#summerreads2015

Everything Maria could think to do in the town she had already done.

'I mean the word dating? Doesn't it strike you funny?' 'Not particularly.'

In the end it was just a New York story.

not want to, recognized her, knew her, has her number, understood as she did that the still center of the daylight world was never a house by the sea but the corner of Sunset and La Brea. In that empty sunlight Kate could do no lessons, and the mussels on any shore Maria knew were toxic.

In the story Maria told herself at three or four in the morning there were only three people and none of them had histories, only the man and the woman and the child and, in the lamplight, the opalescent mussel shells.

Every morning in that house she would make the bed with fresh sheets. Every day in that house she would cook while Kate did her lessons. Kate would sit in a shaft of sunlight, her head bent over a pine table, and later when the tide ran out they would gather mussles together..

.. knew how the wild grass ran down to the beach and where the rocks made tidal pools

There would be plumbing anywhere she went.