People We Meet on Vacation

Alex and Poppy are dining at a Mexican restaurant when she learns his grandmother Betty has died and he has moved into her house. Poppy feels hurt by missing news in the two years she and Alex have been estranged. Alex replies that he was uncertain whether Poppy wanted to hear from him. She feels like she wants to ask him if “he too feels like he lost two good years of his life when we stopped talking, and why he let it happen” (129). She finds “there’s a heaviness between us now that we’ve brushed against what happened in Croatia” (130) and feels so guarded in his presence that she cannot even confess that she is personally funding the trip.

Back in the hotel room, Alex insists on taking the chair bed and when Poppy wrestles him for it, they fall against each other in a way that causes sexual tension. Poppy resolves to make the next day special and to be the fun version of herself rather than the hurt version.

Poppy awakes in the middle of the night to find Alex in pain from a back spasm. He began to have stress-related back spasms in the interval of their estrangement.