by Grace Palmer
Come to think of it, maybe Jared and Heather had been in her car together, laughing with the windows down and the music up and the wind tousling their hair. Maybe his hand was resting on her thigh. Maybe he’d opened the door for her and they’d fallen through it in each other’s arms, kissing madly, clinging to one another greedily and recklessly.
The thoughts tumbling through her head one after the other made Toni nauseous. She thought for a moment that she would need to pull over, or else she would crash her vehicle.
She knew full well that she was rubbing salt in a wound that was still fresh and bleeding, but she couldn’t stop herself from doing it anyway. So, in a last-ditch choice between crashing or crying, she chose the latter. She pulled into the as-yet-unfinished driveway of a house under construction and cried. Her tears plonked into her lap. It was a weirdly silent cry, a movie-star cry, not the boo-hoo, body-wracking sobs she might’ve expected.
Until, after a while, the tears stopped coming, as suddenly as if someone had turned off the faucet. In their place was a weird sort of humming, throbbing feeling, like when you’ve fallen asleep on your hand and aren’t quite sure if it belongs to you anymore or not.
She was at a crossroads in her life; anyone could see that. The question was: now what?
Before she could decide, she was going to need some time to think. Now what was a big and scary question, and it presupposed an awful lot. Even acknowledging the question meant that she was giving up on Jared. Could her marriage be saved? She still had hope in her heart—what woman wouldn’t?
But deep down in her bones, she knew that there was no chance of it. Jared had all but screamed it with his tepid “Yes, that’s it.” She wasn’t quite ready to extinguish the flickering flame of hope she still safeguarded, but anyone could see that its time was running out.
So then, back to the question—now what?
There was only one real answer. Before Toni could fully process what she was doing, she had already picked up the phone and the line was ringing.
“Hello, this is the Benson residence, Mae speaking!” a familiar voice answered.
Toni took a deep sigh. She was just about to tell Mae everything that had happened because it felt all of a sudden like far too much for one person to bear all alone.
But before she could get the words out, she heard a shuffling, rustling kind of noise on the other end of the phone, and a low, laugh-tinged rumble saying, “Who’s that, hummingbird?”
Mae shooed Henry away with a girlish chuckle as she shot back, “Well, how in heaven’s name am I supposed to find out if you don’t let me talk?” Clearing her throat, she then said back into the phone, “I’m sorry, dear, who did you say this was?”
Toni smiled bitterly. Glancing in the rear-view mirror, she saw that there was still one lone tear clinging to the tip of her nose. She swallowed and said in a bright, cheery voice that felt like it was a million miles away from the interior of this lonely car, “It’s me, hon!”
“Toni! Hello, my love. How are you?”
“I’m great,” Toni lied. “Calling with good news, actually.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I decided to come back home after all.”
Mae chirped, “Wonderful! Oh, that is good news indeed. Everyone is going to be so excited to see you. As a matter of fact…” Toni heard Mae’s breathing get a little fainter. She must be putting the phone down. She could just barely make out the muffled sound of her saying, “Brent, honey, come say hello to Aunt Toni!”
“You don’t need to interrupt—” Toni started to protest.
But she didn’t get to finish the thought before there was another rustle on Mae’s end of the line, and a tinny voice called out happily, “Aunt T!”
“Hi, sweetness,” Toni said. “How are you today?”
“Me and Daddy built the world’s biggest sandcastle at the beach!” he bragged, sounding like it was the greatest accomplishment in the history of man. “It was as big as Daddy!”
“Oh my goodness,” laughed Toni. “That sounds very big indeed.”
“And then the waves came and whooshed it all away!” He added wave sound effects at the end.
“What an exciting day.”
“It was the best day ever.”
“I bet it was, honey.”
He paused. “Are you coming for the Fourth of Joo-ly?” He pronounced the name of the holiday carefully, giving each syllable some time to breathe on its own.
Toni smiled. The tear still clung to the tip of her nose. “I think so,” she said softly. “I would love to see you.”
“Okay…” he said. His voice grew softer as he handed the phone back to his mom.
“Brent Benson!” Toni could hear Mae admonishing her youngest. “Come give your aunt a proper goodbye!”
“Bye, Aunt Toni!” called his pipsqueak little voice from far away. “I love you!”
“I love you, too, darling,” she said back.
Mae sighed. “That boy is a Tasmanian devil,” she said. In the background, Toni heard Brent roaring like a dinosaur. “I’m going to be gray in no time at all. Anyway, dear, what prompted the change of plans?”
Toni gnawed at her lip. A father and his young daughter wheeled slowly down the street on bicycles ahead of her. It was a pretty summer’s day, sunlit and endless. “Jared got caught up with a work project. It could be a big client, so we decided to just do a rain check on the lake-house trip and save it for another time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I know you were looking forward to it. But we’re all thrilled to have you home for the holiday. Does that mean Jared won’t be coming along for the ride?”
“No,” Toni said. “No, Jared won’t be there.” It felt like a sentence that held far more significance than it might have seemed. Toni found it hard to speak out loud.
But Mae, as was her way, smoothed right over that with her trademark cheer. “A shame, of course, but like I said, we’re happy to have you nonetheless. As a matter of fact, Henry just told me that he’s been shanghaied into helping Mike Dunleavy at a fishing tournament out of town, so he’s going to be gone for most of the weekend as well. The nerve of that man, I swear!”
“Now you see where Brent gets it from,” Toni teased.
“That was never a mystery, I promise you that. Okay, well, yay! Ladies and the kids for the weekend. I’m excited already.”
“Me too,” Toni said quietly. “I think I could use a little time at home.”
“Then come on home, darling. We’ll be waiting.”
They said their goodbyes and hung up the phone. As soon as Mae was gone, Toni felt like some of the warmth left the car. Even though it was a hot day in Georgia, there was a chill surging up and down her spine and along the backs of her legs.
She knew she was shutting the door on a part of her life, and she wasn’t quite sure how she was meant to handle that. There ought to be some kind of ceremony or at least a moment of reflection to mark moving from one stage to another. Something better than Jared’s feeble, “Yes, that’s it.” That didn’t do the moment justice at all.
But what was a woman to do? She was now thirty-nine, single, childless, and probably homeless to boot. Her only immediate plans for the future were to fly to Nantucket and drink a large glass of wine, not necessarily in that order.
So, with the same tough-minded pragmatism that she had done everything else in her life, Toni Benson decided to heck with it—who needs a ceremony? Who needs a cheating husband? Who needs to cry? She put the car in drive and put her old life in the rear-view.
It was time to go home to Nantucket.
6
Buenos Aires, Argentina—May 19, 2018
It has taken some time, but Toni is finally getting used to the bizarre hours by which the Argentines live their life.
Breakfast is always late, almost never before ten in the morning. And even then, it’s hardly more than an espresso and something sweet to nibble on. The porteños do love their sweets, as
it turns out (not that Toni is complaining about that!). Medialunas, the sweet and buttery Argentine riff on croissants, have quickly found their home in her heart.
Lunch, which comes much later in the afternoon as well, perhaps two or three, is also not much of a big eater’s occasion. As it turns out, they save all their appetite for dinner, which is when the national palate truly shines.
By the time Toni gets to dinner each day—which is served anywhere from 10 p.m. all the way up to midnight—she is ravenous, I-could-eat-a-cow hungry. Fortunately, eating a cow is exactly what the whole country has in mind.
No matter where she goes to eat, the table is inevitably sagging with juicy, sizzling plates of the finest meat that she has ever tasted. Asados, chorizo, mollejas, morcillas—every cut and flavor imaginable, served alongside puréed potatoes and fresh, fragrant salads. Everything is washed down with copious glasses of rich red wine. It makes the long day of minimal-calorie consumption feel worthwhile to take that first, melt-in-your-mouth bite of steak and feel the tannins of the wine simmer like a mirage on her tongue.
That won’t come until much later today, though. For now, she must content herself with a crisp, bitter espresso and the remains of her medialuna.
“Daydreaming again?” Camille asks from the other side of the table. They’re seated nestled up against the window at a charming little café in San Telmo, the more bohemian section of the city. Toni has been idly watching the pedestrians go by and fantasizing about what dinner that night might present.
“Something like that,” Toni answers with a soft smile. “Dreaming about something delicious.”
“Or someone delicious, perhaps?” her friend teases.
Chuckling, Toni shakes her head immediately. “Who, me? Never. Not I.”
But that’s not entirely true. Because, in the two weeks since the tango class, Toni has thought more than once about Nicolas. She can’t shake the bone-deep sensation that lingers from being led around the dance floor in his arms.
It wouldn’t be quite right to call it a romantic feeling. It’s more just that she has spent many, many years—ever since Jared, in fact—proving to herself that she is capable all on her own. As a result, the experience of surrendering completely to the touch and sway of another person is alien.
“Mhmm,” Camille purrs, as though she doesn’t believe Toni in the slightest. Camille made one or two comments about the night’s array of partners after they left the milonga, but Toni didn’t take any of that dangling bait. She merely laughed and said that it was a pleasant evening, but she was quite looking forward to a shower and bed. Back then, just as she is doing now, Camille merely mhmm’d and said nothing further.
“Cami…” Toni warns.
Camille holds her hand against her chest in mock offense. “Did I say a thing?”
“You said enough.”
“I said nothing. Not even a word.”
“Sometimes a noise is all it takes.”
“You are paranoid, cariño.”
“‘A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on,’” Toni recites authoritatively.
“Is that a quote?”
“William S. Burroughs.”
One of the strangest things thus far about Toni’s experience in Argentina is the discovery that there is far more time in the day than she has ever realized before. In eighteen years of running the Sweet Island Inn, she never once went to bed with a perfectly complete task list. She always supposed that was the nature of being in the hospitality business—you were never going to get it all done. But it’s now a bit disconcerting sometimes for Toni to look down at her dinner plate and realize that yet another day has whisked by and she has hardly noticed it.
So, in a strange way, this has been a retirement of a sort—although, whenever anyone she has met asks her if that’s what has brought her here, she is adamant that it is merely a trip, not a retirement, and makes sure to throw in a little bit of haughtiness to that response, as if to make clear that she has no intention of throwing in the towel on her life.
But she cannot find the heart to complain about all this newly discovered time. Time to eat, time to relax, time to do nothing at all—and so much of it! She’s at long last caught up on a reading list that was two decades old and a mile long.
She’s also taken to writing down quotes from her books that she particularly likes. Camille may have begun rolling her eyes whenever Toni offers up a new proverb or beautiful turn of phrase, but there is something nice about finding a little gem of the English language when she is surrounded day and night by so much that she still does not fully understand.
That being said, her high school Spanish has come back faster than expected. With Cami’s help, Toni has grown more and more confident at managing the little micro-interactions that life in a big city requires. Giving directions to the taxi driver, explaining her order to the man behind the counter at the butcher shop—bit by bit, Toni is finding her sea legs in the strange and wondrous ocean that is Buenos Aires.
The women sit in silence and sip their coffee for a little while. After a few minutes have passed, Camille turns back to Toni with a wicked gleam in her eye.
“So, tonight…” she begins.
“Oh no.”
“No, no, no,” Camille interrupts. “You want a quote, Toni? ‘An open mind is like an open window: it lets the fresh air in.’”
Toni starts to argue, but she stops short of saying anything. Instead, she has a sudden and jarring flashback to the night she booked the flight to Argentina in the first place.
Buenos Aires—the city of fair winds.
Isn’t that what she is seeking?
She slumps back into her seat, resigned. Camille smiles because she knows she’s won. “And you will wear the red dress again, yes?” she asks.
“Who am I to argue?” Toni says with defeated sarcasm. “Your wish is my command.”
Cami winks. “That’s the spirit, cariño.”
Which is how Toni finds herself seated in a wooden chair at the periphery of the milonga a dozen hours later. Her black heels are tapping on the dance floor with nervous energy, though she keeps her hands clasped together so they don’t tremble too much.
Just as she did last time, Camille rests her hand on Toni’s thigh and gives her a reassuring smile. “Ready?” she asks.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Your mystery man is not here, right?”
That, at least, is true. Nicolas is conspicuously absent. Toni scans the crowd, but she doesn’t really need to. She has the sense that she would know the instant he entered the room, even if she were facing the opposite direction. Something about that confident, magnetic energy of his would vibrate through her like a struck bell.
“No,” she answers softly. “All clear.”
“Clear indeed,” Camille responds. “So nothing to worry about, yes?”
“Why do I feel like we’ve had this conversation before?” Toni teases. “Déjà vu, I think you would call it.”
Camille pretends to shudder. “Darling, you are an angel, but your French accent is in desperate need of work.”
Despite the nerves she feels burbling below the surface, Toni laughs, and the two women settle into the kind of easy back-and-forth chatter that has marked their friendship since the moment they met.
Soon afterward, the bell dings, and the milonga begins. Toni finds herself dancing this first tanda in the arms of a strapping, burly older gentleman who went a little heavy on the cologne this evening.
She’s surprised by how quickly she falls into the rhythm and grace of the movements. From the first crashing strings section flowing through the speakers into the spiky rise and fall of the music, she is smiling and striding confidently. The man she’s with is a capable dancer, though he could look a little less dour. It’s a dance, not a funeral! Toni nearly cries out to him jokingly.
But as soon as that thought crosses her mind, she thinks of her brother.
With
a forceful wrench, she turns her mind back to the dance. But for the rest of the song, it keeps straying away. Back to Nantucket, to a fresh patch of grass and a gravestone she never thought she would have to see. Argentina has soothed away her pain like a mother laying her cool hand on the forehead of a child in bed with fever, but it’s still there, ready to spring upon her when she least expects it.
Even now, as she is consumed by the smell of the man’s cologne, the crescendo of each spicy, confident song, and the whirl of bodies pressing in around her on all sides, she can feel the grief eager to pounce and drag her into the shadowy corner where it lives.
She tries to smile through it. When the song ends, she shakes her partner’s hand with a forced grin and retreats to her seat at the perimeter.
“That was dreadful,” Camille says. She’s wincing as she collapses into the seat next to Toni. “Like dancing with a drunken elephant.”
Glancing down, Toni sees that there are already bruises blossoming on two of Camille’s toes. “Yikes,” she says distractedly.
Camille hears the warble in Toni’s voice and glances up sharply. “Cariño, are you okay?”
“I’m—”
The sentence dies on her lips as the doors to the room are thrown open, and who should march in but Nicolas.
His suit tonight is a dark maroon, of all things. On any other man—or any other mannequin, even—it would look garish, borderline ridiculous. But Nicolas wears it well. He transforms it into something elegant and elusive. He’s wearing a white shirt, as before, perfectly starched and open at the throat to reveal a flash of tan skin and a smattering of curled chest hair.
He pauses a step or two inside the door and locks eyes with Toni immediately. As if he knew she’d be here. As if he knew she’d be sitting in this chair, in this moment.
He doesn’t smile or wave. He just nods, and his timing couldn’t be more impeccable, because just then, the bell rings to signal the beginning of the next tanda.
For a moment, Toni considers refusing. It wouldn’t be hard, after all. She could just let her eyes slide away and find someone else. The crowd is thick tonight, and she’s already noticed more than one man eager to catch her attention. No doubt the red dress has something to do with that.
