The marshmallow burst into flame. Aubrey made no attempt to rescue it.
“If I’d have gone with you,” Sam said, “you wouldn’t have had to drive home alone.”
“You speak of being alone as if it’s something to be frightened of.”
“Blow the marshmallow out, would you? You’re going to torch the whole place.”
She swung it around, close enough to singe his eyebrows, and blew it out herself. When she pulled it off the stick and placed it in his mouth, Aubrey touched his lips.
Sam tried to swallow, and almost couldn’t. He might as well be forcing down a lump of clay.
“Do you remember when I first kissed you?” He shouldn’t have asked. He knew better.
“I’ll never forget,” she said.
Waves crashed onto shore in the darkness beyond them. The sound, usually comforting, turned to white noise in his head. An occasional burst of the teens’ laughter twined into the air with the smoke.
The memory of that long-ago kiss hung between them.
Aubrey stood abruptly. “I brought pictures of the kids. You want to see them?” She fished in her pocket for a plastic sleeve that must have come from her billfold. She held the pictures out as if they were talismans that would protect them both. “This is Channing’s school picture from last year. She’s prettier than this, actually. She won’t give a full smile because of her braces. This is the baby. Hannah. She won’t take a picture without Elephant.” The child was clutching a ragged, blue stuffed animal coming apart at the seams. “And this is Billy. He’s such a precious little man. He was the only one who kissed me good-bye at the airport. Look at him, his face is always dirty. He always smells a little bit like sweat.”
Sam almost couldn’t look. Their smiling faces, Billy’s toothy grin, made him ache. “I’d like to meet them,” he said. “I bet we’d be friends.”
“I bet so, too. Especially Billy.”
“Channing looks like you.”
“You think so?”
“She reminds me of you, bounding along the jetty.”
“She’s spent plenty of hours running around this beach.”
The snapshots made Sam feel deficient, like the Biblical servant who had buried his master’s coins and had nothing to show for them. Oh, Father. If Aubrey had answered the door that day, is this something we would have had?
“Is Gary—?” But he stopped because he had no right to ask the question. Is Gary a good husband to you, Aubrey? He didn’t dare let himself finish it: Because I would have been.
He asked instead, “Your children, you say they spend lots of time here? Surely your father doesn’t push them away?”
“No, he enjoys my children. It’s just me. It’s always been me—” Aubrey’s stricken expression told him everything he needed to know.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sam purchased a kite on the wharf, an orange trapezoid with a spiral tail that snapped when it launched into the wind, and Hunter spent hours sending it skyward along the beach. While Hunter unfurled twine and ran backward along the beach, Aubrey coached through cupped hands, “That’s it! Pull back!” and Sam caught it as it made mad lunges toward the sand.
Aubrey drove them along the coast toward the Umpqua Lighthouse, shore pines enclosing them when the road twisted inland, following the signs to Siltcoos Dunes. Every time the highway meandered west toward the headlands, she exclaimed over the broad expanse of sea. Sam treated them to ice cream when they stopped to browse at the cheese factory, Tillamook Mudslide for Hunter, blueberry cheesecake for Aubrey, and a double dip of pistachio pecan for himself. Hunter bought wind chimes for his mother. And for the next forty miles, every time they passed a sign about Siuslaw National Park, Hunter begged to rent dune buggies.
Sam couldn’t resist dune buggies any more than his nephew could. He rented them at a place called Sandman Adventures. After donning helmets and revving their engines, they followed a path through oat grass and cypress until it opened onto what seemed like a planet of sand.
Aubrey let out a war whoop and headed straight uphill. Hunter followed, the orange flag flapping on the rear of his buggy. Sam kept some distance back, taking it all in. He might be in a landscape penned by some moody artist who kept shifting his brush, altering heights, rearranging patterns and forms. Sam had the feeling, if he arrived at the same place tomorrow, he wouldn’t be in the same place at all. This sand moved, caught, overtook everything. If he stayed still long enough, he might simply disappear.
“What’s taking you so long, Sam Tibbits?” Aubrey whipped around a dune and came at him full bore. He floored the buggy and hung a U, leading her toward a crest of sand that had been purled by the wind. Hunter zipped past them both, his fist raised and his T-shirt billowing. The three of them caught air, racing full-throttle toward the bottom.
They headed home after their rides wearing sunburn lines shaped like their goggles and grins as wide as Depoe Bay. Their scalps were gritty with sand. They found an oldies station; Aubrey sang along with Rock Lobster, only hitting every second or third note. She broke off the song to tell Hunter, “We were on the beach once and your uncle thought he was catching a sea otter in his hands. He grabbed it and it was nothing but an old shoe. Did he tell you about that?”
“What about the time she knocked over the bucket and we had crabs scuttling under the seats in the boat. Make her tell you about that.”
“I’ll bet your uncle never told you about the Sea Basket on all-you-can-eat night and they made his parents leave because he ate 167 shrimp.”
“Stop,” Sam said, chuckling, knowing they could tell Hunter stories about their childhood until his eyes rolled back in his head. “You’re tormenting my nephew.”
“I’m tormenting you,” she said, poking him and laughing, before she reverted to singing Rock Lobster again.
When Sam donned running shoes and took Ginny for a jog on the beach, he passed an old pier that had fallen into ruin. Thick-napped grass carpeted the pilings. Rivulets of water had receded with the tide, sculpturing the sand.
Sam hadn’t noticed the old church before; he realized it had been years since he’d come this far afield. As he ran, his footfalls plowed into the sand, his calf muscles burning, his lungs ready to burst. Every footstep called her name. Aubrey. Aubrey.
The morning was cool, the church’s steeple impaling the fog. Sam couldn’t place this tall, hand-cut stone building among his boyhood memories, but he knew it had been here. The cemetery outside was marked with headstones that must be a century old.
When he commanded Ginny to stay and pulled open the door of the church, wonderful old smells greeted him: the remnants of gladioli and carnations, vanilla candle wax, furniture polish and silver cleaner. Underneath was another smell, musty and biting, part mildew and part sweat.
Father, the troubles of my heart are as deep as the ocean.
The stained glass depicted not Bible stories but pictures from the sea. A lighthouse on a jagged rock. A boat pitching at sea. The sun fell through the windows in strands that spotlighted the dust motes. The ceiling towered over him as Sam neared the altar.
You brought me into a spacious place.Yet all you’ve done is heap questions on my head.
Sam didn’t expect anyone to greet him this time of morning. He meant only to walk forward along the center aisle, where holes had been worn in the carpet so the backing could be seen poking through, where decades of couples must have stood to exchange vows, where coffins had been set and wept over, where followers had come to say they would be baptized, where broken souls had come to accept Christ, and healing had taken place.
Search me and know me, Lord, because I don’t know myself.
A man stepped down from the balcony but Sam did not notice him at first. For some reason, Sam expected the minister here to wear robes and a stole even in the middle of the week. So he was surprised to see the man dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a scrubby green shirt, looking more like a grizzled fisherman than someone who s
erved the church.
The minister said quietly, “Welcome,” and went about slowly carrying a plate holding unleavened bread to the altar. Sam watched while the man’s hands broke the bread into pieces. He headed out a side door and returned some minutes later with a chalice. He set it, too, on the altar.
“You’re just in time for communion. The sanctuary is always open, but on Wednesdays we offer the elements of the Lord’s Supper.”
Sam focused on the stained glass overhead, a ship in a storm aiming toward a distant lighthouse. In the panes of the window, the beacon from the lighthouse had been cut from clear, faceted glass, reflecting diamonds. The shards of blue were transparent but filmy, a watercolor hazed with oil.
“Solomon Fraser.” He extended his hand.
They shook hands soundly. “Sam Tibbits. Pastor Sam Tibbits.”
“Ah, you’re here on vacation?”
Sam didn’t know how to answer. It hadn’t been his choice to take a sabbatical. He wondered how this time might have been different if he had sought it out for himself.
He wondered if God would’ve been more inclined to point him the right direction if he had not been so certain he was already headed there.
Upon the altar, candle flames dipped and waltzed on a gentle draft. A telephone rang from some distant office, muted and urgent. The waiting communion cup and the plate of unleavened bread stood at the foot of the altar, as inviting as a banquet laid out for a hungry guest.
Sam didn’t realize he hadn’t answered until Solomon said, “If you feel capable of doing something, Sam Tibbits, then God isn’t the one doing the calling.”
When Sam first understood the Father wanted him to preach, he had not once, not ever, ever, questioned that what was happening to him had been divine inspiration. He had prayed ever since he’d been a boy, in the childlike way of a boy, that the Father would use his life for something special. Sam had only batted .243 his junior year in American Legion, so the professional baseball career was out of the question.
“God has done nothing since he brought me here except make me remember,” he said to Solomon.
I’m desperate for you, Father. I’m desperate for your guidance.
Solomon lifted the plate of bread from the altar, gave thanks over it, and held it toward Sam. It occurred to Sam that he was standing in the precise spot where he’d stood earlier, where the carpet was worn flat by people who had stepped forward.
Solomon recited from the Bible, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
In remembrance of me.
Oh, Father.
Sam was standing where people had fallen on their knees in joy. He was standing where people had knelt in pain.
“This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” Solomon recited. “Do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
Come back to your first love, Beloved.
Sam dipped the bread inside the cup. He waited until the bread was soaked deeply with the ruby liquid. He put the bread on his tongue, holding it there, tasting both grapes and pungent wheat. It tasted like nothing Sam had ever tasted before. Yet it tasted as familiar and sweet as the first time he’d taken communion as a child.
Oh, thank you, Father.
“You must remember,” Solomon said when Sam opened the massive door to leave, “that you are not called to fix people. You are called to love them. And sometimes that is the more difficult job.”
On Thursday morning, while mist still curtained the sky, Aubrey knocked on their cottage door to say she’d rented a crab boat. Not twenty minutes later, they were dressed and ready. Even Hunter was excited to be on the wharf so early in the day. Seagulls already swirled around boats in the bay. People shouted to one another in the slips. A bell clanged from a distant buoy.
As Sam watched Aubrey step onto the planks of the dock, now painted bright yellow when once they’d been weathered gray, the wave of nostalgia hit him so hard that it knocked his breath away. The tall posts, which once had held a weathered McCart sign, now bore a ruby-red metal sign with block words in white: WHALE WATCHING. BOATS TO LET.
On the opposite side of the dock from where they were standing, a metal building displayed pictures of gray whales in the window.
Long ago, that metal building hadn’t been there, either. That was the shack where Arlie kept the schedule book with green quadrille paper; a binder with rusty rings and bent edges. Where Arlie would lean on the long counter that held candy bars and plastic-jelly lures in every color. Where the pictures of The Westerly, the No Nonsense, and the Stately Mary had been tacked on the wall.
If he looked hard enough, Sam could almost see Kenneth McCart swabbing down the decks, leaping with sure steps from the wharf with the coiled green hose in his hand.
The boat Aubrey had rented was a bare aluminum skiff, as dented as an offroader’s hubcap. It rocked as Hunter stepped in. The proprietor loaded supplies for the trip, buckets, a bag of frozen bait, Styrofoam floats, and crab rings constructed of mesh, their rims bound thickly with black rubber.
Sam yanked the rope on the single outboard and, with a chuff of oily blue smoke, the motor came to life. The skiff rose and fell with the chop. Aubrey showed Hunter how to bait the crab rings, how to drop them, how to space them evenly. And Hunter discovered what the other two already knew as they made circles and checked the pots that day: The thrill wasn’t only in luring crabs, but also in deciding which ones to keep.
The crabs had to be scrutinized, the widths of their shells measured from point to point. The crabs scurried about, their legs making amusing clicking noises along the bottom of the metal skiff. Breeding females had to be thrown back. Any crabs that measured a hair under 53⁄4 inches had to be tossed, too.
They ended up with precious few in the bucket!
It was just after noon when they hauled in their gear and counted their catch. Nine Dungeness crabs, enough for a reasonable supper. Sam headed the boat into the harbor, steering them around the spit, where the seal herd had hauled out onto the shore. The largest one sprawled in the driest, warmest spot, sunning its belly. Others crowded around him, their bodies strewn across the sandbar like wrinkled, fat sausages. Pups frolicked among the adults, capering about on their flippers.
Hunter started to rise but Sam placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Not while we’re underway, buddy. Keep your seat.”
Hunter craned his neck. “We can’t get any closer?” His nephew didn’t mention his encounter with the seal pup.
Sam throttled down the engine, edging toward shore. An easy surf slapped the skiff. The only other sounds were the sporadic barks of the seals, a ship’s horn blowing, the jeers of seagulls circling overhead. The water evened out, began to quiet, became murky. Beneath the hull it flowed like smelted pewter, heavy and still.
Hunter stayed amidship, his rapper-logo cap pulled low to shade his face. Sam could tell the boy was disappointed when he cut the motor completely.
“We mustn’t go closer. The ones out fishing, who need to feed their pups, might be afraid to return to shore.”
“We’d be careful. Nobody would know about it.”
“We mustn’t take the chance of harming them.”
Even as Sam said the words, he was struck by Aubrey’s posture opposite him. Not knowing she was being watched, she huddled in the boat with her arms hugging her legs, her shoulders curled forward in defeat. She watched the seals absently while she bit her bottom lip. Sam sensed her sadness, almost stronger than her body could bear.
Are you missing your father’s love, Aubrey? Or are you hiding something more?
Solomon Fraser’s words echoed in his head. Not called to fix people. Called to love them.
Oh, Aubrey. I have loved you since I was eleven years old.
Hunter touched his arm. “Look.” A seal and her pup had surfaced on their starboard side. Two gleaming heads, one small and one large, bobbed above the ripples. The sea mammals didn’t seem afraid. Sam could see the
pinpricks of their whiskers; he could almost touch them. Their eyes were as inquisitive as children.
As silently as the seals appeared, they slipped underwater and were gone.
Even Aubrey had lifted her chin to see them. Sam grasped his nephew’s shoulder, this time in love and not restraint. “The Lord sometimes blesses with a physical sign, Hunter. Something he lets you see so you’ll know he is nearby. Something that becomes dear to you.”
“The seals?”
Sam’s eyes leveled on the boy’s. “Watch and see. I believe so.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hunter steered the skiff alongside the pier while Aubrey brandished the bucket proudly, showing it off to the dockhand. “Not a bad catch for one morning, is it?”
Sam pitched the stern rope onto the wharf and jumped. After he attached the boat to its mooring, he offered Aubrey his hand. She shook her head, loving the feeling of the breeze in her hair. When their fingers interlaced, they fit together as if they’d been wrought for this one purpose. Sam’s grip carried her back to a dozen other moments, to a handful of other sunswept summers, days when Sam had raced her along the jetty and they’d counted cranes roosting among the rocks and he’d kissed her. Sam’s grip transported her to days when her future seemed full of possibility and she’d thought her father would forgive her and she hadn’t been married to a man enslaved by drinking.
Gary can’t hurt himself. He’s taken care of. He can’t hurt other people.
But what of the day he comes home?
Aubrey hoisted herself from the skiff. She had things she needed to tell Sam. She had questions to ask of him as well. If you are the pastor of a church, how can you be here so long? She wanted to know. But every time they were together, she felt so lighthearted. She knew how brittle words could shatter that façade. Aubrey asked instead, “Who’s boiling and cleaning the crabs?” while she removed her hand from his. She could tell by the quick tilt of his head that he’d noticed. So difficult, pretending Sam’s touch no longer had any effect on her.
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