“You've got more in the car?” Bea asked him.
Nate nodded. “Three buckets and the empty jars.”
“I'll help,” I said.
I stood too quickly. The chair leg scraped the floor, and Mother looked up from the flowers.
“Finish your tea first, Lucy.”
“It's finished.”
It wasn't. I wanted to get out of the kitchen before my face did something I couldn't explain.
Bea picked up the car keys from the counter. “Come on, then.”
I followed her through the hall, expecting Nate to follow us. He stayed with Mother, who wanted to know whether the buckets had scratched his car.
Outside, the air felt hot after the kitchen. Bea opened the boot of Nate's small grey car. There were cardboard boxes beside the flowers, packed with newspaper to keep the jars from knocking together.
She held a bucket out to me.
“Can you take this?”
I took it. Cold water splashed my wrist.
“Bea. I need to talk to you about him.”
She looked at the open boot, then back at me.
“I know you've only just arrived.”
“That isn't what I mean.”
“I know.” Her voice was softer. “Let's get this inside. We can talk properly after supper, upstairs. Just us.”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight,” she said.
She didn't ask what I wanted to say. I noticed that, but she knew me well enough to see that something was wrong. And I didn't want to explain Nate while standing in Mother's front garden, where she could lean through a window and tell me how I felt.
I carried the bucket in. Nate moved out of the doorway to let me pass.
“Heavy?” he asked.
“Manageable.”
He took a step toward it, then stopped when I kept walking.
The kitchen had become a flower shop. Mother was dividing stems according to a system that involved laying them in small piles and sighing when anyone touched the wrong one. Bea cleared a place on the table, spread out a towel and put me in charge of washing the jars.
“Who ate all this jam?” I asked.
“Don't question people's sacrifices,” Bea said.
“I'm concerned about their teeth.”
Mother gave me a box of squat jars with labels still attached. “Those first. The tall ones are for the back.”
“The flowers at the back will think they're more important.”
“They are,” she said, and returned to her piles.
Bea laughed. I almost did too.
It would have been an ordinary afternoon if he hadn't been there. That was the awful part. Bea getting water down her shirt. Mother trying to make a flower stand still. Me complaining about glue because Bea had always found my complaining funny.
And Nate, my sister's fiancé, carrying boxes through the door.
Nathan.
When Bea first used the name on the phone, I had asked her. I hadn't forgotten that Nate could be short for Nathan.
“Not my Nate?” I'd said, making it sound like a joke. The words my Nate had felt stupid even then. He hadn't been mine for almost two years.
“You haven't met the man I'm marrying,” she'd told me. “How's work? Is that woman still asking for a sea view from the room at the back?”
I had let her change the subject. I'd been relieved. Nate was a summer I tried not to revisit, and Bea was the person who'd helped me get through the end of it. I had trusted her answer more than I trusted a coincidence in a name.
I looked at her now. She was stripping leaves from a stem, her thumb moving neatly down its length.
He set another box on the counter beside me.
“These need washing too?”
“Only if we want clean ones,” I said.
His mouth moved at one corner.
I hated that I saw it. I hated more that I wanted the rest of the smile.
I turned on the hot tap.
He had always made a joke look like an offer. Something we could both enjoy if I would meet him halfway. The first time he'd asked me out, I'd told him I wasn't spending my afternoon watching him fail to skip stones. He'd said we could spend it watching me fail instead.
I had gone.
Now I scraped a label with my thumbnail until it rolled into a grey lump.
“You work at a guesthouse?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Bea said you've got a permanent job there.”
“That's right.”
“Good.”
I glanced up. He meant it, or was very good at looking as if he did. There was no suitable answer to that from a man who'd said it was nice to meet me.
Bea reached between us for the washing-up liquid. “She'll have her own room next week. We need to visit before she's too grand to answer her phone.”
“You can visit,” I said.
The word you came out sharper than I'd intended.
Bea pressed her lips together and squirted soap into the sink.
Mother asked Nate to move the boxes away from the oven. He lifted one, catching its corner on a tall jar I'd stood beside the draining board.
The jar tipped.
I grabbed for it. So did he. His hand caught the glass at the neck, mine caught the base, and between us we held it sideways over the sink.
“Excellent,” he said. “We've saved an empty jam jar.”
“It had everything to live for.”
Then we looked at each other.
For one second he forgot to be formal. His smile came all the way out. I knew that smile. I had caught a falling bottle with him once outside the corner shop, our hands meeting in exactly this awkward way. We'd congratulated ourselves on preventing a terrible lemonade disaster.
He remembered. I could see it.
My fingers loosened. He set the jar upright and stepped back.
“Sorry,” he said.
Bea was watching from the table. He turned toward her.
“Where do you want the last bucket?”
“By the door.”
Her answer came quietly. She looked down and gathered the stripped leaves into a pile.
I dried my hands on the towel. I hadn't imagined his face when he walked in. I hadn't imagined it now.
He was pretending.
The last bucket contained pale roses. Bea bent to lift it, and Nate got there first.
“Your wrist,” he said.
“It's fine.”
“It's been fine since Friday. Let it be fine without carrying this.”
She let him take it. While he set it by her chair, she brushed a leaf from the back of his neck, an easy little movement he didn't seem to notice.
I looked away.
They weren't two people who had met for the purpose of ruining my afternoon. They knew each other's sore wrists and untidy collars. My sister had fallen in love with him. Whatever I said upstairs tonight would go into the middle of that.
Mother inspected a jar I had washed.
“Very good. We don't need any more sticky disasters.”
She set it down and nudged the tallest flowers toward the back. “Those are begging for attention. We don't want them blocking everyone's view.”
“They haven't learned manners yet,” Bea said.
I reached for the next jar while Mother adjusted the stems.
By supper my fingertips were wrinkled and the kitchen table had vanished under clean glass. Nate went out to put the empty buckets in his car. Bea checked the oven while Mother counted chairs in the garden.
For the first time since his arrival, we were alone.
“Still tonight?” I asked.
Bea shut the oven door.
“Of course. Go up when we've eaten. I'll finish down here and come to your room.”
I searched her face for the sister who'd held my hair away from my wet cheeks two summers ago.
She reached for my hand.
“I'm glad you're here, Lu.”
Her fingers were warm and rough from the stems. I wanted to believe that was the thing that mattered most.
“Then listen to me tonight,” I said.
“I will.”