Page 37 of Good Dirt

Foreigner

E bby the foreigner does things that she never would have done at home. On the first full day of Henry and Avery’s stay in the guesthouse, Ebby goes home with the stranger from the village café and has sex in the midmorning light. Later, she slinks out of his house while he is running the water in the bathroom, suddenly aware of the huge risk that she has taken. Sure, she’s been with guys she hardly knew before, but not like this.

Ebby doesn’t even know the name of the street she’s on. Worse yet, she is making the oldest mistake in the book. Even as she walks quickly away from Robert’s house, she is thinking that there was something between them that went beyond the immediate physical attraction she felt. The way they’d talked and laughed before going at it again. How he had caressed her forehead. How it had seemed just right, for a bit, until she’d felt the need to escape. Either way, she will remain grateful to the soft-spoken stranger with that curly mane of hair and the cyclist’s legs for making her forget everything for just a couple of hours.

Ebby spots the roof of the village chateau, its slate-covered turrets leading her back to the town square and the side street where she left the car. Now she knows where she is, but she can’t bear the thought of returning to the cottage after running her errands. She might find Henry and Avery there. Instead, she drives to the train station up in the big town and stands with her back to a wall. The train station is vast and loud. It smells of coffee and pastry and fried foods. It is filled with people coming from elsewhere. Filled with people chattering in languages she doesn’t understand. She pretends to be a traveler scrolling through her mobile phone, when all she is doing, really, is trying to disappear from herself.