Page 96 - In Five Years

that feels precious, rare. I feel accomplished before I’ve even had my first cup of
coffee. The whole day is better.
The return is short, no more than two miles, and when I get back the house is
still asleep. I take the gray-shingled stairs to the kitchen and edge the sliding

door open. My shirt is damp from my run—a combination of sweat and sea mist.
I take it off, toss it over the back of a chair, and head toward the coffeepot, just in

my sports bra.
Lid up, filter in, four giant scoops and an extra for the pot. It’s a full house.
I’m leaning forward, elbows on the counter waiting for the first drips of caffeine,
when I hear Bella’s feet on the stairs. I can always tell it’s her. I know the way

her body sounds. I can hear the way she walks, honed from decades of
sleepovers, her cushioned feet padding around the kitchen for late-night snacks.

If I were blind, I think, I’d be able to tell every time she entered a room.
“You’re up early,” I say.
“I didn’t drink last night.” I hear her slide onto a stool, and I take a second

mug down from the cabinet. “Did you sleep well?”
David is a silent sleeper. No snoring, no movement. Being in bed with him is
like being alone. “I love waking up to the ocean,” I say.

“It reminds me of when your parents had that place at the shore, remember?”
The coffee starts to descend in a sputtering fit. I turn toward Bella. Her hair is
down and tangled around her, and she’s wearing a white lace nightgown with a

long terrycloth bathrobe, opened, over it.
“You came there?” I ask.
She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah. You guys had it until we were like

fourteen.”
I shake my head. “We got rid of it after Michael—,” I say. Still, all these years
later, I can’t bring myself to use the word.

“No, you didn’t,” she says. “You kept it for like four more summers. The
place in Margate. The one with the blue awning?”
I take the pot out. It hisses in anger—it’s not time—and I pour her half a cup,

setting it down on the counter in front of her. “That wasn’t ours.”
“No, it was,” Bella says. “It was on the ocean block. That little white house
with the blue awning. The blue awning!”