by Angel Lawson
“Paige, this is Maggie, Ivy’s friend,” Anita says gesturing to a girl in a white T-shirt covering her bright blue bikini and a cap that says “Ocean Beach Marina.”
“Do you work with Justin?” I ask.
“No. Ivy fills in sometimes.” I look out in the water and see the two of them floating together in the water. I guess maybe he was more than flirting with her a while ago. “I work at a restaurant near the pier and go to USC.”
“Paige goes to Vanderbilt,” Anita offers.
Maggie nods in recognition. “Nashville. Do you like it there?”
“I do. I mean, I grew up near the school so it’s not really unfamiliar but college is cool.” I hope no one can hear the waver in my voice. I try to divert attention off myself and go for the basics. “What are you studying?”
She holds up her bottle of beer and smiles, “Undeclared—for as long as I can get away with it.” She laughs and clinks bottles with Bobby. Everyone but Ivy and Justin are out of the water, cleaning up and setting up for dinner. John Thomas and Bobby pull a heavy, metal fire pit from the porch near the house and load it with coals.
“Ride it in,” Bobby shouts and I look toward the water. Both Ivy and Justin have caught a wave on their surfboards.
“Ouch,” Maggie says, when Ivy crashes into the waves but Justin coolly rides his all the way to the shore, hopping off before it hits the shore.
“Impressive,” I say.
Anita nods. “Yeah, they’re the best out of all of us. When Justin sets his sights on something, he’s pretty determined. Surfing was his big passion for a long time.”
“And now?” I ask, curious about his passions.
She gave me a quick glance. “Now that he’s graduated, I suspect he’s looking for something new.”
“Here,” Maggie says handing me a metal skewer, with a hot dog on the end.
“Thanks,” I tell her and hold it over the fire. Justin and Ivy finally come out of the water and I listen as they take turns in the shower under the porch. He disappears for a minute and comes back in dry shorts and an orange hoodie. The zipper stops midway up his chest and I struggle to pull my eyes away. I nudge Anita. “I had fun today, thanks for inviting me.”
She catches me staring at her brother-in-law but says nothing about it other than yelling down the boardwalk, “If you think I’m cooking your dinner, Justin Hawkins, you’re crazy.”
He walks up to Anita and pushes her out of the way, grabbing a rod and skewering three hotdogs down the metal. “I can fend for myself,” he says, swatting her as she walks over to the table to fix a plate for Sibley.
He and I stand near one another, quietly roasting hotdogs over the fire. After a minute he raises an eyebrow and says, “You have a good time today?”
I take a deep breath. “I did. It was nice to be around some other people—you know other than my mom and the Florence County records keeper.”
“Yeah, that’s not a big camper; you two must get along well.”
“Usually. My trip was kind of spur of the moment. I may be crashing her adventure a little.”
“The grounds are buzzing with news of her celebrity. I’m sure she’ll keep busy. Plus, there’s always bingo on Thursdays,” he laughs.
“Who?” John Thomas asks, stealing a hot dog from the end of Justin’s skewer and giving it to JT. The little boy ran over to the tables and squeezed a giant glob of ketchup on top.
“Paige’s mother.”
“Oh, right,” John Thomas nods. “Well, that and she’s a legend around here.”
This piques my interest. “She is? How so?”
Justin points at my hot dog and says, “You may want to take that off now.”
I look down and see a charred, blackened hot dog. “Shoot.”
“Eh, give it to Bobby, he’ll eat anything.” On cue Bobby walks over and plucks the blackened dog off my stick and walks away. “Here,” Justin says, giving me one of his remaining hot dogs. I take it and move over to the table filling the rest of my plate with chips, fruit, and other picnic foods.
Anita waves me over and I take the seat next to her under the gazebo. Justin sits across from me, next to Ivy. Before I lose the courage I ask, “So how, exactly, is my mother legendary?”
“She was notorious for being pretty wild back in the day. All of our families were tight. Julia would come for the summer and stir things up just enough to cause trouble, break hearts and then leave. One summer she left for good and no one saw her again until you two showed up a week ago,” John Thomas explains.
“Wait,” I say, looking around the fire, refusing to meet Justin’s eyes. “Am I related to any of you?”
“You’re cousins with Anita and maybe the same to Ivy.”
“Okay, good to know, I guess.”
Anita grins. “My mother talks about how she convinced Julia to sneak out of the house and take the car down to Myrtle Beach to the Pavilion. Back then it was a forty minute drive. All on deserted back roads. Completely crazy. If my grandparents had found out they would have been whipped within an inch of their lives.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “My mother?”
“Yep. She and my mom were inseparable.”
“What’s your mother’s name?” I ask.
“Sugar.”
“Oh right, my mom mentioned her the other day. I had no idea.” Anita forehead furrows and a tiny frown tugs at her mouth when I say this, but she doesn’t respond. When the conversation turns to local gossip, I get out of my seat and head to the cooler for a drink. I open the can of soda and lean over the railing of the deck facing the ocean. It’s almost dark but I can see the white caps on the crashing waves. The wind picks up, and I shiver.
“Want my sweatshirt?”
I turn to find Justin leaning next to me. “No, I’m okay.”
He unzips his hoodie anyway and stands before me bare-chested. I eye the tattoo on his arm. I can now see that it’s kind of a combined sun and moon. “What does that mean?”
“Harmony. It’s how I feel when I’m out on the water.”
I snort.
He tilts his head. “What? You making fun of me?”
“No, I just wish I felt that way in the water. If anything it’s the opposite. Pure, unadulterated fear.” A gust of wind blows past us and I shiver.
“You’re freezing. Take it.”
“Now you’ll be freezing.” I want the jacket though. I want to smell it, to know what this beach boy smells like and if his scent is as delicious as everything else about him.
“I’m pretty hot-natured. Plus, I’ve got another shirt in my car. Here,” he says placing it over my shoulders. “I mean, we’re like third cousins once removed, right?”
I make a covert attempt to sniff his jacket. I’m hit with the warm scent of laundry detergent and sunscreen. Better than I hoped for.
“Are we?” I ask, and try to do the math of how illegal it would be for me to kiss him.
“Nah,” he laughs. “I don’t think so. Although, your mom does know my uncle Richard.”
“Oh, I met him. He’s nice. I mean, he tried to get me drunk. Not in a creepy way,” I promise. “It was a nice gesture. I was trapped.”
Justin tips his head back and laughs, flashing his teeth in the dark. They’re nice. White and only a little bit crooked. Why am I looking at his teeth? I shift my eyes to his lips. No, his…I look at the water.
“I suspect he was around during those late night adventures Anita was talking about.”
“Yeah, I’m having a hard time believing that. About my mom, that is.”
“Really? Why’s that?” he asks.
“The last crazy thing my mother did was ditch the Junior League tea for a book club hosted by the mayor’s wife.”
He gives me a funny look. “Your mom lives in a shiny rocket ship trailer. Around here that definitely is crazy.”
“How is that crazy? All of you live in the same place—hers is just sliver.”
He shrugs, his bare shou
lders catching light. “Yeah, but we’ve all lived here forever. It’s not every day a best-selling author and her daughter move in. That’s big news.”
“I guess.”
“Well, Paige, what do you plan to do with your summer other than fight over campground water, sunburn yourself to peeling skin, and hanging around?” He reaches over and peels a strip of skin off my back. We both watch it flutter away in the breeze.
“Gross! And that water thing was your fault.”
“Maybe.”
“Completely.”
“So?” He’s still waiting for an answer. I remember what Anita said about his persistence.
I look out at the water and confess, “I’m not sure, I thought I’d just relax on vacation but I just keep finding out all this stuff I never knew about her. This place, family, the history. It’s like she’s been hiding all this from me and I never would have known if I hadn’t crashed her trip.”
“Maybe you tagging along was a good thing, right?”
I glance up at the small smile playing on his lips and try to figure out his angle. I’m not convinced I want to know. “I guess we’ll find out,” I say. He doesn’t respond but there’s that feeling in the air. The one where everything gets electric. I’m afraid of that feeling, so I just smile and walk away while I can.
Chapter Six
I spend the next day traveling up and down the coast looking for Donald Gaskins’ kin. I had no idea what my mother planned to do if we found them. Regardless, I had already decided I would stay in the car and wait while she charmed them out of the traumatic details of their lives. The whole process felt intrusive.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I ask.
“No,” my mother answers while leaning over the steering wheel to see the street signs. The pole at the corner of the street is bent halfway to the ground. “Can you tell if this is Hill Street?”
I look out the window and run my hand over the lock to make sure it’s secure. From the ramshackle houses to the junk cars in the yard, it’s obvious we aren’t in the best neighborhood. “Yeah, I think this is Hill Street.” I look again. “No that one, that’s Hill.”
She turns the car and we slowly drive by a group of young guys hanging out on a brick wall in front of the house. They stare at us as we pass. I slide lower in my seat. “Could you pick it up a little, Mom? I think we’re about to get carjacked.”
“There it is,” she says, pointing at a house with peeling green paint and a gray tarp covering half of the roof.
She parks the car on the street in front of the house. “Are you kidding me?” I ask. “Are you really going in there?”
She gives me a look like I’m an idiot or something. I give her one back. “This is what I do, Paige. I find family and friends and search records. One time I climbed in the dumpster behind a school looking for trashed records. I know it’s not glamorous but this is my job.”
“You climbed in a dumpster? Gross.” I consider the stories Anita and the others told me at the beach. Maybe she is capable of those things.
She ignores my protests and bends over to get her bag. “Are you coming?”
My plans to sit in the car alone vanished the minute we passed the corner hooligans, so I grab my purse, lock the car door, and follow her to the house. “Wait up,” I say, practically clinging to her arm. I’ve never been in a situation like this. I grew up in suburban Nashville. I’m a student at Vanderbilt, southern Ivy League. Not that we were rich or anything, but this? I’ve never been around this.
I hover beside my mother as she knocks on the door and after a moment the door opens and we can see an older woman peering at us from behind the screen door. “Yes?” she asks.
My mother steps forward. “I’m Julia Barnes and this is my daughter Paige,” I wave when she says my name. “I was hoping you could help me find someone I’m trying to locate—“
“Who ya looking for?” she interrupts. Her accent is thicker than Anita’s.
“Well, really, anyone that may be related to Donald Gaskins.”
The woman opens her mouth once but instead of speaking slams the door in our face.
“So, I guess we should go…” I start, but my mother is already knocking on the door. “I don’t think she wants to talk to us.”
Despite my argument, she knocks again. “Of course she doesn’t. She’s possibly related to the worst serial killer this part of South Carolina has ever seen. No one wants to talk about that.”
“Umm…then why are we here if she won’t talk to us?”
“Just because she won’t talk to us today, doesn’t mean she won’t when she’s ready.” She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a business card. She knocks again and then says in a loud voice, “I’m leaving my card on the door. It has my name and number, call me if you want to talk.” She tucks the card into the edge of the screen door. “Okay, let’s go.”
Like a child, I follow her back to the car with a sense of awe. We pass an older man, his face lined with age and she smiles and says hello. Just like that. Like there is no difference between her and everyone else on this broken down street. She has so much determination and I realize that this is a woman who knows how to get what she wants. A woman that doesn’t make stupid decisions or runs from them. She unlocks the car and when I slide in my seat I wonder, not for the first time, if I can ever be like her.
~*~
I wake the next morning to a loud banging on my metal camper door.
“I’m coming,” I shout, stumbling across the trailer to the door a couple of feet away. I peer through my swollen eyes. “Justin?”
“Morning,” he says through a wide grin. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says Ocean Marina across the chest, and a hat that says the same thing, cargo shorts and sneakers. He looks way too awake for this time of morning.
I start to let the door slam shut on its tight coiled springs but he stops it from closing with a quick hand. “Thought you might want to have some fun today?”
I pick up my phone from the table behind me and check it. “It’s 6 AM.” I ignore the two messages from Mark overnight on the screen.
“Come on,” he says. “It’ll be fun.” I feel his eyes traveling over my pajamas and I shift under his scrutiny.
“You’re not going to take me fishing or something.”
“What’s wrong with fishing?” he asks.
I shoot him a look of warning. “I’m going back to bed.”
“No fishing. Trust me.”
“Ugh, let me get dressed.” He starts to step inside, but I hold my hand up. “While you wait. Outside.”
He flashes that grin and laughs. “Thought I’d give it a shot.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, slamming the door in his face.
~*~
I force Justin to stop at the coffee shop next to the grocery store. He waits for me in the same Jeep he drove when he offered me and my mom help on our first day here. It’s weird sitting this high off the ground and with no walls or roof. I take a gulp of coffee and sigh. “Okay, what are we doing?”
“Going to work,” he says, turning left onto the beach road.
I almost spit my coffee all over the dash. “Are you kidding me? You made me get up to go hang out at your job?”
“Sure,” he says. “Why not? You don’t have anything else to do.”
I stare at the tattoo on his arm and wonder what else he thinks is fun. “You suck, you know that?”
“I don’t,” he laughs and keeps driving, turning down a small side road back toward the water. “Just wait, you’ll love it.”
Turns out he’s right, although I don’t tell him that. At the marina, I learn he spends the day prepping boats and readying them for clients who dry dock them when they aren’t in use. It’s not glamorous or anything but the marina stores a ton of boats, some of them enormous. I can see it’s a successful business. Personally, it’s a nice change from sunbathing and serial killer research.
“Can I try?” I ask. He
’s behind the wheel of a massive forklift used to move the boats in and out of the three story dock storage.
“Negative.”
“Why not?”
“Because this boat costs about sixty-thousand dollars and if you drop it I’m going to have to pay for it.” He shifts a lever and the lift runs down the side of a 20 foot-drop and into the water where Ivy waits below to guide the boat onto it. She works at the marina. I also saw John Thomas in the office when I used the bathroom.
“Does she get to use the lift?” I ask, jerking my head in Ivy’s direction.
He doesn’t respond right away, busy with the levers and gears on the forklift. Biting his lip in concentration, he focuses on his job until the boat is securely on the lift. When he’s finished, he looks up and says, “Yeah. But she’s worked here since she was fifteen.”
“Of course,” I mutter, knowing I’m being lame. I’m jealous of a girl who’s been perfectly nice to me, because she gets to lift boats on a forklift and spend time with Justin, who, by the way, I’m spending time with right now.
I have a problem.
Justin drives the forklift into the huge warehouse used to store the boats. When he disappears around the corner, my phone buzzes, and without a second thought I answer.
“Hello?”
“Don’t hang up,” he says.
I consider hanging up.
“I know you’re mad, but I want you to reconsider,” Mark says.
I take a deep breath and say, “Reconsider what?”
“All of it,” he says. I hear the relief in his voice that I’ve finally responded. “Me. The trip. I miss you.”
I look out over the marina and spot a pelican swoop down over the water and scoop up a fish.
“Paige?”
Still, I say nothing. I don’t trust myself.
“Come on the trip,” he tries again. “I’ll stay away from you, if that’s what you want.”