He stood just inside the screen door, watching her for ten minutes before she noticed him. In that time, she stretched, pirouetted, and leapt back and forth across the porch. Some of the time, he could recognize when she landed in a plié or stretched over the steps in an arabesque, but he didn’t know how to describe many of the moves she made. That was characteristic of her: she often left him without words.
Finally, she stepped off the porch and raised her face to the sky, and her hair darkening made him aware of the sounds talking through the trees and on the window pane. Looking at the droplets cascading down her shoulders, he couldn’t believe he’d never liked the rain. She turned to step back up on the porch and froze as she saw him through the screen.
“Oh! You’re back?” She squinted, trying to peer through the mesh into the darkness behind him.
“Your parents still have the kids. I took an Uber back. We couldn’t go mini-golfing because of the rain, so they decided to go to the Mall instead. Something about shopping and then going out for ice cream and pretzels. They’ll probably be several hours.” The door squeaked and then banged behind him as he stepped outside.