My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

Author:Gabriel Tallent
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

When she hears the 4Runner coming up the drive the next day, she pulls on her jeans, threads the knife onto the belt, slips into a T-shirt and flannel. Then she folds up her blankets and sets them by the hearthstones and opens the door. It is Jacob, without Imogen this time. Standing on the porch, he looks past her, and she watches him take in the scrubbed floorboards and clean counters, the scoured fireplace, frying pans hanging on hooks along the wall in the kitchen. The living room smells of powder solvent and oil.

He says, “I like the place. Spare.”

“It’s not spare,” she says.

“All right,” he says, “a little minimalist.”

“This is just how the living room is,” she says.

“All right,” he says, “I like it.”

“You should.”

“Where’s Captain Ahab?”

“Out.”

He lifts a paper grocery bag, rolled down at the top, and says, “My parents think I’m at Brett’s. Brett is at his dad’s in Modesto. I brought picnic things.”

“You ever have eel?”

“I didn’t know we had eels, but now that I know, I’m wondering why we’re not eating eels right now.”

In the kitchen she takes down a skillet and a stick of butter from the warm fridge. Then she walks past him out onto the porch and picks up a can of lighter fluid and a bucket. They go down the hill together beside a deep-cut seam in the grass running with clear water, overhung with currants and thimbleberries. Frogs leap from the grass to the water. They walk through a stand of alders and Jacob reaches up to capture an alder leaf in his fingers and his shirt rises and shows his tawny stomach. Inside the crests of his hip bones, two alluvial hollows, the top of a trim and boyish V going down into his pants. These hollows fill her with excruciating want, a sensation of almost happening, like stepping down from one stair to the next. For a moment she cannot look away.

They duck through the barbwire fence, cross the highway, and climb down to Buckhorn Beach, a broad crescent of black shingle and white foam, blue-stone causeways diked with quartz, green waves among gardens of the large, round cobbles. Buckhorn Island sits a hundred feet from the tide line, out between the two hooks of land that form the cove, and the backwash of the retreating waves funnels through the island’s cave and there meets the incoming set, booming the island like a drum, lofting slurries of white water through the blowhole, hanging foam into the island’s pines, the water slapping down onto the rock. On the southern arm of the cove, there is a redwood mansion and a gardener going back and forth with a lawn mower. These would be Turtle’s closest neighbors, within a fifteen-minute walk of her house. She’s never seen them. The sky is blustery. Beyond the safety of the cove, the surf breaks white on the bare, rocky islands that litter the coast here.

They set their picnic bag behind a driftwood log and Jacob takes off his shoes and rolls up his pants and carries the bucket out to the rocks.

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