Scorcher

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After about 10:00 A.M. it gets too hot to sit outside during July in central Florida. It was nine o’clock now, and already bright, baking, and humid. Everything warm-blooded and not working on a tan sought the shade.

On the brick veranda of Carver and Edwina’s beach house in Del Moray, the umbrella that sprouted from the center of the white metal table was tilted to block the morning sun, which was crawling up the hazy blue-gray sky over the Atlantic like a burning thing, slow in its agony. The upper half of Edwina’s face was in the shadow of the umbrella, as if she were wearing a mask. Maybe she sat that way on purpose. Though they’d lived together for almost ten months, here in the house that was actually Edwina’s, Carver still didn’t know her. There was a part of her that belonged to a past she kept private. He’d kept his ramshackle beach cottage, twenty miles up the coast, because there might be a day when Edwina would want him out of her future as well as her past. She was unpredictable that way; possibly Carver loved her for it.

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