by Jenny Hale
The rest of the ride was quiet as she flip-flopped between sheer embarrassment that he might have been able to decipher her thoughts and utter panic that she was going on a lunch date with Luke Sullivan with paint down her leg. He pulled the truck to a stop in front of a tiny shack of a building and got out. Callie sneaked a quick look at herself in the side-view mirror but this only made her feel more self-conscious.
“Do you mind if I just pop into the ladies’ room for a second?” she asked as he opened the door for her.
She did a little jog toward the bathrooms, leaving Luke with the hostess, and commenced digging in her handbag for her powder and lip-gloss. She hit the tap, the water splashing in the basin, and washed her hands before pulling her ponytail loose and running her fingers through her hair. She looked at herself. Oh well. He’d already seen her like this; she didn’t need to worry about it. A toilet flushed and a woman stepped up behind her, waiting her turn at the sink. After a friendly nod, Callie moved aside and quickly texted Olivia that she’d be later than expected, but after waiting a little while and not getting any response, she headed out to the dining area.
The entire back of the building was open to the beach, with a long bar facing the ocean, a thatched roof, and dangling twinkle lights that must come on when the sun goes down. Luke waved from his seat on the other side, daylight on his face, giving him a glow. The hostess opened the door, allowing Callie access to the barstools that ran along the back of the building on wooden decking built over the beach. It was weathered and gritty from the surrounding sand. Luke reached over and pulled one of the seats out from under the bar for her.
“What are we having to drink today?” the bartender asked. He was wearing an old T-shirt with a faded logo, his slightly longer than average hair tucked behind his ears.
Luke waited for her to make her choice, so Callie grabbed a menu and scanned the long list of cocktails. “Um,” she said, buying time. It had been quite a while since she’d gotten a drink with someone. “A rum and Coke please,” she said, unable to focus on any one of the millions of drink options that were scrawled across the glossy page in electric blue script. This wasn’t that kind of date anyway, she thought. Best to keep it simple—and just the one drink.
“Coconut rum?” the bartender asked.
She nodded.
“And you, sir?”
“Just a beer, thanks.” He nodded toward some sort of import. Then to Callie, he said, “You mentioned a cottage—The Beachcomber? Are you opening soon?”
“My friend Olivia and I are opening it back up at the end of the summer,” she said, relieved at the question. This was a nice, easy topic. She loved talking about The Beachcomber.
Callie hated this part of meeting someone. She much preferred the point when both people felt comfortable enough to sit at a table and eat without needing to fill the silence. She’d always been bad at offering up tidbits of information about her life, preferring to keep all that private.
The bartender slid their drinks toward them. Luke retrieved a couple of loose dollars from his pocket and stuffed them into the tip jar.
“Thanks, man,” the bartender said. “Ready to order?”
Callie wasn’t ready. She hadn’t even looked at the menu yet except for her poor attempt to find a drink. “What do you normally get?” she asked Luke.
“A bacon cheeseburger.”
“I’ll have the same.”
He eyed her inquisitively. “They’re really big,” he warned, a smile twitching at his lips.
His gaze swallowed her in a way that made her feel like she was the only person on the planet. She cleared her throat and looked down at the menu. “That’s fine. I can take the rest home if I don’t eat it.”
He turned back to the bartender and ordered their burgers. When the bartender left to put in the order, Luke swiveled on his bar stool to face her. “If the world ended tomorrow, and I had one last meal, it would be this burger.”
“You would choose a burger as your last meal?” she asked, surprised. “I can think of so many things that I’d have over a burger.”
“You’ve never had this burger.” He tipped his beer up to his lips, and she tried not to watch for fear she’d be goggling at his attractiveness. She liked how easily the conversation was going, how he didn’t put her on the spot.
“You’re very confident,” she said, meaning more by her comment than just his certainty about his choice of last meal.
He took a long look at her before shifting his eyes down to his beer and having another sip from his bottle. “What would you have for your last meal, then?”
“I don’t know if I’d be worried about my meal. I’d be too busy trying to do everything I wanted before the end.” She sipped her rum and Coke, savoring the coconut flavor. A string of paper lanterns hanging from the thatched roof above the bar rattled as they danced in the wind. With the warm breeze and the hiss of the sea behind them, she felt herself relaxing.
His eyebrows rose in interest. “What do you want to do before you die, then?”
“Learn how to knit.”
He laughed. “You could choose the hardest, most unreachable thing in the whole world—bungee jumping, mountain climbing, world travel—and you picked knitting? That’s something you could do right now. I’ll buy you a How-To-Knit book on the way home. Come on, you can do better than that,” he teased.
With a grin, she thought some more.
“Meet a world leader?”
Callie shook her head.
“Swim with dolphins?”
“Stop,” she giggled. “I’m actually trying to think of something but you keep distracting me.”
“So no clowning classes?”
“No! Nothing like that,” she laughed.
“Well what would you really want to happen before you die? Really.”
“I’d like to be closer with my mother,” she said, immediately feeling fire shoot through her veins at admitting that out loud. She’d never done that before. Luke’s easy talking had pulled her in and she didn’t know how to do this: get personal with a stranger. The things she wanted to do before she died were very intimate desires, the kinds of things buried so deep down in her heart that she wasn’t sure she wanted to share them with anyone. The fuzzy memory of her father leaving—a memory that had almost faded completely with time—filtered into her mind, reminding her of the turning point with her mom. It caused Callie to tense up.
His face softened, and she realized then that she’d bristled. She noticed that her knees had moved slightly away from him, her arms folded across her body. She straightened them out, channeling that moment of calm before his question and let her shoulders drop. She leaned back toward him again, grabbing her drink to have something to do with her hands, stirring it with the little black straw in the glass.
“Why aren’t you close with your mom?” he asked gently, turning toward the sea, as if the gesture would make the heaviness of the conversation go away. The bright sunlight made the water shimmer like diamonds on the horizon. When he didn’t get a response, he turned to her. “You can tell me,” he said with a shrug. “I’m an outsider. What would it matter if I knew?”
The answers bubbled up in her mind. She took another drink of her rum and Coke. Her mom hadn’t really been there for her since her dad left when she was eight. Callie wanted to know if her mother wished she hadn’t been so distant with her after her father left; if she wondered why Callie couldn’t just turn off the hurt like her mother obviously could; if she missed her. She opened her mouth to say it, but then she clammed up, choking the answers back. “What do you want to do before you die?” she said, steering the subject away from herself.
“I’d like to have a family, kids,” he said with a smile. “Travel.”
She was surprised by his answers. Lots of people wanted those things, but here was a single guy with his whole life in front of him, and the first thing he’d said was family. Not to mention, kids were a huge investment—emotionally, fi
nancially, time-wise. In all the relationships she’d been in, not one of the men had mentioned children, and she’d never felt the need to press them on it. She didn’t take marriage and children lightly.
“Where would you travel?” she asked, sticking to the easier side of the conversation.
“Malta, maybe. Belize… Somewhere exotic.” He smiled at her.
“They’re both by the water,” she noted, comforted that he wasn’t trying to get anything more out of her. He was easy to talk to; it was as if he sensed when to pull back and push forward, and just as she felt uneasy, he made it all better.
“I could never live away from the water. I love it too much.”
“Me too. I used to look forward to my visits here as a kid. I couldn’t wait to feel the sting on my face from too much sun and the salt in my hair. It’s fantastic.”
“When I’ve been surfing all day, that night when I lie in bed and close my eyes, I feel like I’m still on the swells of the waves.”
Callie knew that sensation. She got it too.
He smiled and said, “My mother used to tell me that feeling was the ocean soaking into my soul.”
“Mmm, I love that,” she said, feeling the tension leaving her.
The bartender arrived with two plates, setting them in front of Luke and Callie. He grabbed a few paper napkins from behind him, folded the wad in half, and set them on the table between them.
Callie looked down at the massive burger.
“You were warned,” Luke said.
“I underestimated what you meant by ‘big’.”
“You get a T-shirt if you finish it.” He pointed to an array of pastel garments pinned to the slant in the ceiling above the bar, all reading I survived The Beach Bum Burger Bash with a line drawing of the burger in front of her.
“Enticing,” she said, holding back her grin.
“You’re considered royalty if you have one of those shirts.”
“Do you have one?”
He looked at her as if her question were ridiculous. “Of course I have one! That’s my picture right there on the wall of fame.” He nodded toward a small bulletin board with five photos pinned to it. Luke was wearing the navy blue T-shirt over an Oxford button-up with the sleeves rolled, smiling an enormous smile.
“Quite an achievement,” she teased.
“Don’t make light of it. I’m one of five people on the Outer Banks who can eat the whole thing.”
“Now you’re just showing off.” She giggled. “It can’t be that hard.”
He flung her a challenging look. “I’ve only been able to do it once. But I’m throwing down the gauntlet: One of us is leaving with a T-shirt… And we know who that is.”
Callie rolled her eyes. Peering down at the small paper napkin she’d put in her lap, certain it was insufficient in this instance, she slid her thumbs under the enormous sandwich, barely able to stretch her fingers around it to lift it to her mouth. She had no utensils, or she’d have cut it into eighths. Assessing the task at hand, she attempted to devise a strategy to get a bite that had bread, meat, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and onion without the condiments squirting all over Luke when she tried to eat it. With some effort, she managed to strategically squeeze the burger while widening her mouth to reach from top to bottom, and took a bite. Her mouth full, her cheeks like a chipmunk with its stash, she watched to see if Luke could be successful with his effort.
With entertainment clear on his face, he took a bite and chewed.
“It’s delicious,” she admitted, once she’d finally been able to swallow. She blotted her mouth with her napkin before washing the bite down with her drink. Then she turned to Luke and said, “I’ve so got this.”
His eyebrows lifted in surprise. “It’s bigger than you are. I think you’re bluffing to get me to eat all mine. I had an omelet this morning. I wasn’t prepared. You have to eat this on an empty stomach.”
“You’re just scared,” she said, trying to cover her grin with her game-face.
“Of you? Ha!” he said, but there was affection showing in his eyes. He liked this.
“I’m a force to be reckoned with,” she said as she took another bite, this one bigger than the last. After she swallowed, she added, “I may look small, but I’m feisty. And I don’t like to lose.” She squared her shoulders, the burger between both hands.
He smiled, an undecipherable look lingering on his face.
“What?”
“You have ketchup on your shirt.”
She looked down and saw, dripping toward her midsection, an enormous glop of red sauce. She was mortified. “That’s fine,” she said, acting unbothered. “I’ll have a new shirt to wear home anyway.”
He shook his head and took another bite.
“I’m so surprised I’ve never heard about this place,” she said as she blotted the sauce stain. But then again, it wasn’t the usual tourist location. It was hidden from the main road and she couldn’t see a single person she thought looked like a vacationer. Gladys probably wouldn’t have known about it since she didn’t go out to eat very much. She’d rather do the cooking herself.
There was a group of guys down the bar who seemed as though they’d just gotten off work—their feet bare, their work boots lined up under their chairs with a bag of tools nearby. They were laughing, their beers swinging between their fingers, their elbows on the bar. Another couple inside was talking to the waitress, and she recognized the woman from the bathroom. The waitress had pulled up a chair and was looking at baby pictures. From what Callie could tell, she knew the baby, calling it by name.
“I like it because it’s off the beaten path, and it has this view,” Luke said, throwing his thumb over his shoulder.
Callie turned around, holding her burger. The beach was completely secluded—not a soul out there except the silhouette of a sailboat in the distance. The white, powdery sand stretched, untainted, as far as she could see.
“The beach is private; it belongs to the owner of this restaurant.” Luke stood for a moment, gesturing for Callie to follow. She set her napkin on the bar and leaned forward with Luke to view a small home sitting in the sand beside the bar. “He lives right there.” Luke sat back down, wrapping his hand around his beer and lifting it to his lips. The breeze blew off the ocean, the sound of the waves mixing with the steel drum that was playing over the speakers. “Certain times of year, the beach is closed off. It’s a turtle breeding ground.”
Callie smiled at that. “I love animals.” She got comfortable again on her barstool, and took another bite of her burger. After she finished her bite, she asked, “Do you have any pets?”
“I wish I did, but I’m never home. I’d hate to have an animal waiting for me day in and day out when I could only show up in the evenings to give it any attention.”
She went in for another bite of burger.
“If I did have a pet, it would be a dog,” he said. “A beachside game of fetch might be tricky with a cat.”
She laughed. Here she was, a complete mess, eating a burger the size of a dinner plate, and talking like she’d known this guy for ages. The more she thought about it, the more it unnerved her. In a weird way, those awkward first dates, while annoying, comforted her—she hadn’t ever had to open up and she felt safe that way; it was like a learned formula of conversation. With Luke, she was in unfamiliar territory.
She looked down at her half-eaten burger, her tummy getting very full.
“Reconsidering your bravado now?” he laughed, his teasing light-hearted.
She nodded. “And I was so hoping for us to have matching T-shirts.”
“You’ve given it a good effort,” he said with a grin. “Would you believe, I brought my grandmother here and she almost finished one?”
“What?” Callie laughed. “I don’t know what’s more interesting: the fact that you took your grandmother to a burger shop or that she almost ate this whole thing!”
“She was a funny lady.” He wiped his hands on his na
pkin and took a swig of his beer. “She passed away at eighty-seven, and until then, she called me every day.”
“Really?” Callie thought about her own grandmother, and the empty spot still there without her. She had been the rock that had held Callie’s family together. Especially after her father left. Callie had so many memories of her; spending whole weekends at her house, taking long walks, baking—her grandmother had even started to show her how to knit, but Callie had never had a chance to practice with her, and she still couldn’t do it. Callie missed her terribly.
“Yep. She said that I couldn’t get into too much trouble if I had to answer to my grandmother every day. I enjoyed her calls,” he said with a chuckle, then took another few bites, following them with his beer. “When she passed away, my mom took over for her.”
“That’s really sweet. I wish my mom would call me more.” As the words left her mouth, she wanted to chase them and pull them back, in disbelief that she’d even uttered them, but she could relate to his comment so much. Her issue with her mother had always been the one thing she wished she could fix, but she just didn’t know how.
“That’s twice you’ve mentioned your mom.” He didn’t say anything else, and she wondered if he could sense her regret in uttering the comment. The breeze blew in, rustling a napkin by her plate. She set her drink down on it.
“I should probably go soon,” she said. “I have a lot of work to do on the house.”
Luke looked surprised, and Callie wondered if she’d been rude. Maybe he’d wanted to stay, have a few more drinks, but she hadn’t planned on all this—any of it: the lunch, the talking, meeting him. She needed to go.
Luke flagged the bartender.
When he came over, Luke asked for the bill and one of the navy shirts from the ceiling, to Callie’s complete astonishment, holding up his empty plate. “I couldn’t let you leave without getting that matching shirt,” he said with a wink. The bartender grabbed a shirt and handed it to her.
“Thank you,” she said to Luke with a smile.
Once the bill was delivered, Callie packed the rest of her burger into a “to go” box. “I’m going to put in an order for my housemate and her son before we go, if that’s okay. They asked me to get dinner for them tonight,” she said, reaching across the bar and snagging a menu.