The Gooseberry Trellis

Vikki Larsen, forty-four years old and a nurse at the clinic for the better part of two decades, parked her ancient blue Corolla at the top of the hill and looked down at the Gooseberry Trellis glowing in the dark like something out of a travel brochure, all strings of lights and gooseberry vines catching the breeze, and she thought, well, this is either going to be wonderful or a complete circus.

"So how's the house feel?" Dot asked from the passenger seat, wrestling her purse strap loose from the seatbelt like it had personally wronged her. "Quiet?"

"Quiet enough to hear the refrigerator humming at three in the morning," Vikki said, easing out of the car. "I actually stood in the kitchen listening to it. Thirty years old, that refrigerator, and it's the only man in my life who never lets me down."

"Oh, please," Joy laughed from the back, climbing out with her big sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though it was nine at night and dark as a pocket. "You raised three kids. Two are out the door, one's at orientation week as of Sunday, and you have earned every loud, ridiculous night of this. You have earned it like a medal."

Her youngest, Ben, was eighteen and off at orientation week, texting her photos of his dorm room with a plastic mattress cover on it and one sad pillow, and she had cried a little in the car when she dropped him off and then cried a little more in the driveway at home, and then she had called her friends and said the two words she'd been waiting to say for months, which were girls' night, and here they were.

The three of them started down the gravel path toward the entrance, and that was when Vikki heard the motorcycles. Not a couple of motorcycles. A rumbling swarm of them, parked in a line along the road shoulder that stretched almost to the bend, chrome catching the lights, and Dot squinted down at the row and said, "Oh no. Is that the club? The Ironsomething? The ones whose clubhouse flooded?"

"Their septic aerator failed," Joy said, in the tone of a woman who read the parish Facebook page like a newspaper. "Tuesday. The whole party got moved here last minute, apparently. Half the restaurant is theirs tonight."

"So the other half is ours," Vikki said, and squared her shoulders, because she had worked twenty years of night shifts, and she was not going to be intimidated by a hundred leather jackets and a band that had apparently never learned where the volume knob lived.

Inside, it was warm and loud and the smell of grilled fish and rum came off the kitchen in waves, and the open-sided dining rooms hung with vines were packed, and half the floor was genuinely taken over by the motorcycle crowd, big men and their partners laughing too loud, someone's helmet on the bar like a centerpiece, the poor staff weaving through it all with trays held high like they were crossing a river on stepping stones. But the far end, the quieter end under the big trellis where the dance floor was, still had space, and the three of them claimed a table with the aggressive confidence of women who had been coming here since before some of the servers were born.

They ordered the first round, and they ordered the second round, and somewhere in between Joy told a story about a doctor at the clinic who wore the same tie every single Thursday and Dot laughed so hard she snorted into her punch, which set them all off again, and Vikki felt the last of the week's tension drain out through the soles of her sandals. This, she thought. This was what she'd been missing, or not missing exactly, but waiting for, saving up.

It was when she got up to fetch the third round herself, because the waiters had all vanished into the motorcycle half of the room like divers into deep water, that she saw him.

He was standing at the far end of the bar, up on the quiet side, a tall man in a rolled-sleeve work shirt with a spice-export company logo stitched on the pocket, a group of coworkers around him who looked like they'd come straight from a shift, and he was laughing at something one of them said, and then he turned his head, and Vikki stopped walking.

Jacques. Jacques Hannigan. She knew it was him the way you know your own handwriting.

She was twenty-two, newly hired, working the bar at a little place in Fort-de-France, and he was twenty-three and came in with a crew on Fridays, and for one whole season there had been this thing between them, this warm, humming, unfinished thing, every Friday night, him at the end of the bar, her pretending to wipe glasses that were already clean. He had finally worked up the nerve one night near closing and told her she had a smile that reminded him of the first day of the dry season, and she had frozen, absolutely frozen, said something dumb about the ketchup, and retreated to the kitchen, and by the time she'd talked herself out of her own panic he had stopped coming. Twenty-two years ago. Twenty-two years, three kids, one whole marriage and a civilized divorce, and she had never once forgotten that stupid, lovely line about the dry season.

And there he was, forty-five years old now, a little gray in the beard, forearms that said he still worked with his hands, standing under the string lights like the past had walked in and ordered a drink.

Dot found her standing there holding two empty glasses and no drinks.

"You okay? You look like you saw a ghost."

"Worse," Vikki said, and nodded toward the bar. "You see that tall one, in the work shirt? Gray beard?"

Dot peered. "The one laughing?"

"That's Jacques."

Dot's face did the thing. Dot had heard about Jacques. Everybody who had ever had a rum punch with Vikki had heard about Jacques, the great unfinished what-if of her youth, the man she'd frozen on and regretted at a frequency of roughly once a year ever since.

"Vikki," Dot said slowly, "you have to go talk to him."

"I absolutely do not. I froze on him twenty-two years ago. The man confessed something nice to me and I discussed condiments."

"So discuss condiments again. You're forty-four, you're gorgeous, and your youngest is at orientation week. Go talk to him or I will go talk to him and tell him an embarrassing amount about you."

"Don't you dare," Vikki said, but her feet were already moving, which was a betrayal she chose not to examine.

The problem was the crowd. The motorcycle half of the room had decided, around this time, that the dance floor under the trellis was theirs now, all of it, and the band had kicked into something fast, and the corridor between the bar and anywhere else had become a river of leather and beer bottles. Vikki threaded through it, apologizing to a large man with a beard like a paint brush who stepped on her sandal, and reached the bar end just as Jacques turned and saw her.

She watched it land on his face. Recognition, then disbelief, then that specific flustered look of a man who has rehearsed a moment for twenty-two years and is now watching it arrive without warning.

"Vikki," he said. Just that. Her name, like it was the first day of the dry season all over again.

"Jacques Hannigan," she said, setting down the empty glasses and putting her hands on the bar so they had something honest to do. "You're grayer than me, I see."

"Only in the beard," he said, and then laughed at himself, nervous and real. "God. I heard a rumor the club crowd had taken the place over and I almost didn't come tonight, and now I'm standing here thinking that would have been the stupidest decision of my life, and I've made some bad ones. I tension fan belts for a living, Vikki, in a warehouse. It's not a glamorous story."

"It's the most you thing I've ever heard," she said, and it was true, it was exactly the kind of odd, specific life detail she had always liked about him, back when she'd known almost nothing about him and wanted to know everything. "What are you drinking?"

He looked at her glass-less hands, at the three friends at the far table obviously watching, at the chaos of the room, and something in him seemed to settle, the way a man decides to take the risk after all.

"Rum, neat," he said. "And Vikki? Before anything else gets complicated, or loud, or interrupted by forty bikers. I've thought about that smile of yours for twenty-two years. I just wanted to say it out loud once, while I had the nerve."

The band crashed into the chorus and a whoop went up from the dance floor and somewhere Dot was almost certainly narrating this to Joy, and Vikki felt twenty-two again, but this time, she noticed, she was not frozen at all.

"Well," she said, leaning an elbow on the bar, smiling the exact smile in question. "Say it again, then. I'm listening this time."

He said it again, but this time it came out slower, and with his eyes on hers the whole way, and Vikki had to put her drink down because her hands were suddenly unreliable. "A smile that reminded him of the first day of the dry season," he said. "When the whole island finally stops sweating. That was the line, right? That was the one I said to you at the bar?"

"That's the one," Vikki said. "And I responded with a comment about ketchup, because I was twenty-two and dim and you were so good-looking that my brain left the building entirely."

"You didn't seem dim," Jacques said. "You seemed to be a woman who had been ambushed. Which, to be fair, I had just done to you." Around them the crowd roared at something, a bottle hit the floor somewhere near the stage, and a man in a leather vest with a skull on the back bellowed laughter loud enough to be heard over the band, and neither of them flinched, because they were both somewhere else entirely.

"So tell me," Vikki said, needing to move before she stood there grinning like a fool all night. "Spice warehouse. Fan belts. How does a man from, what, the crews who used to drink at that little place on the waterfront, end up tensioning belts in a warehouse for a living?"

"Same way you ended up a nurse, I expect. One thing led to another and then it was twenty years." He shrugged, and his shoulders did a big honest thing when he did it, and she made herself look away from them. "I came back from working a season on a cargo boat and the bar was gone, turned into a phone shop. I asked the guys, nobody knew where you'd gone. I figured that was the universe telling me I'd had my one chance and blown it."

"I got married," Vikki said. "Had three kids. Got divorced, very civilized, we split the furniture like adults. I've been a nurse at the clinic for the better part of two decades, I drive a Corolla so old it should be in a museum, and I just dropped my youngest at orientation week on Sunday and cried in the parking lot like an idiot."

"That's not an idiot," Jacques said. "That's just a mother."

"It felt idiotic at the time."

"No," he said, and he said it simply, no performance in it at all. "It wouldn't."

And then the universe, which apparently had a sense of humor about reunions, sent a motorcycle through the middle of it, or at least a man built like one. A big fellow from the club backed up hard into the small round table beside them, and a tray of rum punches went up in the air in a slow, terrible arc, and came down mostly on the floor and partly on the table and a little on the big fellow himself, who looked less sorry than a man in that position ought to look. "Sorry, sorry," he announced to the room in general, not to them in particular, and wandered off. Vikki's hand had gone to Jacques's forearm without her deciding anything, gripping the rolled sleeve, the muscle under it warm and solid. "Okay," she said. "New plan. This room is a disaster and I refuse to conduct the most important conversation of my adult life while getting splashed by biker spillage. Come with me."

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere quieter. There's a corner under the trellis, past the dance floor, where the vines hang down and nobody sits because the gooseberries drop on you. I know this because I've been coming here with these two women for eleven years and we've colonized it every time."

"Gooseberries dropping on me," Jacques said, letting her pull him along. "You know how to show a man a good time."

"You have no idea yet," Vikki said, and then heard herself, and went red to the ears, and Jacques laughed, a big easy laugh that she remembered suddenly and perfectly, having heard it every Friday for one whole season and then never again.

The corner was exactly as she'd promised, two benches pushed together in an L under the wooden trellis, the vines hanging down in green curtains thick enough to swallow voices, a few fallen gooseberries on the bench like little yellow-green marbles, which she brushed off with her palm before they sat. From here the dance floor was a rumor, and the band was a heartbeat behind the wall of leaves, and the string lights came through the vines in dots. "Oh, this is good," Jacques said, tipping his head back. "This is very good. Vikki, this is the best seat in the building."

"I know. Eleven years of research." She sat with her knees angled toward him, her drink sweating on the bench between them, and for a second they just looked at each other, both of them doing the arithmetic of twenty-two years out loud in their heads without saying any of it. "You're staring," she said finally. "I am," he agreed. "I'm owed about two decades of it. I'm catching up."

"Catch up slower, I'll spill my drink."

"Let it spill."

But he was the one who brought it up, because of course he was, because it had been sitting between them since the bar and neither of them could breathe properly around it. "Can I tell you what happened, that night?" he asked. "The real version. Because I think you got the wrong version, the version where you did something wrong, and you've been carrying that, I can hear it in the way you talk about the ketchup." Vikki took a sip to give her mouth something to do that