Barefoot Beach

by Toby Devens

  “I know what you mean. I’ve got one a year older. He’s talking about joining the Marines. Maybe that will mature him. Nora . . .” Scott leaned in so I got a close-up of his dark, long, wasted-on-a-man eyelashes nervously flickering. “By any chance, would you happen to be free for dinner Saturday night? Or we could take in a movie. Cutting it close, I know, but I thought maybe . . .”

  I wasn’t about to go into Dirk DeHaven’s upcoming visit, the reason for it, or why I felt I ought to be around and available on Saturday with no delay or excuses if Jack needed me. I wanted to be there for him if this meeting turned into a disappointment or, God forbid, a catastrophe. I’d already turned down a ticket to the Driftwood’s first production of the season, The Gin Game, the two-actor drama starring Margo, so I could hang around the house, waiting to congratulate or, worst-case scenario, console my son.

  Scott watched me grope for words. “You probably have a previous . . .”

  “Commitment,” I finished, careful to avoid the word “date.” “I do. But some other time?”

  He drew a single breath before asking me out for the following Saturday, a fund-raiser for the Veterans Food Pantry. “I’m vice commander of the post so I have to make a welcoming speech. They do kind of a USO show organized by the ladies’ auxiliary. In the past they held it at the VFW hall, really casual, with ribs, fried chicken, my kind of food. But we had such a big turnout last year, this year’s is being held at Upton Abbey, the new resort over in Pinella. The one with the casino. It’s supposed to be five-star fancy. More your kind of place.”

  Did I come off as five-star fancy? I told him I loved ribs.

  “I think you’ll like the crowd. It’s a diverse group in terms of age, race, and background. Most of them have been stationed or posted overseas. So they’re pretty interesting. We can always duck out early if you get bored.”

  Did he think I was an elitist snob?

  “I’m looking forward to meeting them,” I said. “And”—because no risk, no reward—“to being with you.”

  “Me too.” His voice pitched up with surprise, perhaps at my boldness, then dropped to husky. “Very much, Nora.” An awkward silence was followed by a pat on my knee and him rising from the chair. “Okay, then. See you Tuesday in class. And slot me in for next weekend.”

  “Consider yourself slotted.”

  He bounded down the stairs back to the path. This time no crashing through the underbrush. He was right about stealth mode. When he didn’t want to be heard, he wasn’t. And when he wanted to be heard, he made sure he was.

  Well, that was an interesting afternoon, I told myself as I leaned back in the deck chair. Now, don’t start dreaming an hour with Scott into a lifetime with him, because you’ll freak yourself out. Read your damn book. Embrace your fabulous you.

  I got to the part about how women are their own worst enemies, holding on to their hurt, and how it doesn’t have to be that way if you open yourself to opportunities. Like I needed a book to tell me this. I put it down to take in an especially glorious sunset, and dream a little.

  chapter twenty-two

  It was Dr. Dirk DeHaven, Donor Dude’s Delivery Day. And it was a dreary one. Not a respectable rain, but a laconic drizzle grayed the sky and washed everything a dull monotone. I was out early Saturday on the side path with my pruning shears, clipping away, when Jack found me.

  Poor kid was desolate. “Can you believe this weather?” he said. “I mean, sunny for the whole last week and today it’s a mess.” He took in the scene. “What are you doing out here?”

  I’d decided that since I might have to sell the house, I’d best get it in order before I called in a Realtor to check it out. I didn’t mention the Realtor idea to Jack. He had enough on his mind, and if I got a hit from the networking I planned on doing that morning, the last resort might never come to pass.

  “Just trying to clear the path. It’s wildly overgrown,” I said. “Better to work in a light rain than with the sun beating down.”

  He nodded, backed off two steps, and, arms out, palms up, asked, “So, what do you think? Am I presentable?”

  He was wearing an open-collar knit shirt with the Duke Blue Devils D embroidered in navy on its pocket. The chinos were recently purchased—I’d seen him ironing out the manufacturer’s crease—and now I reached over to snip off the plastic thread that dangled its price tag. His hair, even without the glint of sun, shone a streaky blond. My son. So handsome.

  I knocked off the “so,” which would have made him squirm. “Handsome,” I said.

  “Casual enough for crabs?”

  “You’re doing steamed crabs for lunch?” It was hard to imagine the doctor with a crust of Old Bay Seasoning lodged under those pristine fingernails.

  “Yup. Dirk got hooked on them when he interned at Johns Hopkins. He even has them shipped from B’more to Frisco. San Francisco,” Jack corrected himself. “But he wants the real thing today. The whole nine yards. Beer. Paper on the table.”

  Servers dumped the hot, crimson-shelled crustaceans leaking succulent juices on tables covered with sheets of tan butcher’s paper that at the end of the feast looked like a battlefield strewn with the skeletons of the vanquished.

  “I figured The Claw is authentic.”

  A local dive, not yuppied up, the real thing. On second thought, maybe crabs weren’t an odd choice. Maybe Dirk realized the diversionary potential of steamed crabs. All that shell cracking and picking sweet meat from crevices and prying it from tunnels would give the men a task to focus on if their conversation lagged. Plus he was a surgeon; maybe this was designed to show off his skills. In any event, they’d both have something to do with their hands. Jack’s were in constant motion now, flexing, drumming against his thigh. He caught me noticing him cracking his knuckles.

  “I’m nervous,” he admitted. His left eyelid was twitching. “Dumb, huh?”

  “Understandable. It’s a first meeting. No one knows what to expect.” Or what to want, I thought but didn’t say. Or maybe they did, both of them, and it was only me who was in the dark.

  “Yeah. Well, I guess I’m on my way. Ugh, look at that sky.”

  Storm clouds were gathering. “You can’t control the weather, buddy.”

  “I know. But I wanted to walk the boardwalk. And downtown. See the stores. Maybe go to the lighthouse. The nature preserve. Stuff to keep him interested.”

  “He’s more interested in you than the scenery. And you can drive him around. Not through the Mews, but the other places.”

  “I guess. Okay, I’m heading out. Love you.”

  “Love you too. This is going to be good, Jack.” That’s all I ever wanted for him. But this time, God forgive me, I didn’t want it to be too good.

  True to her word, the receptionist at the National Association of Dance Movement Therapists had fired off six job openings. I’d emailed my updated résumé with a sane-sounding cover letter to each of them. So far only one had responded, and that position was full-time, year-round, and way up in Pennsylvania. Plan B: for the rest of the morning, hunkering over my bedroom laptop, I sent emails to former colleagues telling them of my job search, renewing acquaintances with people I’d worked with or conferenced with over the years. “It’s been much too long,” every message began. And ended, “Let’s do lunch when I’m back in town, but in the meantime if you know or hear of anything, please keep me in mind.”

  Early afternoon, I propelled myself through a series of mindless tasks, rearranging closets, folding laundry, Windexing all the downstairs glass. When I caught myself decrumbing the toaster tray I concluded it was absurd hanging around the house. I could be home from almost anywhere in Tuckahoe in under ten minutes. And maybe Margo was right that I coddled Jack.

  “Overwater or overfeed any living being and you know what happens,” she’d said, hitching her neck toward the stringy orchid hanging its head in my kitc
hen window. “Everything withers from too much attention. Except Pete Manolis. Now there’s a specimen that can’t get enough. In Jack’s case, I’m not saying you should neglect him. I know what a lack of parental interest can produce: me. Not that I’m chopped liver, but that’s in spite of Paulette and Bernie and at least partly because of a parade of loving nannies and high-priced shrinks. But you don’t want to go to the other extreme, Nora. Don’t turn Jack into a mama’s boy. Back off. Give him a chance to stand on his own two feet. It’s what you’ve got your degree in.”

  So with the evening stretching empty ahead and no calls or texts from Jack, which I decided meant good news, I switched my cell phone ringer to the alarming William Tell Overture, notched up the volume to VERY LOUD, changed into sneakers, strapped on a Love Strong backpack, locked the door behind me, and trotted downtown, trying to get my heart pounding from something other than nerves.

  Half an hour before, the weather had turned abruptly from a gloomy dampness to an atmosphere as crisp and pale yellow as a fine chablis. The sky above was a tender blue and the scent around me was flowery and freshly washed.

  Usually the air-conditioned interior of Turquoise Café lured summer patrons inside, but on this suddenly exquisite day, the patio, with its bougainvillea-woven trellis and its cobblestones shaded by twin willows, made an alluring oasis. Three of its four tables were taken, and when Em saw me through the window, she lit up and pointed toward herself, then the patio, signaling me to claim the last one for us.

  She was ready for a break, she told me, and unloaded her tray’s clove-and-cinnamon chai and plate of börek, made with yufka, a hand-rolled dough thicker than phyllo and layered with spinach and cheese. Low on caffeine, light on sugar, this late-afternoon snack wouldn’t ratchet up my jitter level. She sat down with a sigh and the newest entry from a menu of Merry stories.

  Merry had been keeping a ginger cat stashed in her bedroom walk-in closet, a hideaway set up with food, water bowl, and litter box. Sarman’s subsequent eviction had spurred a major tantrum and slammed doors.

  Erol had taken the brunt of his sister’s fury because he’d tattled. In retaliation, Merry had painted his toenails pink while he was sleeping.

  Our mutual friend Margo also knew from retaliation. She was a maven at it. She’d banned Merry from the Driftwood until the girl pulled herself together. Once Merry apologized to the family, including Erol, she’d be welcomed back. On probation, though. She’d better watch her step. As a bonus, Margo—who sometimes amazed me with her generosity, and Em related this with an awed shake of the head—had taken in Sarman as a resident of the playhouse. She bought a case of cat food and Merry brought over the litter box with a vow to clean it twice a week. One crisis, if not averted, at least managed.

  On our second round of chai, something warbled though Em’s monologue to stop me mid-chew. A whistle. Jack’s recently suspended whistle, more sprightly than ever. “Here Comes the Sun.” Had my head been screwed on straight, I wouldn’t have been tempted to turn it and see my son walking in tandem with Sixteen past the patio toward the door. And maybe he wouldn’t have seen me and called out, “Mom? That you? This is so cool.”

  After we wound up pulling two more seats to the little bistro table and Em escaped to fetch coffee, there was the expected awkward silence, but only for a few seconds, because what I assumed was Dr. Dirk DeHaven’s bedside manner, a twist of confidence and charm, seemed to transfer easily to social situations. He was sitting across from me, Jack between us. He leaned in.

  “This is a nice surprise,” were his first words. “Jack wasn’t sure you and I would get to meet this weekend. He said you thought you might be intruding. Let me assure you, you wouldn’t have been. Aren’t.”

  I smiled my default smile, the one that said I had absolutely no idea how to respond. The one that didn’t involve my eyes or my brain, or so Margo had once observed. Now, that was who we needed here: Margo, who was a pro at making small talk and in character. I could see her doing “Mother Courage”: earthy, gutsy, and totally without fear.

  “Jack’s been looking forward to meeting you,” was all I could come up with.

  “And I him.” The grammatically correct DD reached for the last börek. Ah, a privileged man. “I understand that Lon . . .” He paused, while I felt a furious flush rising. Lon, I thought. He called him Lon? As if this interloper had the right to address my late husband by his given name. “Jack’s dad,” he amended, so of course I felt guilty for prejudging, “died when Jack was eleven. You’ve done a fine job raising him.”

  “He’s a good kid,” I said, as Em brought over their coffee, fresh tea for me, and cherry baklava, warm from the oven.

  “I’m not a kid anymore, Mom.” Jack was drawing a smiley face with his finger on the teapot’s steamy porcelain.

  “To a mother, her kid is always a kid, Jack.” The Donor Dude had the temerity to wink at me. “But you are an impressive young man.”

  Then the conversation fell into a black hole, and all hands reached for their cups.

  After two or three sips Jack said, “Tell Mom what you do. About your work. He does heart surgery. Mostly on kids, right?”

  I’d had a hard time taking my eyes off Dirk DeHaven from the moment he sat down across from me. Now I had an excuse to stare, as he explained in layman’s terms the intricacies of his work with pediatric patients who’d been born with miswired circulatory systems. He rerouted veins and arteries and gave them normal lives and life spans. It sounded important, he sounded important, and I could sense Jack puffing up with pride next to me, but I was only half listening. My other half was calculating the role genes played in shaping looks and behavior.

  The doctor resembled Jack less in person than in the emailed photo. There must have been a time lag since he’d posed, because his hair had thinned and gone almost all white, so there was no longer a perfect color match, and the newly exposed scalp and a swaggy chin made his face longer, less Jack’s strong square. The eyes were dead-on. But not the mouth, which Dirk wiped with care to remove a smear of cherry filling.

  “Whatever you do,” Margo had said about meeting DD, “don’t think about how weird it is that his semen got shot up your wazoo.”

  “Yeah, thanks for reminding me not to think about it. And you should talk. You had plenty of strange men’s little swimmers freestyling up your fallopian tubes. Well, at least until they crashed into your IUD.”

  She ignored my insult. “There’s a difference. You carried his baby.”

  “Potential baby. When it became a real one, it became Lon’s, not freaking Sixteen’s.”

  But maybe now he was here to claim what he thought was his.

  “Mom, you okay?” Jack asked.

  “Why?” Had I been glowering? “Just listening. It’s all so fascinating, the advances in surgical techniques.”

  “That’s right. Jack told me you work with amputees, veterans. Now, that’s a noble calling. And there are all kinds of new technologies emerging in your field. Prosthetics with microprocessors. Advances in stump maintenance.”

  Jack made a gagging sound. “Hearts, okay. But stump maintenance? Jeez. Maybe you two could talk about this one-on-one next time.”

  Dirk slid a glance toward me while I thought, One-on-one? Next time? He said, “Jack’s obviously not heading to medical school after college.”

  “Right. Or at least not doing anything too bloody. Maybe ophthalmology,” Jack said.

  Ophthalmology? Until now, he’d wanted to be a professional lacrosse player or a college athletics coach.

  “So, Mom, this is what we’ve done so far today.” He counted off on his fingers: a stroll on the boardwalk, a climb to the top of the Dunmore Point Lighthouse, back to The Claw for crabs and beer. After lunch, they’d spent an hour or so on the beach. (I felt an electric warning buzz prickle my skin.) “And we sat on Mooncussers Rock, kind of catching up.” And there
it was. The jolt. Zap!

  Mooncussers Rock! To the Farrells that rock was a mystical talisman like the Blarney Stone in Ireland. Sacred. Lon had carried Jack out there in his pj’s during his kindergarten summers and spun stories of the pirates who had ravaged the coast of Maryland, the rascal Mooncussers. On later August afternoons, my son had helped my husband make the rock into a fort, dressing it with the toy soldiers and miniature artillery of Lon’s childhood. That was Lon’s rock. Lon’s and Jack’s damn rock, and on the first visit Jack had taken the Donor Dude to plant his ass on it.

  I couldn’t look at my son. Or at his sperm donor. Thank God Em had returned to check on us so I could stare helplessly at her.

  “Anything I can get for you?” She swept her question to me, catching my desperation.

  Yes, you can get me back my old life, I thought. Even the last eight years of it without Lon were better than what I suspected lay ahead. They’d stolen my rock. It was just a symbol, but that was the point of symbolism. It stood for something.

  “Actually, you can help us out here, Mrs. Haydar.” Jack slipped his iPhone from his shirt pocket. “Mom is lousy with a camera. Sorry, Mom, but you know it’s true. It’s the French Revolution with her. ‘Off with their heads.’” I managed to nod. He held the phone out to Em. “Would you mind?”

  He called the shots. First, the two men stood side by side, Dirk’s hands clasped behind him like an English duke’s, Jack’s arms dangling purposelessly. For the next few, they moved closer together. Then Dirk clasped a hand on Jack’s shoulder and my son’s grin broadened.

  I was nursing my tea, wishing it were bourbon, when Jack called out, “One with you, Mom.”

  Oh . . . dear . . . God.

  There was no arrangement that didn’t tick me off. With Jack in the middle we looked like the standard family portrait. Wrong. But left to right—Jack, Dirk, me—made me the outsider.

  “Very nice,” Emine said when she’d snapped at least five and she and I thought we were finished. Jack moved out of the last frame, saying, “Thanks, Mrs. Haydar. Appreciate it,” and took back the iPhone.