She still surfs, you can tell that by looking at her lithe, athletic body and her thick, sun-streaked, red-gold hair, at her tight white jeans, sunny yellow tee-shirt, and bare feet in flip flops, but her face is weathered and deeply lined and what she wants to talk about is her husband (you were at her wedding in that sunny meadow in the San Diego hills, remember?)—“It was a good death” she says, “Robby didn’t even speak to me the last week because he was trying to get to some state of Zen detachment so it wouldn’t be so painful for him to die and so it wouldn’t be so hard on me”—so you put your arms around her and murmur how you are so sorry you lost touch, how you’d been busy with the job, the babies, how you had no idea; but she is doing better now, she assures you, it has been two and half years, and you know what, she laughs, even though they didn’t have any kids, between them she and Robby had 14 surfboards, and then she introduces you to her new boyfriend, a lifeguard.
by Nina Zolotow
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