‘Not funny—I told her I liked it.’ The young waitress crossed her arms over her chest. ‘So did you meet Jim when he was over there on R and R? He looked so handsome in his uniform. He told us how pretty the girls in Australia were; I bet he was talking about you.’

I looked at the door to the street, wishing that I could walk away from this conversation without making a fool of myself. ‘Something like that,’ I mumbled.

Gwen reached over and squeezed my shoulder. ‘We hope we’ll be seeing you again, now.’

She gave the younger waitress a stern look and I fled, thanking them as I backed out the door.

I walked down Main Street past a drugstore, a bowling alley, a hardware store and an oyster shop. When I turned off Main there were no footpaths, so I kept to the verge beside the painted timber homes with wide verandahs and lawns that flowed each into the next. The napkin clutched in my hand said it was the end of Cox’s Farm Road, which the waitress had said was a few miles. I felt lightheaded, queasy in the stomach, regretting the hamburger I’d had for lunch. It was flat here, and humid. There was the back-of-throat smell of wood burning and a fishy sort of muddy smell of the bay meeting the river.

I passed a woman out in her garden cutting back rose bushes. ‘Nice day,’ she called out, and I nodded.

‘Sure is,’ I replied, walking on briskly before she could ask me where I was from. It seemed you couldn’t walk past a person on the street here without saying hello.

It took about an hour to reach the end of Cox’s Farm Road. Down the long driveway I saw a tall timber structure with porticos and a sharply pitched roof, a turret like something from a fairy tale. It was painted white with green trim, a recent paint job with no chipping around the sills and frames. I walked up, my purse banging against my hip, silently cursing myself for not thinking this through. What if he had a fiancée now, and she answered the door? But it was too late to turn back. I gritted my teeth until my jaw hurt, and stepped onto the creaking verandah, where a swing hung from a chain just like at Roy’s house. What was it with the bloody swings in this country? And the rocking chairs? Did no one like to sit still?