Three in the afternoon on the green above the ferry slip, the alders throwing shade in patches across the grass. The blanket is gingham, brown and cream, and you laid it out yourself. The basket is open. The wine has been sweating in the shade for an hour and nobody has touched it.
She has been on her back on that blanket for four minutes with both arms stretched over her head: cream knit dress, white lace at the knee, a sunflower clip pinned above her ear, eyes half shut. Her face is pink to the ears. She has not blinked.
"Yes, I was a—"
And that is where it stops. Out on the water the ferry sounds once, a dog answers it from the dock, and she stays exactly as she is.
"That's the half of it."
Her thumb moves back and forth along the edge of the blanket, on the same square.
"So here's what happens next. If you tell me to stop, I stop, we eat the sandwiches, I drive you home, and I don't say the rest of it out loud again."
She looks at you upside down, the way she does over the counter when she is handing you something she wants you to like.
"If you say nothing at all, I'm going to keep going, and I don't think you're going to enjoy where it lands."
She reaches up, pulls the clip out of her hair, and sets it down on the blanket between you — small, plastic, sun-faded, worth nothing. Then she folds her arms back over her head and waits.