Page 20 of Spring Showers

“Yes. So, answer my question. What brings you out here?”

“I, um...”Usually had a canned answer ready to go. “Work.” It wasn’t a lie, though he was certain she would ask more questions. He beat her to the inevitable. “I needed a break from the day-to-day grind. This place seemed like a good way to do that.”

“And what is the grind?” she asked as Anne returned to the table with a modest dinner sampling on her plate.

“I’m a consultant,” he said, knowing it was easier to weave as much truth into his ruse as possible than risk getting caught in a lie. “It’s a good job. I get to travel a lot.”

“Oh,” Anne said between bites of thinly sliced beef that dripped with gravy. “We love to travel. That’s all we do now that we are both widows and retired.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and he was. “It’s difficult to lose someone you love.”

“Speaking from experience?”

He pinched his lips tightly and nodded as the image flashed in his mind of the woman he had loved once. She had taken the key to his heart with her to the grave. At risk of feeling emotions that he had been avoiding for longer than he could admit, he stood from the table. “I think I’ll get some food now.”

Anne placed a hand on his shoulder the way people do when they truly understand the deep hurt hiding under the surface. He appreciated the gesture and didn’t know why now, after nearly ten years, he had chosen that moment to call up his wife’s memory. The pain that he had so expertly disguised beneath the mask of an international corporate consultant with no time for love or fancy was surfacing with force.

He blinked away the moisture fogging his eyes and bowed out of the lady’s presence. At the buffet, Grant looked at the food, though he was seeing past it. He mindlessly picked and spooned each item onto a plate, numb to his appetite.

“It’s the darnedest thing,” Thandie said as she bumped shoulders with him, tearing him from his solitary contemplation. “I went to talk to the chef, and no one was in there.”

“What? What did you say?” Grant said as her words sunk in. “Oh, the chef was out here. You didn’t see him introduce dinner?”

Thandie looked over her shoulder into the dining area as though she was wanting to spot the chef. “I just don’t get it. It’s as though he, I’m pretty sure he is a he, I barely saw him through a curtain of fettuccine yesterday?—”

“He. And we think he’s Italian.”

“We?”

“Margret. She’s some sort of linguist, and she thinks he’s Italian.”

“I hear she’s just nosey,” Thandie whispered as she filled her own plate. “But don’t tell anyone I said that.”

Grant pinched his lips and mimed turning a lock. Her laugh was the sweetest reprieve from his depressive reverie about his loss. “Your clandestine gossiping is safe with me.”

“Thank you,” she said and scooped the tomato and basil salad onto her plate. “This is the strangest collection of food I think I’ve ever seen. There’s Mediterranean, sushi, and whatever that is, and this—” She held up something on a skewer that looked like a banana dipped in barbeque sauce and sprinkled with chopped cauliflower. “What is this?”

Grant pointed at the table. “That is squid-ink risotto, and that is broccoli rabe. This,” he held up the skewer, “is corn on the cob. Though I’ve never seen it prepared this way.”

Thandie stopped all movement but her eyes. Astonishment stretched her face, and her eyes were wide. She put the skewered corn back on the tray. “I hate corn on the cob. If I never see another ear of corn again, I’d be perfectly happy.”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t like octopus, and there it is.”

“How do you know what all these things are? Are you a chef too?” Thandie asked him.

This time, Grant laughed so loud that the room quieted, and the guests turned their attention to him. He addressed the group and waved them off as his laugh subsided.

“What is so funny?” Thandie asked. Her hand went to her hip, and he could see heat rise in her cheeks.

He merely pointed at the buffet. Little chalk board signs sat in front of each item and described the menu. “I can read.”

Thandie grunted, and Grant realized he might have teased her too far, given their rocky start on the hiking trail.

“I honestly didn’t even notice the little signs. I suppose I was just so hungry, not to mention puzzled by the vanishing chef, that I was mindlessly filling my plate.”

“I know the feeling.” Grant looked at his own plate and then to her nearly identical one with one of each item neatly arranged around the rim. “Do you want to sit with us? There’s an empty seat.”

Thandie looked around him at the table where Margret and Anne were sitting, and back at him. “Sit with the cool kids? On the first day?” A grin. A giggle.

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