Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella

by Jenny Holiday

  Well, he didn’t know her. She knew him. Or knew of him. She’d always thought he was cute, running around at track meets in his little shorts, his muscles rippling as he hurled his body over the bar in pole vault. He and Rohan both competed in the eight-hundred-meter run, and Benjamin always won, which Ro always put down to the fact that he was older. The two boys had a friendly rivalry that was heavy on the friendliness, and indeed, Benjamin had always seemed like a nice guy. Everyone liked Benjamin, including Maya.

  Until he ruined her first play. Romeo and Juliet. She was fifteen, and she’d had big dreams even then. She’d worked so hard to get that first play off the ground. Law had been dating her Juliet, and he’d talked her into impulsively skipping town the day of the show, forcing Maya to cancel it. She still remembered the anger and shame. All that work down the drain.

  But she didn’t want to get into it. It sounded so stupid from this vantage point. She’d just been so mad at him, and by the time the anger had faded, they were settled so far into their groove of bickering and feuding that there was no climbing out of it.

  So she went for the rest of the story, which was all true. “We just don’t like each other. When I opened the theater, we started having all these conflicts. Parking, noise from the bands he has in here on weekends, you name it. And the new pizza oven out back belches smoke. My patrons used to like to go out behind the theater during intermission, but they can’t anymore.” She shrugged. “We just sort of got into the habit of being at odds. Oil and water, you know?”

  “But doesn’t it get tiring?”

  Not at all. If anything, it was the reverse. Fighting with Benjamin made Maya feel alive in a way that nothing else did—which was annoying, but it was what it was. She picked up her drink. “Everyone needs hobbies.”

  An hour later, Maya was still sitting at the bar, though Nora had left. She should just leave, too. But as in the aftermath of a play, the mermaid queen gig had her hyped up. It was a common phenomenon among actors. The energy you needed to put on a show couldn’t be turned off with the flip of a switch. She needed a step-down of sorts before she went back to her quiet apartment. If she was doing a play, she usually wasn’t out of the theater until well after eleven, and Lawson’s Lager House was the only thing open. Plus, its proprietor aside, she loved this place. It was familiar and cozy and she could always find someone to talk to if she was in the mood. If she wasn’t, she could sit at the bar and read or work on memorizing lines. She almost thought of it as an extension of her living space, which was a crappy studio. A communal living room of sorts.

  She took a tiny sip of her wine. She always ordered a glass because she wasn’t about to sit in Benjamin’s bar without ordering anything. He wasn’t going to be able to accuse her of freeloading. But she never drank very fast, as she was aware that her almost daily presence in the bar would make it easy to start drinking too much.

  Also there was the part where she had no money.

  “So tomorrow is your last show, right?” Benjamin asked.

  “Yes,” she said warily. Her summer play always coincided with Mermaid Parade weekend—there was a preparade matinee on the Saturday and an evening show on the Sunday. This year was Grease. She’d thought it would be a crowd-pleaser, but she’d sold only a third of the seats today, which made her panic when she thought about it too hard. She shoved aside thoughts of impending financial ruin. She was pretty sure Benjamin was about to start something, so she needed to be on her toes.

  “I want half the parking spots tomorrow night,” he said. “I have Final Vinyl in for their last show of the summer, and it’s going to be packed.”

  “Okay.”

  He reared back a little, and she laughed. She’d shocked him with her easy acquiescence. They were forever battling over parking. The bar and the theater were separated only by the Moonflower Bay Monitor building, and the reserved parking spots right out front were in demand in the evenings.

  “On one condition,” she added.

  “Ah,” he said, “that’s more like it.”

  “I’m thinking of adding wine to the concessions at the theater.” She was thinking of a lot of things, actually, probably none of which would be enough to make up for the blow of not getting the grant she’d been counting on, but this was one he could help with. Booze, according to her research, had high margins, and if she could get a deal on the supply end, she could turn an even bigger profit. “I’m not totally sold, as I’ll need cups and corkscrews and all that, and I’m not sure about the legality of my concessions guy, who’s a high schooler, serving.”

  “Your high schooler has to be eighteen. And there’s actually some decent wine in cans these days. You could serve it straight out of the can with a straw—no cups or corkscrews needed. Act like you’re doing it on purpose—pretend you’re being trendy.”

  That was a great idea. But no need to get overtly excited. “I don’t have to pretend to be trendy, Benjamin.” She narrowed her eyes.

  “Says the woman wearing a tube top. Nineteen eighty-three called, and they want their outfit back.” He leaned closer over the bar and held her gaze. They did this. Staring contests. Glaring contests. She wasn’t sure when it had started, only that when you were in one, the goal was to not look away first.

  She usually won, if only because he had actual work to do. As was the case now, when Carter came up to ask him a question. She smirked.

  “So how do I get these cans of wine?” she asked after he was done with Carter. “Advise me and you can have the parking spots tomorrow. Do I just buy them in bulk from the liquor store?”

  “No. You tell me what you want, and I add it to my wholesale order. Your per-unit price will be better that way. I’ll invoice you.”

  That was unexpectedly generous of him. But that was the strange thing about Benjamin. Though they battled pretty much constantly, he would sometimes surprise her by doing something decent.

  He left to serve other customers, leaving her to ponder the mess she was in. She had opened the theater with a start-up economic development grant and a big investment from her parents. She had kept it operating the past five years through a combination of arts grants and the money she made from ticket sales and the summer arts camps she ran for kids.

  On paper, she should have been profitable by now—certainly past the point where losing out on one grant was enough to do her in. The problem was the building. It had started its life as a theater in the late nineteenth century and had been converted to a movie house in the 1970s. But that had been shuttered fifteen years ago, and the building had sat vacant until she bought it for a song. She’d known it was going to need work but had underestimated just how much. The leak in the lobby ceiling was only the latest in a series of problems—electrical fires causing her to have to rewire, pipes freezing—that had demanded influxes of cash that was supposed to be going to operating and payroll.

  What was she going to do? She was already running as lean an operation as she could. She had only two full-time employees—Marjorie Nicolson, who did box office and admin, and Richard Lanister, who was her tech guru and jack-of-all-trades, overseeing set building and running the light board during shows. Everyone else was part-time—the concessions kid, for example, who wasn’t eighteen, which was a new little problem to deal with. The cast and crew she hired on contract for each show. The ushers worked for free in exchange for getting to see the show. Everything else she did herself, meaning not only was she the Moonflower Bay Theater Company’s artistic director, she was also its janitor.

  So she needed to think of something, and she needed to think of it quick. Something more than wine in a can.

  She was starting to get kind of panicky, so she pulled out her phone. There had been a football match today, and though she’d checked the final score, she hadn’t had time to do anything beyond that. Even though her beloved Crystal Palace had lost, watching the match highlights would soothe her.

  Except…Ugh. She’d forgotten that as part of her attempt
to cut her personal expenses because she’d started paying herself less, she’d dumped the app that was the only way to watch English Premier League football in Canada. It had gone in a moment of resolve, along with Netflix and even the Wi-Fi in her apartment—she had Wi-Fi at the theater and that was enough, she’d reasoned. “Ugh.” She said it out loud this time.

  “Everything okay here?” Benjamin was back.

  “Yep, I just forgot I’m out of data this month,” she lied. She didn’t like anyone knowing about her money troubles, but she especially didn’t want him knowing. Showing weakness in front of Benjamin Lawson was not in her playbook. “And since you’re a troglodyte with no Wi-Fi, I can’t check how the football match went earlier.”

  “Who needs Wi-Fi at a bar?” he said. “You come to a bar to forget your troubles, not surf the internet.”

  She rolled her eyes. She’d have to go back to the theater and pull up some of her UK sites to get a recap. Damn, she was going to miss watching matches this season. But when it came down to it, what was more important, football or the theater? No question. She slung her purse over her shoulder and hopped off her stool.

  “Hang on, though, I think I get English Premier League soccer.” Benjamin picked up a remote and aimed it at one of the TVs mounted above the bar. “I get my NFL from this app that I think now has English Premier League, too.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she practically shouted, not sure if she was happy he had the app or mad that he’d never mentioned it.

  He shot her a look. “Calm yourself.” He futzed with the TV, and there it was. He pulled up the menu and handed her the remote. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Hang on a sec,” she called after him. He’d been on his way down the bar but he came back, eyebrows raised impatiently. “If you don’t have Wi-Fi in this bar, how do you run the app?” His face froze. Ha. Busted. “You do have Wi-Fi!”

  “Keep your voice down,” he whisper-yelled, looking around and leaning in like they were preparing to do a drug deal. “Yes, I have Wi-Fi—in the whole building. I need it for some of the streaming services and apps I need to show the sports people want.” He gestured at the TV above them. “Like your precious soccer.”

  “And no one has put two and two together before?” She’d seen people ask him for the Wi-Fi password before and him answer that there wasn’t one.

  “Look, I just want this to be a certain kind of place—a place where people can hang out and not be slaves to their phones.” He rolled his eyes. “Not that it really matters. They already are. I just figure I don’t have to help them along with Wi-Fi.”

  She actually understood that. How many times had she had some idiot ignore the turn-your-devices-off announcement before a show and then been interrupted by a phone ringing? And the living room feeling she liked about the bar came from its communal vibe. Not its everyone-staring-at-their-own-phone vibe.

  Most importantly, she wasn’t in a position to complain if she wanted to watch football here. So she just said, “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s it? You’re not going to expose me as a fraud?”

  “Not today.” She shot him a saccharine smile. “Maybe later.” But actually…“What’s the password for the Wi-Fi?” If she could get Wi-Fi in her living room away from home, that would be awesome.

  “Why?”

  So I can mooch off your Wi-Fi. “I really, really need to check something.” She shook her phone at him, and he raised an eyebrow. “It’s an emergency. Tell it to me, and I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  He shook his head, but he leaned farther in—he smelled good—and whispered “LLH1943.”

  “How original.”

  “Well, we can’t all be creative geniuses.”

  She typed it in, connected to his network, and shot him another fake smile. “That’s true.”

  Chapter Three

  Four months later

  Law looked up from garnishing an old-fashioned when the bells on the door jingled.

  It was Maya.

  Which was a surprise. She generally didn’t come in on nights he had bands in.

  As if on cue, she paused in the doorway, glanced at the band, and rolled her eyes.

  She pulled up a stool next to Eve and Sawyer, who were oblivious to her arrival because they were half making out, half whispering to each other. Maya rolled her eyes again, but this time it was an inclusive eye roll, like she expected Law to share her view on how annoying the lovebirds were. He had the sudden urge to wink in solidarity with her, but he held back. They didn’t do solidarity.

  “How come you have a band here tonight?” she asked him. “I would have thought that’d be tomorrow night.”

  Tomorrow was New Year’s Eve, and she was right; he did usually have a band on New Year’s Eve, and since he didn’t usually do bands more than once a week, her surprise at finding one here tonight was logical. “I’m trying a DJ for New Year’s this year.”

  “Well, I was hoping to watch football, but now it’s going to be impossible to hear it.” She sighed, but not in her usual theatrical way. Something was off. She seemed almost…sad?

  He handed her the remote for her preferred TV. “My sincerest apologies that the normal operation of my business is getting in the way of your recreation,” he said in a way that was neither apologetic nor sincere. Thrown a little by how out of sorts she seemed, he was trying to goad her back to her usual self, but she didn’t take the bait. So he set a wineglass in front of her, filled it, and left her to her sulking.

  A while later, when the band was on a break between sets and Eve and Sawyer were settling their tab, he was drawn into a conversation between them that Maya was tangentially part of as she half listened, half watched her match.

  “It’s December thirtieth,” Eve said, leaning over to speak to both Law and Sawyer. “You think Jake is okay?”

  “Yeah,” Law said.

  “Well, as okay as he ever is,” Maya said.

  “You and I should probably go check on him tomorrow, though?” Sawyer asked Law.

  Law nodded his agreement. Jake’s son, Jude, who had died of the flu several years ago, just shy of his first birthday, had been born on December thirtieth. Jake always marked the day in self-imposed solitary confinement in his cottage, and he also never appeared for any New Year’s Eve happenings. Law and Sawyer had tried, that first year, to be there for him on and around significant days, like Jude’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, but Jake had made it abundantly clear that he wanted to be left alone. That wouldn’t stop them from checking in on him, though.

  “Has anyone heard from Nora?” Law asked, since they were taking stock of absent friends. Nora had left town abruptly a little before Christmas because her grandmother was dying.

  “Yes,” Maya said. “Her grandma died on the twenty-sixth.”

  They were all silent for a moment. “Any idea when she’s coming back?” Law asked.

  “Nope. I’ll ask her next time I talk to her, though,” Maya said.

  Eve and Sawyer made their farewells, and Maya picked up the remote and turned the volume up on her match. “Sheesh. I could hardly breathe through all the pheromones there.” Law chuckled. Eve and Sawyer were definitely still in their honeymoon phase. The band started making tuning rumblings.

  “Are they playing another set?” Maya asked.

  “Yeah, one more short one before closing.”

  She sighed—once again, she seemed sad, which wasn’t usual for her—and handed him the remote. “Well, this is pointless.”

  She moved for her coat, and he said, “Actually…” But wait. Was he insane?

  “What?” she said impatiently.

  “I have the app on my TV upstairs, too, if you want to go watch up there.” Yes, he was insane. “It’ll be quiet.” Like, very, very insane.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, the app allows more than one log-in, so I have it in my apartment, though I don’t think I’ve ever used it up there.” He realized that didn’t
address her shock, and honestly, since his subscription came with three log-ins and he only had two in use, what he really should do was give her the third. But he liked having her watch soccer at his bar. Since she’d found out he had the app, she’d taken to coming in at night, parking herself in front of the TV he now thought of as hers, and cueing up the day’s league highlights. He’d even gotten a little into it himself.

  Weirdly, she hadn’t even given him crap—well, not much—about his secret Wi-Fi. Probably because it benefited her.

  “You’re inviting me up to your apartment to watch football,” she said, clearly still not quite believing him.

  “Well, I’m not inviting you up. I’m not going to be there.” He gestured at the still-buzzing bar. “I’m just saying you can go up there if you want.” He fished his keys out of his pocket and held them out. Her mouth fell open. She was agog. Fair enough. He was kind of agog himself. He didn’t know what had possessed him, except he was pretty sure he hadn’t imagined those flashes of sadness in her eyes earlier. And her soccer team made her so happy.

  He also hadn’t truly expected her to take him up on the offer, so he was extra agog when she grabbed the keys out of his hand and hopped off the stool.

  Well, damn. “Will you be able to figure out the TV?”

  “Yes, Benjamin. I can run a light board. I aced video editing in college. I can figure out a TV.”

  Ah, that was more like it.

  And she must have figured it out, because after she left, he didn’t see her again. Knowing she was upstairs, in his personal space, while he carried on like normal down here was strange. There was an intimacy to it, which should have been the wrong descriptor, because she was there and he was here. After closing up, he rushed through only the most pressing cleaning tasks, telling himself he’d come down early and finish in the morning.

  Upstairs, he pushed open the unlocked door to his apartment, his heart beating faster than he could explain away as a result of having run up the stairs. The place was dark, but he could hear the TV.