busy street at a gift shop built in the form of a three-story stone-and-timber
windmill, and she stiffened, looked stricken. Travis had to guide her to a bench
in a small park, where she sat trembling for a few minutes before she could even
tell him what was wrong.
“Overload,” she said at last, her voice shaky. “So many . . . new sights . . .
new sounds . . . so many different things all at once. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said, touched.
“I’m used to a few rooms, familiar things. Are people staring?”
“No one’s noticed anything. There’s nothing to stare at.”
She sat with her shoulders hunched, her head hung forward, her hands fisted in
her lap—until Einstein put his head on her knees. As she petted the dog, she
began gradually to relax.
“I was enjoying myself,” she said to Travis, though she did not raise her head,
“really enjoying myself, and I thought how far from home I was, how wonderfully
far from home—”
“Not realty. Less than an hour’s drive,” he assured her.
“A long, long way,” she said.
Travis supposed that for her it was, in fact, a great distance.
She said, “And when I realized how far from home I was and how .. . different
everything was . . . I clenched up, afraid, like a child.”
“Would you like to go back to Santa Barbara now?”
“No!” she said, meeting his eyes at last. She shook her head. She dared to look
around at the people moving through the small park and at the gift shop shaped
like a windmill. “No. I want to stay a while. All day. I want to have dinner in
a restaurant here, not at a sidewalk café but inside, like other people do,
inside, and then I want to go home after dark.” She blinked and repeated those
two words wonderingly, “After dark.”
“All right.”
“Unless, of course, you hoped to get back sooner.”
“No, no,” he said. “I planned on making a day of it.”
“This is very kind of you.”
Travis raised one eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Helping me step out into the world,” she said. “Giving up your time to help
someone . . . like me. It’s very generous of you.”
He was astonished. “Nora, let me assure you, it’s not charity work I’m involved
in here!”
“I’m sure a man like you has better things to do with a Sunday afternoon in
May.”
“Oh, yes,” he said self-mockingly, “I could have stayed home and given all my
shoes a meticulous shining with a toothbrush. Could have counted the number of
pieces in a box of elbow macaroni.”
She stared at him in disbelief.
“By God, you’re serious,” Travis said. “You think I’m here just because I’ve
taken pity on you.”
She bit her lip and said, “It’s all right.” She looked down at the dog again. “I
don’t mind.”
“But I’m not here out of pity, for God’s sake! I’m here because I like being
with you, I really do, I like you very much.”
Even with her head lowered, the blush that crept into her cheeks was visible.
For a while neither of them spoke.
Einstein looked up at her adoringly as she petted him, though once in a while he
rolled his eyes at Travis as if to say, All right, you’ve opened the door of a
relationship, so don’t just sit there like a fool, say something, move forward,
win her over.
She scratched the retriever’s ears and stroked him for a couple of minutes, and
then she said, “I’m okay now.”
They left the little park and strolled past the shops again, and in a while it
was as if her moment of panic and his clumsy proclamation of affection had not
happened.
He felt as if he were courting a nun. Eventually, he realized that the situation
was even worse than that. Since the death of his wife three years ago, he had
been celibate. The whole subject of sexual relations seemed strange and new to
him again. So it was almost as if he were a priest wooing a nun.