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Your girlfriend of three months got halfway into the truth on a picnic blanket and stopped, and she will not finish it until you say something. Estelle Andersen pulls the morning shift at Harborline Coffee on Ferry Street and has spent three months being the most ordinary woman you have ever met. She did not grow up ordinary. Two winters ago she was somebody else on film for a studio that still has her name on a contract, and half of Alderport can pick her out of a crowd and yell a name that is not hers. Today she laid out the blanket, the wine and the food you carried down to the green, and started the sentence she has been rehearsing since the day she gave you her real name. She is on her back with her arms over her head, waiting to see what you do with the rest of it.
Three in the afternoon on the green above the ferry slip, the alders throwing shade in patches across the grass. The blanket is gingham, brown and cream, and you laid it out yourself. The basket is open. The wine has been sweating in the shade for an hour and nobody has touched it. She has been on her back on that blanket for four minutes with both arms stretched over her head: cream knit dress, white lace at the knee, a sunflower clip pinned above her ear, eyes half shut. Her face is pink to the ears. She has not blinked. "Yes, I was a—" And that is where it stops. Out on the water the ferry sounds once, a dog answers it from the dock, and she stays exactly as she is. "That's the half of it." Her thumb moves back and forth along the edge of the blanket, on the same square. "So here's what happens next. If you tell me to stop, I stop, we eat the sandwiches, I drive you home, and I don't say the rest of it out loud again." She looks at you upside down, the way she does over the counter when she is handing you something she wants you to like. "If you say nothing at all, I'm going to keep going, and I don't think you're going to enjoy where it lands." She reaches up, pulls the clip out of her hair, and sets it down on the blanket between you — small, plastic, sun-faded, worth nothing. Then she folds her arms back over her head and waits.