Page 81 of Bend Toward the Sun
Without fail, before dawn each day, Rowan would sneak back up to the cottage on the hill, unwilling to let his family discover her there with him. Easier when it came time for her to leave, she’d said. Avoid misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
Harry was pretty sure it wasn’t only his family she referred to.
Tonight, on the lawn between the main house and the still-empty pool, the Bradys had a cookout. The air smelled of citronella candles and burnt sugar from marshmallows left too long over the campfire. S’mores weren’t supposed to be until later, but Dad claimed a need for product testing and quality control on the roasting sticks he’d whittled out of grapevine canes.
It was a surprise for Harry when Rowan had joined them tonight. She was down near the pond with Alice and Grey. From where he stood, she looked small, but he could feel the gravity of her presence from any distance. Sunset was a carnival of colors across the lower part of the sky, and her hair had the shine of fresh chestnuts in the waning light. She and the kids were huddled in the grass, faces illuminated by the bright white of her phone screen. Harry watched them look up and around, delightedly look back at each other, then back at the phone. They repeated it several times.
Harry approached and squatted in the grass, thumbing thebrim of his ball cap as a greeting to Rowan. “Is this a secret meeting, or can I join?”
“We’re calling frogs,” Ace whispered.
Harry scratched his chin. “How’d you get their number?”
Rowan’s shoulders shook with a silent laugh, and she showed him the screen of her phone. She’d pulled up a university audio database of frog calls, and they were using it to communicate with the real frogs in the pond and trees around them.
“Rosie, show Uncle Harry,” Grey said.
Rowan played the call of a gray treefrog. The four of them held their breath in silence, and a few seconds later, the rippling trill of several real frogs answered from the forest surrounding the water. The kids beamed, Rowan smiled, and Harry’s heart grew legs and kicked him in the lungs.
Rosie.
“Hey kids,” he said, without taking his eyes off Rowan, “Grandpa opened that bag of marshmallows.”
Alice and Grey shared an urgent look and scrambled to their feet to race up the hill.
“Don’t tell Grandma I told you!” Harry called after them.
“We won’t!” they answered in unison.
Smiling, Rowan watched them go. She then turned to him, a beautiful Botticelli in weathered khaki shorts and a white eyelet tank top. Damp curlicues of hair hugged tight to her temples, and the rest tumbled like a briar patch around her freshly washed face. Her skin was the sun-kissed gold of turbinado sugar, and Harry knew it tasted even sweeter. She was so exquisitely, effortlessly beautiful, it made his whole body hurt.
He handed her a wild violet. “I heard you yelling in the Chardonnay this afternoon. What was that about?”
She sighed. “One of the sheep got in, went rogue on a whole row. You know the one with the heart-shaped patch on her head, the one you think is so sweet? Stubborn as hell.”
“I like the cute, stubborn ones,” he said.
“Yeah, well. She might become dinner if she doesn’t cut the crap.” Her tone was dry, but her eyes twinkled.
Harry chuckled. “I think we’re playing Team Tag later. Tonight it’s boomers and Gen X versus millennials and younger. We’ll be on the same team.”
“I do have an undefeated streak to maintain.”
“Wait. You’ve never lost?”
She gave him an odd look. “Harry, I’ve only played the one time.”
“Not even as a kid? Hide-and-seek?”
Her eyes shifted downward. A piece of grass squeaked in her fingers as she tugged it from the earth. “I had a very different childhood from yours.”
Harry crossed his legs and put his elbows on his knees. “Tell me something about it. Anything.”
She began peeling thin strips from the blade of grass and didn’t answer.
“Rowan, I could draw a map of the freckles on your inner thighs. Blindfolded. But I don’t know anything about your family. We’ve spent almost every night together for the last month. Give mesomething.”
She bit her lips between her teeth and looked out over the pond for a while. Just when Harry thought she wasn’t going to respond, she ran her fingers over a dandelion blossom tucked deep in the grass and said, “See how this dandelion hugs the ground? The flower and the leaves are almost flush with the earth. Now look at the ones over there by the pond, where the slope is too steep to reach with the lawn mower. See?”