Page 27 of Every Step She Takes

THIRTEEN VILA PRAIA DE ?NCORA

Mal

The silence without Sadie is a different story.

She spends the trek from Viana do Castelo to Vila Praia de ?ncora dawdling behind the rest of the group with Vera, taking pictures and stopping to chat with every old man who wishes them a bom caminho .

Vila Praia de ?ncora is one of my favorite towns on the northern coast. It’s a quaint beach community with incredible surfing that’s still relatively unknown by non-Portuguese tourists.

On the white sand beaches, you’re only likely to meet locals, pilgrims, and the occasional Portuguese traveler on holiday.

We would vacation here sometimes, my dad and me.

When I was eleven, he purchased a vineyard north of here on the other side of the Spanish border, and we’d spend at least a few weeks at that vineyard outside Vigo each summer, training staff and testing grapes to see how they were progressing for the upcoming vindima, when people from all over would come to stay at my father’s vineyards and help with the harvest. He made the season into a spectacle, of course.

If the flavor of the grapes in Vigo pleased my father, sometimes we’d add a few extra days to our trip and come down to ?ncora.

And if the grapes were sweet and not bitter, my father sometimes even let us take his sailboat to make the journey.

Just the two of us, my father barefoot as he taught me how to adjust the sails out on the ocean.

He’d let me take over when we reached the Minho River between Portugal and Spain, and if the grapes had been really good, he’d compliment me on my skills, call me a natural.

Then we’d spend a long weekend swimming in the Atlantic, reading books on the sand, and eating oysters and ice cream until my stomach hurt.

So, I love Vila Praia de ?ncora, but I also hate it, like I hate all the places that hold my happiest memories with my father.

I spend most of the eighteen-kilometer walk trying not to think about those memories.

I share AirPods with Ari and listen to a podcast about the history of ketchup.

I reminisce with Inez about our previous Caminos together, and I go for a jog with Stefano during morning tea, and I let Ro tell me more about their corgis than I ever wanted to know.

But no matter what I do, the silence of the walk is anything but exquisite.

It’s a comparatively short day, so we arrive in town a little before two and get lunch in the central square across from the city’s main church.

Flowers of deep magenta are in bloom and ornament every available surface in the square.

I eat pizza, and I don’t think about the way my father would sneak a single flower from these displays to tuck into my hair.

But I do think about it, and the golf ball in my throat swells to tennis ball–size.

And that’s when I decide I can’t handle any more silence. I need loud. I need busy and crowded. I need distractions.

I need a Sadie-size distraction.

“I think you’re ready,” I tell her after we’ve checked into our hostel on a narrow street that connects the central square to the beach.

As soon as we arrived, Sadie fell into her post-Camino routine, checking for new blisters and tending to old ones before getting in the shower for twenty minutes to scrub the Camino off her smooth skin.

Now she’s cross-legged on the floor, going through her yoga stretches, but I can’t force myself to sit down. Stillness is just as bad as silence.

“Ready for what?” she asks, doing a sideways stretch for her lower back.

“Ready for flirting.”

Sadie snaps back into her forward-facing cross-legged seat and stares up at me. “I don’t think I am, actually.”

“Is that what you’re wearing to dinner?”

Sadie glances down at her outfit: a pair of yoga pants that stick to her curves like glue, a white crop top, and her black zip-up. “What’s wrong with my outfit?”

“It doesn’t exactly scream flirting with a random hottie at a bar .”

“Why would I want my outfit to say that, exactly?”

“Because that’s what we’re doing tonight. After dinner. I already got Ari and Stefano on board.”

She stretches her legs out in front of her and stares at her knees. “Tonight?”

I nod. “I know you’re harboring a crush on Inez, but since she’s off-limits, I think our best bet is to go to a bar and have you get your flirt on.” I do a shoulder shimmy to emphasize this point.

“Flirt…?” she repeats. “With a woman?”

“No, Sadie, with a man. Preferably one with a full beard and lots of muscles. A real Jason Momoa type.”

Her gaze snaps back up to my face, and she looks truly petrified. I would feel guilty for teasing her if I slowed down enough to feel anything at all.

“Yes, Freckles, with a woman. Isn’t that what you want?”

Her splotchy blush begins to bloom across her throat, her cheeks, the whites of her arms, like a hundred flowers opening in the sun. Almost like the sunrise this morning, painting everything in pink.

“Yes,” Sadie croaks. “Yes, that’s what I want.”

Dinner is at a sidewalk restaurant with a view of the water, and I guide Sadie to the far end of our communal table so we can have a little privacy. “When you were dating men,” I start while she surveys the menu, “did you ever make the first move?”

Sadie shoots an anxious glance down to the table, and I follow her eyes to where Inez is ordering a few pitchers of sangria for the table. When her gaze returns to me, she keeps her voice low. “Do I look like I’ve ever made a single move in my life?”

Sadie looks like she doesn’t even know what a move is .

“Men always made the first move, then?” I ask, matching her almost-whisper. It’s unnecessary: Ari is telling a loud story about the time she met K.D. Lang and Stefano is doing burpees, much to the ire of the restaurant waitstaff, and much to the delight of a table of fit young men across the patio.

“On dates, you mean? I guess, yes. I’ve always waited for men to initiate the kiss. Mostly because I never wanted to kiss them,” she grumbles. “But beyond that, moves have never really happened… like, a man has never tried to initiate sex with me.”

She only mouths the word sex , and I wish I didn’t find it so damn charming. “I find it very hard to believe that a man has never tried to have sex with you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re very beautiful, Sadie.”

She winces at the compliment. I brace both hands on the table. “Do you believe you’re beautiful?”

“I know I’m beautiful.” She shakes out her shortened hair, and I’m so utterly and hopelessly charmed . “I just… I have a complicated relationship with that word…”

“With the word beautiful ?”

She winces again as the server puts a giant pitcher of sangria between us. Apparently, Inez ordered a liter for every two people. Sadie fumbles with the heavy pitcher and sloshes sangria into her glass.

“The thing is, whenever someone tells me I’m beautiful,” she says as she gives herself a generous pour, “there’s always this hint of surprise in their voice. Like they can’t believe I’m beautiful. Like I’m beautiful in spite of .”

“I truly have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Sadie is unequivocally, inarguably pretty, like the requisite freckled redhead in a J.Crew ad.

She’s even prettier right now than she was the first time I studied her face on the plane, with her spunky short hair and her sunburned face and her freckles sneaking through her makeup. “In spite of what ?”

She takes a gulp of sangria and almost chokes on a chunk of peach. She makes a little sweeping gesture over her torso. “In spite of how fat I am.”

“You’re not fat!” I say, perhaps a little too loudly. Ari’s story cuts off midsentence, and everyone turns to stare at our end of the table.

Sadie groans. “Damnit, Mal. That’s literally the worst possible response.” She becomes a human face-palm emoji. “I thought you were better than that.”

“How… how was that the wrong response?”

She slams back another drink of sangria like it’s a tequila shot. “Fat is not a bad word,” she says firmly. “It’s not an insult. It’s not positive or negative. It’s just a fact about my body.”

“But you’re not even that —” I try, but she cuts me off with a fiery glare.

“I’m midsize, if that’s what you mean.”

“I’m really sorry,” I say, and Sadie picks up a dinner roll from the basket in front of her and chucks it at my head. Everyone at the table laughs.

“You’re still not getting it!” Sadie snarls post–bread projectile.

“Don’t be sorry ! There’s nothing wrong with being fat.

There’s only something wrong with how other people view my fatness— what they assume it means about me.

” She picks up another hunk of bread from her basket and takes an unapologetic bite.

Someone at the table grunts, “You tell ’em, kiddo.” I think it’s Ro.

Sadie sits up straight in her chair, looking poised and regal. “When people tell me I’m beautiful, it’s always in this infantilizing way. Like, no, Sadie, you’re so beautiful . Like they deserve a fucking medal for seeing my beauty through the ugliness of my body.”

“Your body isn’t ugly.” It’s probably the wrong thing to say again, but I can’t help it.

Sadie’s body is as beautiful as the scenery on the Camino, like the rolling hills and staggering rocks, like the undulating waves and the softness of the earth.

Her body is glorious, and it didn’t occur to me that anyone might not see it that way.

But I’m also genetically predisposed to be thin with minimal effort. I have the metabolism of a teenage boy, and I get muscle definition from a single day of manual labor. So, I guess I don’t have the faintest idea what it’s like to live in Sadie’s body.

I pick up the bread she threw at my face and take a bite. “Thank you,” I say instead. “For taking the time to correct me.”