Already jangled by her brush with disaster, she was caught totally off balance, blindsided. All she could do was gasp in delayed reaction, while Helen was hopping up and down and yelling, “Yay! The beach, the beach!” and David screeched, “The beach! Oh, man-really? Honest, Mom?”
“No, Riley-”
“Honest, swear to God.” His smile was smug-so very male. “And it’s a long drive, so you’d better get crackin’.” Ooh…and his calm, authoritative tone infuriated her.
While the children thundered out of the kitchen shouting, “Oh boy, the beach!” at the tops of their lungs, Summer turned on Riley, quietly seething. “I told you-” she began.
“Ah-ah-” he stopped her there with upraised finger and eyebrows “-a deal’s a deal.”
“A deal?” She frowned. “But, I don’t-”
“You told me, as I recall, to do exactly what I normally do on Sundays-which I am doing. And unless you’d prefer to stay home, Mrs. Robey, I suggest you go and get into your beach duds.” And he touched her with his finger, first between her brows, then her nose, thereby restoring the flour she’d just so energetically disposed of.
“Oh, cool,” cried David. “A real drawbridge!”
“That’s the Intracoastal Waterway,” Riley informed him, pointing while David leaned over his shoulder to watch the mast of a sailboat glide lazily past. “If you wanted to, you could sail all the way from the Florida Keys to New York Harbor.”
“I’d like to do that sometime,” David said wistfully. “Do you think-” Summer’s heart skipped a beat, but he broke it off and scrambled over to the other side of the car in time to catch a glimpse of the boat as it emerged from beneath the bridge.
“Are we almost there?” Helen whined. She had little interest in bridges and boats. The numerous squashed turtles along the roadside had kept her entertained for most of the trip, but she was disappointed she hadn’t seen alligators.
“Almost.” Summer glanced at Riley, who nodded his confirmation just as the drawbridge barrier rose and the cars in front of them began moving again. “Buckle up,” she reminded the children, and settled back to watch the blue ribbon of waterway and green tidal marshes slide past far below. On the other side of the canal, the highway dropped down to arrow across seemingly endless expanses of wetlands, wound through dunes and congested beach towns and over bridges that tied the coastal islands together like beads on a chain.
“It’s so different,” she said at one point, unable quite to prevent a sigh, or deny her inner disappointment. “From California beaches, I mean.”
“Really?” Riley glanced at her. “How so?”
“You may not believe it, but in California, the whole West Coast, there are places-lots of places, even close to the cities-where there aren’t any houses, where you can stand on a cliff and look out across the ocean, it seems like, all the way to China. And where the mountains come down to meet the sea, the waves crash on the rocks, and there are tide pools, and pelicans and sea lions, and hardly any people…and you can drive right along the edge of the ocean and watch the sun sink into the water… Here, you’d hardly even know the ocean was there, because of all the houses.”
He nodded, and after a moment said softly, “There are very few wild beaches left on the East Coast, but I do happen to know of one.” And he smiled a dark and secret smile.
Intrigued and strangely comforted, Summer settled back to enjoy the rest of the drive. But she could sense in Riley a kind of edgy excitement, along with a certain melancholy that she didn’t understand. She kept stealing glances at him under the pretense of sightseeing, and was mystified by the little knot of tension she could see working beneath the edges of his smile.
He turned off the highway, finally, onto a paved road that zigzagged past towns and churches and fishing shacks, then through wetlands and woodlands where blue herons rose with a great beating of wings to the safety of ancient trees, and Spanish moss hung like remnants of tattered curtains over dark, mysterious pools. Eventually, he turned off that road, too, onto a gravel track that wound through woods so deep and dense the Spanish moss swished against the roof of the car, and the only sounds were the cries of birds and the crunch of their tires on the gravel. Even the children seemed to have been awed into silence, just a little too nervous, Summer thought, to risk a question.
“We’re here-everybody out,” said Riley at last, halting the car in a grassy clearing. “End of the road.”
And indeed it was. Ahead through the trees, Summer could see blue sky, the green of marsh grass, the glint of sun on water. She could see a house, too, at the edge of the marshes, a small wood frame house with wide porches and a faintly ramshackle look about it in spite of what appeared to be a fresh coat of paint. After seeing to the unloading of the car and making sure everyone had everything they were supposed to have, however, Riley struck off, not toward the house, but along a footpath that led past it to a long wooden jetty, which angled off across the marsh to where a tiny fishing shack sat on the edge of a landing jutting into a broad inlet.
The children were delighted with the jetty. Liking the way their footsteps sounded on the wooden planks, they stomped along it with restored confidence, running on ahead until their noise brought a man out of the fishing shack to investigate. He was a tall man, thin but muscular and slightly bent, and wore overalls and a light-colored, short-sleeved shirt. He had a frosting of white whiskers on his weathered face and a bald head that shone like polished walnut. Seeing him, both children froze like guilty miscreants and waited for the grown-ups to catch up.
With one hand on David’s shoulder and the other on Helen’s head to steady them on the narrow jetty, Riley stepped between and then past them. Summer, moving up behind the children, saw the old man’s face blossom with his smile.
“Hey you, boy,” he called out, in thickened, lilting cadences that were unfamiliar and difficult to understand.
“Hey, Brasher,” Riley called back as he went to meet him.
After a moment Summer followed, herding the now-shy and tongue-tied children, and was in time to see the two men clasp each other’s arms with the restrained affection of old, old friends. She could see them talking, see nodding heads and gesturing hands, hear the murmur of conversation she couldn’t quite make out. As she drew closer, though, she heard clearly the words boat, island and tide. And last and unmistakably: hurricane.
“What’s this about a hurricane?” she asked as she and the children joined the two men, with a smile to take away the rudeness of the interruption.
“Brasher, here, says we’re gonna have one,” Riley drawled as he turned and with a casual sweep of his arm made them part of his company. And as she listened to him make the introductions, Summer felt a prickling behind her eyes and an ache in her throat, because she realized that with that single gesture, Riley had made them sound more like a couple, and with her children, a family unit, than she ever had in all the twelve years of her marriage.
The black man’s name, she learned, was Brasher Kemp, and she liked his smile, the feel of his warm, leathery hand, the look of honest appraisal in his wise old eyes. She liked the way he took each of her children’s hands in his two big ones and bowed over them as he repeated their names with great solemnity.
“A hurricane?” said Summer, using a hand to shade her eyes from the bright sunshine while she scanned the pale summery sky, the typically hazy and undefined horizon. “Oh, surely not any time soon.”
“Not today, for sure,” said Brasher, his eyes twinkling. “Today be good beach weather.”