On very foggy mornings, he rolls over and murmurs sleepily to her, “We’re inside a cloud!” before closing his eyes again. Fog rolls in often on the coastline, blanketing the ocean and horizon beyond, leaving the clapboard houses to the left and right of theirs awash in a delicate mist. Humid mornings, especially before or after rain, are a study in grays: dove gray clouds, silvery gray drizzle, curtains of pewter condensation obscuring the hydrangea bushes that have been aching to burst into bloom all spring and are now reveling in their seasonal riot of color.
Read moreFUDGY PECAN BROWNIES (GLUTEN-FREE)
It’s hot outside again—so hot, in fact, that she barely has any interest in eating the croissant she buys this morning. She takes it from the paper bag; it’s still warm from the oven and the heat of it has started to leave a moist imprint against the bottom of the bag. She tears off a piece from the end and a shower of flakes fall onto her lap, like a dusting of buttery snow. She sighs, and puts the croissant back down on the picnic table, where he grabs at it, almost toppling over backwards on his unsteady legs.
“Easy,” she chides him, and he presses the length of his body against her torso, sturdy and sticky with sweat already. It’s not even 9 AM but he’s constantly in motion, his small legs churning, his arms pumping comically at his sides.
Read moreBLUEBERRY ALMOND CRUMB BARS
She cranes her neck, stopping so abruptly in front of a Barnes & Noble that a man in a sharply tailored navy suit and camel coat walking briskly behind her almost steps on the heels of her ballet flats (cerise suede from J.Crew, a pair she ogled for weeks in the window of the Fifth Avenue store before finally buying).
“Anna!” she hisses, grabbing her sister by the arm. “Stop, stop!” Her sister stops and looks around. “What? We’re still two blocks away, I just checked.”
Read moreMANDEL BREAD
“You know those are better frozen, right?” she asks, watching as he shakes the box of miniature Charleston Chews so it rattles loudly. He looks at her, frowning. “You can’t freeze a Charleston Chew,” he says, as if that’s obvious. “You can absolutely freeze them!” she retorts. “They get all firm and chewy and the chocolate flakes off in big frozen shards.”
She pauses to lick the basil mayonnaise off of her right thumb, then takes another lusty bite of her BLT. They picked up sandwiches that morning from Fork & Anchor: a tiny spot with worn plank floors and shelves of beach vacation essentials—dried pasta and peanut butter and fancy seltzer and Bremner wafers and kettle-cooked potato chips and those Petit Ecolier shortbread biscuits topped in milk chocolate that come in the long red and black box.
Read moreHOT CHOCOLATE COOKIES
She doesn’t lose control of the car so much as gives herself over to it—instead of driving it, it drives her, like she’s a nameless passenger in a nameless cab, too polite to speak up while the driver takes a turn too fast, her knuckles white from gripping the edges of the seat.
She keeps her hands on the wheel, one foot pressing the brake as far down as it will go, the other foot pushed up against the floor, bracing her body for impact.
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