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Grace felt empty without Mary, and Joanna was suddenly forced to reckon with the fact that she didn’t really have any other friends in town. Most of her friends from high school were either elsewhere or had fallen away since starting college, and the first few days after the wedding were a quiet, empty, lonesome blur.
That Thursday, officially the first day of summer, Joanna spent the evening at the beach. She found a tucked-away corner of Duckhead Beach where she could be alone and sat on the dunes to watch the sunset. The mosquitoes were fierce, but she’d doused herself with bug spray before leaving the house, so she was able to ignore them, for the most part. She smiled, remembering Josh’s joke about Maine being too perfect that it needed the mosquitoes, just to keep it humble.
It was a little chilly, and the sunset actually wasn’t great—it was competing with a gray sky and a fine mist—but Joanna kept watching anyway, her arms wrapped around her folded knees. The same question that had plagued her for weeks came back again: What am I going to do with myself? There was nowhere, really, that she was interested in being; nothing, really, that she was interested in doing.
A minute or two down that train of thought, and she put her head in her hands, fed up. For a while, she focused on just being where she was. She heard the waves coming in and out, in and out, in a soothing rhythm, and finally, she began to relax.
She stayed there for more than an hour, staring out at the water. When she finally stood up to go, the world around her was dark. She hadn’t landed on anything solid, but she felt a little bit better.
+++
Over the next couple of weeks, she fell into a bit of a routine: she got up in time to have breakfast with Poppa before he left for work and then puttered for a while—maybe a run, maybe some errands, maybe a long shower—before turning on the TV and searching for jobs on the computer. Job searching was too depressing a prospect without the distraction of daytime television, she found, so she scrolled listings with real housewives and top chefs providing the background noise. To her dismay, it seemed that she might already be too late to find something in Grace—all the shops and restaurants and beds and breakfasts had their summer crews lined up; the theater in Harper where she’d worked in high school was set; she wasn’t qualified for much of anything else. Majoring in theater and then dropping out of it for her last semester, she was learning, was not a good way to develop her job prospects.
Poppa encouraged her to broaden her horizons, to remember that she had a whole world open to her right now. He meant well, but pointing out how wide her range of options was only made her more anxious. She wanted her world to get smaller, not bigger. She wanted someone to tell her what to do. But nobody would.
After two or three hours of hopeless scrolling through jobs that sounded less and less interesting as the time went, Joanna was usually feeling stir-crazy, and she often spent the rest of her days at that same spot on Duckhead Beach, sitting there until the sky was black around her and letting the waves slough off the trials of the day.
By mid-July, Joanna was getting lonely and restless and was seriously beginning to consider throwing a backpack in the car and blowing her savings on a cross-country road trip, just so she’d have something to plan, when she opened her email and saw a message from Mr. S.
Jo—
I heard you’re home. I’m in a production of Taming the Shrew, opening tonight at 7 and running through the weekend. (I hate to toot my own horn, but I’m Petruchio.) It’s my first performance in a long time, and I don’t mind saying that I’m feeling a bit gun-shy. I’d love to see a familiar face in the crowd, if you’re free any of those nights.
I’ve got a question for you too.
Mr. S. (Oh heck—you’re a grownup now. Call me Mike.)
PS. Tickets are free, and the show is just over from the little beach at the Prom in Portland. Pray it doesn’t rain!
It had been a long time since Joanna had seen either Mr. S. (Mike. She’d have to practice) or Shakespeare, and she missed both. She sent a quick reply—I’ll be there tonight! Break a leg!—and got ready to go, hoping she remembered her way to the Prom.
Mike (she had to say his name to herself every time he appeared, so she’d be able to do it when she approached him afterward) was as good as she’d assumed he’d be. And seeing a show was a powerful balm in her current mental state. Portland’s Eastern Promenade—an enormous park overlooking Casco Bay boasting beachfront, playgrounds, walking trails, baseball fields, and rolling hills—provided a gorgeous and ever-changing backdrop as the sun set behind the makeshift stage. The temperature was perfect, with a slight chill and a light, consistent breeze. Audience members sat on the grass, on blankets or chairs brought from home, or milled around the outskirts of the performance space. Toddlers waddled through the crowd, grabbed and shushed by embarrassed, apologetic parents.
It could have been distracting or come across as embarrassing and amateur, but the performers were clearly having fun. They threw themselves into the unusual atmosphere, including the audience in jokes and using it or the setting itself to make points. There was such an easy bonhomie between the actors and the audience; Joanna felt it immediately. It was a strikingly different experience from the kinds of shows she’d limited herself to over the last four years. At one point, she found herself wishing that Erik were with her. Maybe he’d never been interested in theater or gotten what she was ever trying to do, but even he would appreciate the friendliness and fun of this atmosphere.
Coop had put together a talented company and an arresting series of shows, but, looking back on her college years from this vantage point, Joanna saw that she’d learned to turn her nose up at experiences like this one. She’d learned to assume that only performed human depravity had anything to offer her or could ensure that she wasn’t just like everyone else. But here she was, a foot away from a three-year-old with her finger up her nose in deep concentration, watching a show that a group of ten-year-olds could have performed passably well, laughing at Shakespeare’s raunch and innocent fun, and she couldn’t remember a play she’d ever enjoyed so much.
Ever since The Red Wall, theater had become something she felt she needed to defend or a point to prove. She’d forgotten how it had all started for her—as a means to stories, people, play. All the things she loved. All the things that these performers tonight, clearly, understood.
At the curtain call, Joanna was among the first to jump to her feet, and she kept clapping for sheer gratitude after everyone else had stopped. There was no lobby, so she was able to make her way directly toward Mike, though she hung back so that Lara, his wife, and their kids could congratulate him first. After a few minutes with them, he made his way to her and gave her a light, loose hug.
“Thanks for coming, Jo.”
“Mr.—I mean, Mike—that was just great. Thanks for telling me about it!” Joanna was in danger of gushing, so she shut her mouth and just smiled up at him.
“Thanks. It was rather a fun performance, wasn’t it?” he said modestly.
People congratulated him as they chatted, clapping him on the back and shaking his hand. He took it all in stride, but, after a minute, he steered Joanna to a more secluded spot and looked at her seriously.
“I mentioned in my email that I had a question for you.”
“Yes?”
“What are your plans, once the summer is over? I know you’re here for now; is that a long-term situation?”
She sighed and shook her head. “Frankly, I don’t have a long-term situation. So much has happened in the last couple of years. We don’t have to go into it all,” she added, catching herself. “Suffice it to say, I have no idea what’s next.”
“I was hoping that was the case. Would you like a job? Just part-time, mind you,” he clarified when he saw her eyes get wide. “But it’s something. I’ve wanted an assistant for some time, and this is the first year I’ve been given the go-ahead to hire someone. It’s a ten-month contract for ten hours a week. More during the shows. Mid-August to mid-June. I’m thinking you may help some with teaching, but I’ll really need you for the productions, although we can see what works best. Nine thousand for the year, and I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather hire. What do you say?”
The money—which sounded like an enormous sum—aside, Joanna was so stunned by the offer itself that she couldn’t think of anything to say, and she finally blurted out, “What’s the downside?”
“So you’ll do it?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face.
“Absolutely!”
“That’s great! I’ll give you a call in a couple of weeks, and we can firm up some details. Jo, you don’t know what a help this is to me.”
They shook hands, and he excused himself to go back to his family. Joanna walked to her car in a daze. I’m not a failure, she told herself, over and over as she went, more amazed with every utterance.