Late in the Season by Felice Picano

and red maple trees that grew like mad in the community all came from the Orient, he told her. They weren’t indigenous. They’d arrived as saplings, even as seedlings; gifts for wives and families. Some were a hundred and thirty years old. As were some of the large old houses on the other side of town—built by smugglers and stolen goods fences, low-life pirates whose descendants had become millionaires, stayed long enough to have streets named after them, then moved away.
    He pronounced the meal a complete success—and she thought so too.
    The warm night rustled indoors, touching his fine curly hair, making it glitter a strand at a time in the candlelight. His eyes were huge and dark and compelling.
    He hadn’t said anything about how she looked, so she decided to bring it up in a roundabout way, by telling him that if she’d invited Bill Tierney instead of him, Bill would have dressed all wrong for the occasion.
    Jonathan almost frowned; then, casually, with the wineglass tipped up to his mouth, in preparation for a sip, he said:
    “One of the few advantages of aging is that generally the older one gets, the easier it is to figure out what to wear.”
    “You make yourself seem as though you’re a hundred years old!” she protested.
    “I recently read that people’s height begins to decline after the age of thirty-five. That means I’ve already begun to shrink. Horrible, huh?”
    Unwilling to allow him to belittle himself, she said, “I think you’re beautiful.”
    There was an embarrassed momentary silence.
    “Thanks,” he said. “I wasn’t fishing for a compliment.”
    “ I was.” She stood up, taking the dishes.
    “Didn’t I say how marvelous you looked?”
    ‘‘No.’’
    “Well, I thought it.”
    “I can’t read your thoughts,” she said. “Coffee?”
    When she returned to pour it, he was standing out on the deck.
    “You aren’t angry at me, are you?” he asked.
    “No-o. Of course not.”
    “It’s really a great night,” he said, more softly. “It hasn’t been a terrific summer for weather. Too much rain. It was cool most of July. We used blankets at night, as late as the first week of August. Damp, muggy, misty: weeks at a time. But it’s going to be really fine from now on. Better than all the rest of the summer.”
    Odd; Stevie had thought exactly that this evening, watching the sunset, the geese flying.
    “If it doesn’t storm again,” she said.
    “It won’t.” He replied so firmly, she asked how he could be certain. She wished she could see his eyes as they spoke. How could she steer him back inside where they could look at each other? So much seemed to depend on that.
    “I’m used to feeling out the moods of places I know,” he said. “It’s a telluric connection; as though a plumb line were dropped down from inside me, right into the center of the earth, with everything—the weather, the life placed around us—in a certain relationship. I don’t feel this everywhere, of course. Not in the city, for example. Here at Sea Mist, I do.”
    He was the one who turned and led her inside then, where she refilled their coffee cups. Facing him over the flicker of candlelight, Stevie felt better; he’d seemed so distant out there for a minute.
    “You know something,” he offered, apropos of nothing in particular, “you remind me of another girl, a girl named Fiammetta, in a story I’m working on.”
    “A new show?”
    He seemed surprised at her question. “Yes. A new one.”
    “I loved Little Rock. I saw it twice. Downtown, and when it moved to Broadway.” She almost immediately regretted her gushing. The last thing she wanted was for him to think her a groupie. “Everyone is recording ‘Unreal,’ you know,” she added, hoping to make good her error.
    “Not everyone,” he said, barely holding back a smile.
    “Everyone is. Come on. It’s all right to be proud about that.”
    “Billie Holiday isn’t recording it.”
    “She’s dead. Even I know