The beach in May

The trip had been planned for two people. Célia broke her ankle stepping down off a bus the Tuesday before, which is a ridiculous way to break an ankle, and Renata went anyway because the guesthouse wouldn't refund her.

She arrived on a Thursday in May, four in the afternoon, the hire car full of sand before she had even parked. The village had one tarmac street and the rest packed earth. Of the twelve houses at the far end, two had lights on. Out of season the place wasn't a resort. It was somewhere thirty people lived while they waited for December.

Neusa, who ran the guesthouse, handed over the key and explained that the restaurant was shut until September, that the shop opened eight till six, and that if she wanted fish she only had to say so in the morning.

"You've come on your own, then."

"I have."

Neusa nodded, in the manner of a woman who has seen every kind of person turn up in May, and asked nothing further. Renata liked her immediately.

For the first two days she spoke to nobody but Neusa and the boy at the shop.

That was what she had come for. Thirty-nine years old, fourteen of them working to other people's deadlines, and a whole April of saying yes to things she didn't want. Nobody here needed her. The May sea was grey and came in hard, nobody swam, and the wet sand was the colour of cement. She walked to the southern point in the mornings and walked back, and the south-westerly left her skin salted without her going near the water.

On the Friday she had the idea of driving up to the rocks along the sand track. It was an idiotic idea and she knew it was idiotic twenty metres in, when the back wheel started digging its own hole.

She spent half an hour on it. Put the car mat under the tyre, then a branch, then her towel. The car settled deeper and more comfortably.

The pickup came by around eleven. Red, old, a chain and two spare tyres in the bed.

"Dry sand," the man said, without getting out. "Everybody tries the upper track."

"Apparently everybody is an idiot."

He laughed. He got out.

His name was Otávio. He repaired boat engines and lived there all year round, which in his telling wasn't a romantic decision but an administrative fact, delivered the way you give a house number.

He hooked up the chain, told her to drive, and stayed outside pushing. It worked first time. She offered him money and he pulled such an uncomfortable face that she put her purse away and apologised, and then they both laughed at the whole business.

When he came past the window to hand back her ruined towel, she caught it.

Lemon. Lemon over petrol.

"Two-stroke," he said, because she must have made a face. "Soap won't shift it. Lemon will. I keep half a one in the door of the truck."

She looked. There was indeed half a lemon in a bag hanging off the handle, drying out, dark at the edges.

Renata thought about that three separate times over the rest of the day, which was twice more than she considered reasonable.

On the Saturday he turned up at Dito's kiosk, the only one open, where she was trying to read a book she had started in January.

It wasn't a coincidence. She knew it wasn't, because there was nobody else in the village and because he sat down at her table before asking whether he could.

"You're on chapter eight," he said, looking at the bookmark.

"I've been on chapter eight since February."

"Bad?"

"Too good. I didn't want it to end, so I stopped. Then I forgot where I was, and now I'm afraid to go back in."

He said that was the strangest thing he had ever heard. She agreed with him.

They stayed until six. The conversation went to places that conversations between people who have just met don't usually go, because there was nobody else there to hear it, and because she was leaving on Monday and they both knew it.

He talked about the brother who went to Itajaí and didn't come back. She talked about her father, and then about the marriage that lasted nine years, and about the part nobody asks about: not the separation, the two years before it, when everything still looked fine from outside.

At six the wind turned. Dito started stacking the plastic chairs.

"Forecast says rain all night," Otávio said.

"So I hear."

He watched the water for a few long seconds.

"My place is just behind the dune. Tin roof. Rain on a tin roof is the best thing this village has got."

Renata closed the book on chapter eight.

The rain arrived at twenty past eight and was exactly what he'd promised: loud, unbroken, over everything. Inside the house nobody needed to keep their voice down, since nobody was going to hear anything anyway.

The house was one room, kitchen along the back wall, a double bed pushed up against the window. A bronze propeller stood in the corner, leaning on the wall like sculpture. She asked. He said he'd been waiting on a part since March.

He kissed her still standing in the doorway, one hand at the back of her neck, and the gap between arriving and kissing was maybe four seconds, which in a man that age means he had decided before he invited her.

She didn't perform surprise. She pulled his T-shirt off over his head with a competence that startled them both.

The lemon was on his hands. It ended up on her shoulders.

The bed was low and the mattress was hard and the window beside it stayed open the entire time, wind coming in, the curtain knocking against the wall, the rain on the tin wiping out anything she said. She said it anyway.

At some point in the night he stopped everything to go and find a blanket, because she was cold, and came back with a wool one that smelled of damp. She laughed so much that he started laughing too, and it took a good few minutes for either of them to get back to what they had been doing. They got back to it.

On the Sunday it rained all day. They left the house twice: once for the shop, once to take coffee down to Dito, whose daughter was ill.

Renata didn't open the book.

On the Sunday afternoon he stripped the carburettor of an outboard motor on the kitchen table, newspaper underneath, and she sat and watched and passed him parts when he asked. They said almost nothing for an hour and forty minutes. It was the most comfortable hour and forty minutes she'd had in four years.

At five she rang Célia and lied twice in the same call, for no reason at all, only because the truth was too big to fit into ten minutes of telephone.

On the Sunday night, lying with her back against him and the damp blanket up to her chin, she thought about saying she could stay another three days. She had the leave. She could have done it. She spent about fifteen minutes assembling the sentence.

She didn't say it.

He didn't ask either, and she lay awake the rest of the night trying to decide whether that was tact or simply how a man behaves when he has lived alone all year in a village of thirty people.

Monday, half six in the morning. He drove her to her car in the pickup, because it was still raining.

There were no promises. He didn't ask for a number. She didn't offer one, and the reason was cowardice, and she knew it while it was happening.

"Safe trip," he said.

"Let me know about the part."

"You haven't given me a number."

"No, I haven't."

He laughed and slapped the roof of her car twice, the way you send a lorry off.

Fifty kilometres later, in the queue at the toll, Renata realised she had left the book on the seat of the pickup. On purpose, with her name written on the first page, in the handwriting she had at twenty-two.

She never asked whether he read.