “I’m sitting outside the Airstream with a citronella candle and my tomato plant, minding my own business, and a giant moon is about to come out of the ocean.”

Samantha carried the phone to Ida’s room, for the view of the water. She could see the very top of it: enormous and low over the ocean, gold as a struck match, laying a long bright streak across the water over the beach across the road from the house.

“Oh wow,” she said.

“Mm-hm.” He let her look for a moment. “It’s the Buck Moon. Full was Wednesday, so she rises late now, and she rises big. My granddad could of told you the whole business. It’s named for the deer, their antlers come in this time of year. Half an inch a day, fastest-growing thing in the woods, and it’s basically bone. He told me that every July of my life when I stayed with him during the summer.” A beat. “Anyway. I got to thinking there was exactly one person I know with a front-row seat, and that she was probably lying there, wide awake, thinking too hard.”

“I was not thinking too hard.”

“Okay.”

“I was nearly asleep.”

“I’ve no doubt.” She could hear the smile arrive in his voice, and then he took a breath. “So here’s my pitch, and I want you to know up front that no is a fine answer. I’ve got a bottle of champagne a client gave me back in May that’s been riding around in my truck waiting on an occasion. You’ve got a beach at the bottom of your lawn. And that moon is only going to sit on the water like that for about an hour before she gets up where she’s small and ordinary.” The crickets filled the pause. “It seemed rude to look at it alone.”

Samantha was already reaching for her sandals.

“What about the tomato plant?”

“Dolly will understand. She’s been rooting for you since June.”

“You named your tomato plant Dolly?”

“I did not name her, she told me her name, and if you’re going to be disrespectful about Dolly, I’ll take my champagne elsewhere.” A pause. “Ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She heard the truck come up the crushed stone drive soft and slow. When she came out onto the porch, he was standing at the bottom of the steps in the dark with a bottle under one arm and a quilt over the other. Not the sage blanket. Instead, it was a quilt. Old and apparently faded, though she couldn’t see it fully in the dark.

That was all. No cooler. No little speaker.

“That’s it?” she said. “That’s the whole production?”

“There’s no production.” He shifted the bottle, held out his free hand for hers on the dark steps, and she took it. “I didn’t even check the tide chart. Downright reckless.”

They crossed the quiet road, still hand-in-hand, and took the sandy cut through the dune grass, down onto the little crescent of beach. The moon was waiting for them.

It sat low and huge over the water, more gold than white, close enough to the horizon that it still looked like it belonged to the earth instead of the sky. Like she could reach out and touch it. Its light came in across the ocean in a broad rippling lane, all the way in over the low-tide flats to the wet sand, as though the whole Atlantic had been arranged to point at where they were standing. The waves came in small and unhurried. Everything smelled like salt and warm seaweed and late July.

Murphy shook the quilt out with one snap and let it settle.

“This was my grandma’s quilt. I’m thinking of them a lot tonight. My grandparents had a place on a lake,” he said, working the cage off the champagne cork with his thumbs. “Only house in my whole childhood that was a constant. We moved — Lord, we moved, every two, three years, wherever the Army wanted my daddy. But every summer, I got to go to the lake. And when the moon came up over the water, my grandmother would stop whatever she was doing. Mid-sentence, mid-card game. Walk out on the dock like she’d been called on the telephone.” The cork came loose with a soft pop that the waves swallowed. “It’s bigger over water. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

“It can’t actually be bigger.”

“I said what I said.”

He handed her the open bottle. She looked at it, and at him.

“I’d tell you I forgot the glasses,” he said, settling back on his elbows on the quilt, “but the truth is I stood in the camper holding them and decided against it. Some nights don’t need them.”

Samantha drank champagne straight from the bottle in the moonlight, and it was cold and sharp and a little foamy from the truck ride, and it was better than any glass of anything she’d ever had. She handed it back, and felt a tug low in her stomach when she watched him drink from where her lips had just been. Their fingers overlapped on the neck of the bottle a moment longer than the handoff required.

For a while they just watched. The moon lifted itself off the water by degrees, going from gold to cream, and the bright ripples across the ocean narrowed and sharpened toward them. Neither of them filled the quiet. Somewhere down the beach the tide turned. She could feel the day’s warmth still coming up out of the sand underneath the quilt, and the cool coming off the water, and Murphy, warm all down her right side.

“Can I ask you something?” she said.

“Mm.”

“Why’d you really call?”

He was quiet for a second, and when he answered, he answered the honest way, with the South unhurried and thick in it.

“Because I’ve spent two months showing you off to the whole world,” he said. “Every pretty thing in that garden, including you when you argue with me, or finally laugh at one of my jokes, and I put a camera on it and hand it to strangers. And I was sitting there tonight, remembering my grandparents, and I thought... I want one of you. A memory. Something not posted for everyone.” He turned his head and looked at her, and the moon was in his eyes, and he had never looked less like a man who performed anything. “This one I just wanted for myself.”

The waves came in. The moon laid its narrowing silver road across the water, straight in to the edge of the quilt.

“Murphy,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

“Come over here.”

He came over there.

His mouth met hers, and for the first time all summer, Samantha did not conduct a mental review beforehand.

Later, after redressing, they lay wrapped up in each other on the quilt. Samantha was reluctant to return to her thoughts, and besides, the moonglow was wrapped around them like a blanket.

“Murphy?”

“Yeah,” his voice was a little husky, a bit hoarse, and she felt a thrill at the knowledge that she had done that. He turned and looked toward her, and she couldn’t exactly explain what she felt as the moon illuminated his features.

“Are your… grandparents still alive?”

Whatever he’d been expecting, that certainly was not it. He paused for a moment, seemed to gather himself. “No. They’ve been gone awhile now.”

Uncharacteristically, he didn’t offer any more than that.

“Your parents? Siblings?”

Another long pause.

“No siblings. My parents are somewhere.” He tried for an easy smile, but for once, it didn’t seem genuine. “Why the sudden curiosity?”

Samantha considered the question and realized his reluctance. She understood reluctance. She lay there in the moonlight and made herself do the newer, harder thing instead.

“Because I didn’t ask any questions. With Bradley.” The words picked their way out carefully. “People dropped hints about him for two years. Little comments. And I decided it was gossip, because asking him felt rude, and we were happy, and look how that went.” She stared up at the sky. “So apparently now I’m the woman who lies on a beach with a man and conducts due diligence twenty minutes after — “ she gestured vaguely at the quilt — “this. Which, hearing it out loud, is a horrible thing to do to you, and I’d like to state for the record that I’m aware of it.”

There was a pause. Then Murphy laughed. It was a real one this time, surprised out of him, up at the moon, the tension going out of his shoulders with it.

“Due diligence,” he said slowly.

“I’m sorry. It’s the only language I have for — ”

“No, I know. I’m not laughing at you.” He rubbed his jaw, and then he did her the same courtesy she’d just done him, which was to answer honestly instead of easily. “Here’s the funny thing. There’s just nothing to tell. You could run my credit and call my references and it would all come back clean and boring. That’s not why I went quiet on you.” He looked out at the water for a moment, choosing. “When you grow up moving every two years, you’re always the new kid with a departure date. And you learn real quick to give people the good stories to remember you by and keep the rest of it packed up. It travels lighter.” He turned his head toward her. “It’s not a secret, Samantha. It’s a habit. There’s a difference. I’m not close with my parents because we’re just different people. I didn’t have an awful childhood. I just didn’t have a particularly good one, most of the time.”

She absorbed that.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever fully unpacked for anybody in my life,” he said, quieter, to the moon more than to her. “I’m not proud of that. I’m just telling you what’s in the boxes is mostly boxes.”

The tide moved. Somewhere out on the water, the light shifted a degree.

“You don’t have to unpack tonight,” Samantha said quietly.

“Okay.” With what seemed to be genuine relief, his hand found hers on the quilt. Some of the easiness came back into his voice, though not all the way, and he sounded a little desperate when he said, “Ask me about the lake instead. I’m real good on the lake.”

So she asked him about the lake.

And he was good on the lake. He talked with his eyes closed, one arm behind his head: his granddad’s boat, which ran on prayers so they had to paddle home half the time; his grandmother cheating at hearts so brazenly that catching her was considered part of the game; the summer he was eleven and got to stay an extra month because his father was between postings, which he had understood even then not to question, afraid to jinx his good luck. Samantha lay in the crook of his arm as his voice rumbled through them and learned him in yet another new way.

By the time the champagne was fully gone, the moon was high and small and ordinary, exactly as advertised. It suddenly felt far away.

Even without the magic, it was still the best night.

They shook out the quilt and folded it between them like a flag, corner to corner, and walked back up the sandy cut, and at the porch steps he kissed her once, properly, taking his time about it.

“One of these days,” he said, against her hair, “I’ll tell you the long version.”

“I’ll be here,” Samantha said.

It came out easily. It came out like the truest thing in the world. She thought about asking him to stay and immediately regretted that she didn’t. And it wasn’t until his taillights had gone down the lane, and she was standing alone in the front hall of a house with a listing folder in the kitchen drawer, that she realized what she’d said.

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