Nantucket Sawbuck by Steven Axelrod

reconstructing an ancient city in the desert. She was making good progress. It would be criminally stupid to slow herself down with some useless infatuation.
    But that was exactly what had happened.
    She set her brush in the paint can and stepped back from the ladder with a sigh. She couldn’t concentrate this morning, and she wasn’t here to paint anyway. She was thinking about Mike Henderson all the time now. Any time when she wasn’t thinking of something specific—what to paint next, what to buy at the grocery store, what Diane Reem was saying to the author of the latest “extraordinary book” on NPR—she was thinking about Mike. Her mind was pulled there. His smile had its own gravity. She liked the tug of it, like the soft pressure on your knees and your thighs when you’re lying in bed on Sunday morning. The whole mass and rotation of the planet seems determined to keep you horizontal. She never really wanted to get out of bed and she didn’t want to stop thinking about Mike Henderson, either. It was a form of laziness. She didn’t have the energy to turn away.
    So instead she was doing this. She had gotten out of bed on Sunday morning to come here. Mike was meeting her. They were going to prime the spindles on the sweeping grand staircase. It was a two-person job, so it made sense to do it together. It also made sense to do it on Sunday when there would be no carpenters, Corian guys, electricians, plasterers, and plumbers crowding them and kicking up dust. In fact the site was deserted, just as Tanya had hoped it would be. She glanced at her watch. Mike was due any second. She bent down and untied her sneakers, toed out of them and pulled her socks off. The house was warm but the wood floor was cool. She unbuttoned her pants. Mike had been undressing her with his eyes for weeks, especially since she stopped wearing a bra under her T-shirt. Now it was time for the real thing. She wasn’t sure what she was hoping for. Did she want him to leave his wife? The morals of home-wrecking didn’t trouble her. Mike didn’t have kids and Tanya was Darwinian about marriage. Weak animals got predated by stronger ones; if his marriage was flimsy enough to be killed off by some stray girl and her ten-ounce Kegel weight exercises, it deserved to die—just like the slowest eland in the herd.
    Besides, if Tanya were doing the venal marriage hunt there was much better prey than Mike available. That was the last thing she wanted. She didn’t want to marry Mike; she could imagine him stumbling around some tiny apartment, reeling from his divorce, displaying all his bad habits and sanitary lapses at close quarters. He probably snored and left wet towels on the bed. No, it was nothing like that. It was much simpler than that.
    She pulled her T-shirt over her head.
    Maybe this would be bad and the disappointment would break the circuit in her head; maybe it would be so good that Lomax wouldn’t seem important anymore. Maybe it was just an itch and scratching it would allow her to concentrate. She didn’t know and it didn’t matter. The speculation would be over soon. She pulled down her panties and kicked them aside. She was naked in the big unfinished foyer of the Devil’s trophy house.
    After today she’d know.

Chapter Seven
    Propositions
    Driving out to Eel Point on Sunday morning, Mike Henderson found himself thinking about the old Downyflake restaurant on South Water Street, near Hardy’s hardware, which was gone now, too, making room for clothing stores and antique stores and even a luggage store. He had never understood that one. What does a tourist on Nantucket need with luggage? Something to stuff all the hideous Lily Pulitzer clothes and Nantucket University sweatshirts into? The Nobby shop across the street had changed, too.
    It was all for different reasons, Mike understood that. The Hardy’s people had just retired and cashed out. The Nobby