He kept them to himself. Web Gail materialized beside him with a plate of fruit and a look that suggested the fruit was for her, not for him. Diane wants someone to set up the volleyball net on the north end. The catering guys don't know where it goes. Sure, he said.
He spent the next 20 minutes on the net, then helped drag a kayak down to the water line for Todd, then fixed the canopy corner that kept catching wind. By the time he sat down in the chair he'd set aside for himself, it was past 11 and the sun had gone mean. That was when he noticed her. Diane was on her towel about 30 ft away, lying on her stomach. The cover up was gone.
She'd been reading something on her phone, but now the phone was face down in the sand, and she was just lying there. And even from 30 ft, Marcus could see the problem. She had sunscreen. The white bottle was right there beside her, next to a small orange clip she'd used to put her hair up. The issue was the angle.
You couldn't reach your own upper back, not cleanly. Not the part between the shoulder blades that would burn first. Nobody else was paying attention. Pria was in the water. Todd was organizing a competitive game of botche that nobody had asked for.
Gail had found a chair under the canopy and was on her phone. Marcus sat with this information for a moment. Then he got up because he had a 7-year-old who wore SPF 50 everyday, and the idea of someone burning while a solution stood 20 ft away was something he couldn't unknow. He picked up his own sunscreen from his bag, walked over. "Hey," he said.
"You're going to burn between your shoulders." "Diane turned her head. She looked up at him from behind sunglasses with the very particular expression of someone who was deciding whether to be irritated." "I noticed," she said. "You want?" He held up his bottle, which was more of a question than a sentence, a beat. Then she said, "Go ahead." And turned her head back forward. He crouched beside the towel and applied the sunscreen the way he'd learned to do it.
Efficient, systematic, no lingering, the way you had to be when you were both the parent and the one who forgot the sunscreen and you had a sandy, impatient kid waiting. He worked across her shoulders and down to the middle of her back and then stopped because that was where the suit started. That should cover it, he said. She didn't answer right away. Then she turned her head to look at him again.
And there was something different in her expression. Not quite a smile. Somewhere in the neighborhood of one. That's not where I meant, she said. Marcus went very still.
I meant the shoulders, she said. And her voice was completely level. You covered the middle first. He looked at his hands. She was right.
He'd started at the middle and worked outward. Muscle memory from doing his daughter's back. She always complained if he started at the top because the drips were cold. Old habit," he said. This time, Diane Callaway did smile.