Therese Fowler - Souvenir

Now he pointed to the side of the gravel road, indicating that he was pulling over.

‘You’re not done already?’ Val said when she came to a stop next to him.

The sun pressed heavy on his forehead, forcing sweat down the sides of his neck. He wiped it away. ‘’Fraid so,’ he said.

‘We aren’t even close to finishing the tour.’

He snorted. They’d been out since seven-thirty, and it was closing in on two o’clock. Lunch had been fried plantains and some fizzy fruit soda at a roadside stand. ‘Feel free to go on, but I’m heading back to the villas.’ There was a terrific bar there, and, should he happen to consume a drink or two more than made it safe to ride, he’d already be ‘home’.

Val pushed her sunglasses up onto her shaggy white-blond hair and squinted at him. ‘Okay, I’ll go back with you – if you make it worth my while,’ she said, grinning that same provocative grin she’d used on him the night they’d met, in LA at the launch party for his latest CD. He’d seen thousands of come-hither smiles over the years, but hers was different. Confident – but not threatening, the way some women’s were. Some women were so aggressive they scared him. Val, who at twenty-two was already world famous in her own right, had enticed him with a smile that made him feel like he could reciprocate without remorse. He’d had his share of remorse over the years, and a few extra portions for good measure.

He shook his head, admiring her brilliant hair, the long, lean muscles in her thighs and arms that were products of uncountable hours of surfing and training. She’d won her first junior championship at fifteen, had her first endorsement contract a year later. ‘You’re awfully easy on me, you know.’

‘I know,’ she agreed.

‘It’s a real character flaw.’

‘I never said I was perfect.’ She pushed her sunglasses down and turned her motorbike back toward their resort, a collection of luxury villas on Nettle Bay. ‘Catch me if you can!’

THREE

Meg left her father’s apartment and stopped to admire how the setting sun glowed through the moss-draped branches of live oak trees. Spring was in full force, honeysuckle snaking its fragrant way into the trees, azaleas of fuchsia and pink and white and lavender lining the sidewalks and underlining windows. Spring was Meg’s favorite season, but Brian, with his allergies, hated spring. Messy pollen and drifting seeds, messy flower petals. He’d had their home builder clear a fifty-foot perimeter around their house when it was built. Without trees to shade the house, their electric bill was outrageous. He didn’t care; ‘That’s what money’s for,’ he’d say.

In the parking lot, as Meg dug out her keys, she noticed a strange weakness in her right arm. She struggled to raise the arm, to aim the remote at her six-year-old Volvo, feeling as though her arm had become weighted with sand. Bizarre.

A very long day , she thought, walking the remaining twenty feet to the car. That awkward twins delivery just before lunch must have strained her arm – and those damn speculums she was trying out, some new model that was supposed to work easily with one hand but was failing to live up to the product rep’s promises. Three of them had jammed open this afternoon, causing her patients discomfort and embarrassing her – and, she’d noticed at the time, making her hand ache in the effort to get them to close.

She squeezed her hand around the remote, then tried the button again. Her thumb cooperated, and the odd feeling in her arm began to pass. Once inside the car, she sat back with a heavy sigh and directed the vents so that cold air blew directly onto her face. The prospect of a shower was as enticing as diamonds. No, more enticing; diamonds had little practical value on their own, and almost no value to anyone unable to see them. A shower, though, offered universal appeal: wash away your cares, your sins, the evidence, the damage, the residue – whatever it was you needed; she would choose a well-timed shower over a diamond any day.

As she flexed her hand, she looked at the bag of notebooks where she’d set them on the seat beside her. Opening the bag, she saw maybe a dozen blue composition books, a neat stack tied up tightly with the same all-purpose twine she’d seen, and used, everywhere on their farm when she was a kid. Twine was almost as good as duct tape for making what were meant to be temporary repairs, but which inevitably became permanent.

The notebooks looked almost new. Likely her father had found them in a recently unpacked box – leftover office supplies, unneeded in his full-time ‘retirement’. As if he was the one who’d kept the business records to begin with.

The clock on the dash read seven-forty, and Meg’s empty stomach growled in response. She would stop by KFC on her way to get her daughter from the library, where Savannah and her best friend Rachel were hanging out. Supposedly. Supposedly they had a biology project to research, but she doubted this. They could research almost anything from the computer at home. Knowing Rachel – a bubbly girl whose existence disproved the theory that blondes were the airheads – there were boys involved, and the library was just a staging ground that the girls imagined would fool their parents.

Who might the boys be? Savannah revealed so little about her life these days. Somewhere between getting her first period and her first cell phone, Savannah had morphed from a curious, somewhat needy, somewhat nerdy little girl into an introverted cipher. She was nothing like Meg had been as a teen, which was a good thing. Savannah was just as reliable, but not as caught up in all that boy–girl business. Not grafted onto the heart of a young man who would later hate her for betraying him. Not, Meg hoped, destined to live with her own heart cleaved in two.

Razor sharp, some memories were.

She pushed the past away and sat another minute in the air-conditioning, stealing just a little more time for herself before moving on to her next work shift. Food. Kid. Reports. Case studies. Thirty minutes on the Bowflex, if she could dredge up the energy – or maybe she’d just spare her arm, let it have another night off. And now that it was feeling nearly normal again, she put the car in gear and headed for the library.

FOUR

Carson watched the sun easing itself closer to the low mountains, a glass of sangria in front of him on the thatch-covered outdoor bar. Val had gone to work out with Wade, her trainer, leaving him alone with his musings. He was accustomed to being alone with his musings, had produced some of his best work this way. But this afternoon, the musings were neither creative nor as positive as a man who’d just made love with a vibrant younger woman ought to be having.

Though the bar was shaded, he kept his sunglasses on, along with his ball cap – the ineffective disguise of celebrities everywhere. St Martin wasn’t as rife with fans as most stateside locales, but he’d been approached for autographs seven times already in the two days they’d been there. This, however, wasn’t the reason for his moodiness; in fact, he was having a tough time identifying what the reason was. He had no reason to be moody whatsoever: in addition to having just had sex, he’d recently won two Grammy awards, his Seattle condo was under contract for more than the asking price, his healthy parents were about to celebrate their forty-third wedding anniversary, and he would soon marry a woman who didn’t hold his unseemly past against him – a woman who’d done two Sports Illustrated features, who could have pretty much any man she wanted. Maybe it was this last part that was hanging him up.

‘I know doing this is a cliché,’ he said to the bartender, a short-haired buxom brunette, ‘but let me get your opinion about something.’