Shadows on the Sand

by Gayle Roper

  My mother stood in my restaurant.

  29

  It was all about timing, wasn’t it?

  Act at the right time and you succeeded. Think the stock market.

  Be at the right place at the right time and you met the right people. Think business contacts, networking.

  Go to the doctor’s at the right time and you lived. Think early detection.

  Make sure you were seen by the right people at the critical time. Think alibi.

  He excelled at doing things right, at timing everything.

  It was enough to make him shake his head in wonder, not just at his own abilities but at everyone else’s idiocy. People were such fools, so easily manipulated. So gullible.

  Having the right name was also an asset. The right name got you respect. The right name opened doors. The right name even offered protection from the law.

  He had the right name. And the perfect sense of timing.

  Chaos might reign around him, but his life was ordered, timed, and controlled. All you had to do was look at him, and you knew: He was head and shoulders above everyone else.

  30

  My mother!

  After a moment of shocked immobility, I turned my back and fought for calm.

  She looked good, better than I ever remembered seeing her. Her skin was a healthy pink instead of the dead gray it had been when all her nutrition came from a bottle. Her hair was a shining cap of curls, and while her figure was slightly thickened, she looked healthy and vibrant. She wore a red V-neck sweater over a white shirt, jeans, and white sneakers. She was somewhere around fifty, though the abuse she’d heaped upon herself should have made her look eighty. Instead she looked wonderful.

  There was no justice in this world.

  I saw all this in the moment of shock before I turned away, and as I digested it, I began to shake, feeling as stable as the biblical house built upon the sand.

  A handsome man was with her. He wasn’t as tall as Greg, but he held himself with authority. He had sandy brown hair that had turned gray at the temples, and he had his arm around my mother’s shoulders as if he were protecting her, though from what I couldn’t imagine. Right now I was the one who needed protecting.

  What was she doing here? Was she looking for me? For Lindsay? No, that was impossible. There was no way she could have found us, not after all these years.

  Under the guise of picking up a piece of paper from the floor, I sneaked another glance. My first impression had been accurate. She looked wonderful. Where had the sloppy drunk gone?

  Mary P spoke as she came out from behind the counter. “I’m sorry. We’ve stopped serving for the day.”

  “I realize that,” my mother said with a smile. “I saw your hours in the window.” Her voice was soft but clear, not slurred from some substance she’d ingested. “I just had to step in for a moment. The name drew me. You see, I used to have a daughter named Carrie, but I lost her.”

  There was a moment of silence at that amazing comment. Then I wanted to turn and scream, “You lost me? You lost me? You threw me away, me and Lindsay.”

  Oh no! Lindsay! Where was she? I looked toward the kitchen and saw her through the serving window deep in conversation with Ricky, a list in her hand.

  Stay there, Linds. Stay there! Oh, Lord, keep her there!

  “This is a lovely place,” Mom said. “Warm and seashore-y with the blues and creams, though that pink counter is something else.” I heard the smile in her voice.

  “It used to be the registration desk in a hotel that was once on this property.”

  “How lovely to have rescued it.”

  Right. Lovely.

  “If you’re staying in Seaside,” Mary P said in her warm, inviting way, “perhaps you could stop in tomorrow for breakfast or lunch.”

  “What do you think, Luke?” Mom said.

  I heard the deep rumble of Luke’s voice, but I couldn’t make out his words.

  “I’m Mary Prudence Hastings,” I heard Mary P say. “This used to be my place before Carrie took over. Now I work for her.”

  “I’m Sue Fletcher. This is my husband, Luke.”

  Again came Luke’s rumble. If I turned, I’d doubtless see the three of them shaking hands like new best friends. And what was with the “Fletcher”? When had she acquired a husband? She didn’t deserve one.

  “So Carrie’s has a real Carrie,” Mom said. “I’d love to meet her.”

  There was a pause during which I felt Mary P’s eyes boring into my back. I held my breath, clutching the saltshaker so hard it’s a wonder it didn’t implode in my hand. I waited for her to give me away.

  “Our Carrie isn’t available at the moment,” Mary P finally said. “Maybe tomorrow.”

  And I knew Mary P knew she was speaking with my mother.

  “That’d be nice,” Mom said.

  “Where are you staying?” Mary P asked.

  “We’re renting a house at the south end of town. We’re here for a couple of weeks. I used to come to Seaside when I was a kid living in Camden and loved it. I talked so much about it, Luke decided we should come for a visit.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  Good grief, Mary P, why not just ask for their résumés? Get rid of them!

  “We live in Atlanta, in Buckhead,” Mom said.

  Buckhead! Was she kidding? Ritzy, rich, toney Buckhead? Don’t make me laugh!

  “What do you do, Luke?” Mary P asked.

  “I’m a lawyer,” Luke said, his words clear as a bell this time. “Business law.”

  “And you?” Mary P asked Mom.

  “I’m a writer, a novelist. Maybe I’ll set a book in Seaside.” Again I heard a smile in her voice.

  I wanted to scream. When I knew her, she couldn’t even write me notes for school. I learned to forge her signature and wrote all correspondence for both Lindsay and me. Otherwise we’d never have had an excused absence for illness or gone on a school trip or had our report cards signed. Now she wrote novels? I wanted to puke.

  “We’d better go, sweetheart,” Luke said, and my stomach turned at his gentle manner.

  “Yes, of course. It was so nice to meet you, Mrs. Hastings.”

  “Please, call me Mary Prudence. I feel like we’ve known each other for a long time.”

  “Oh,” Mom said, disconcerted. “How nice.”

  Nice, my eye! The whole situation was terrible, from Mary P, the turncoat, to Mom, the unwelcome Ghost of Christmas and every other day Past.

  God, this isn’t fair! She looks good. She sounds good. She’s married to a man who seems to care about her and makes lots of money. She writes books, for heaven’s sake! Not fair! So very not fair!

  As Mom and Luke—my stepfather? Good grief!—walked out the front door, I bolted for the back door. The last thing I wanted was to talk to Mary P.

  I raced up the steps to the apartment, ignoring the wind and scudding clouds. I ran into my bedroom and fell on my bed feeling cold all over. I pulled the quilt up, tucking it around my shoulders. I lay there shivering, staring at the ceiling.

  My mother was in Seaside, in my restaurant!

  I can’t deal, Lord! I can’t! And I don’t want to. Make her go away! Please!

  I imagined her wanting to help run the café or trying to give us advice about life and love or telling us how naive we were to live like we loved Jesus. I imagined her trying to cut Mary P out of our lives or criticizing Greg or putting down our little business.

  And Lindsay! She was going to hurt Lindsay. She was going to pretend she loved her, draw Lindsay in, and then she was going to disappear or fall into her bottle again, leaving Linds bruised and bleeding.

  At least Lindsay was an adult now, grounded in the Lord, with a career of her own. She didn’t need Mom as she had when we were still at home. But that didn’t mean Mom couldn’t still hurt her deeply with abandonment, indifference, and invective.

  Make her go away, Lord! I don’t want her here.

  I closed my ey
es as I heard myself. I felt miserable and guilty about my terrible attitude.

  I told You this would happen. I told You that if I was near her, all the old hurt and bitterness would spew out. I told You! I don’t like myself like this.

  The bed moved as Oreo jumped up. She walked up to my face and looked down at me with her great green eyes as if to say, “What are you doing here in the daytime?”

  “Hey, baby,” I whispered.

  She lowered her black head and ran her raspy tongue over my cheek. I gave her a weak smile.

  She stepped onto my pillow and began turning circles. When she was satisfied in that feline way that never quite clicked with humans, she collapsed, curling into a furry ball beside my head. Then she reached out and gently laid a paw on my cheek.

  Well, somebody loves me!

  And I began to cry.

  31

  At ten before four, I pulled myself from bed and got ready to meet Greg. I felt so very tired, the emotional toll of Mom draining me. Just like she always did, Lord! I also felt angry and resentful at both God and Mom for making me feel so confused and weepy.

  Poor Greg. I wouldn’t be a great date, but at least the stripers wouldn’t mind if I cried.

  Lindsay stuck her head in my room. “Greg’s here.” She grinned and wiggled her eyebrows.

  I nodded morosely, and she gave me a “what’s up with you?” look. I forced a smile. If she only knew. She frowned at me and left.

  I looked in the mirror to comb my hair and saw the sick smile I’d directed at my sister. No wonder she looked startled. It was Halloween-mask grotesque. I sighed. In my current frame of mind there was no way I could conjure up a genuine happy face, not even for Greg.

  My melancholy will probably kill our budding romance, Lord. What guy wants to spend time with a downer of a date? Leave it to Mom to ruin another thing for me.

  Greg was waiting in the kitchen, and I managed a weak smile in which he seemed to see nothing amiss.

  “If we’re lucky, you can join us for a fresh fish dinner,” Greg told Lindsay.

  She grinned. “Then you’d better be lucky. I’ll look up striper recipes and be ready when you bring your catch home.”

  Her happy enthusiasm made me feel even worse, something I wouldn’t have thought possible. The idea that I had to tell her about Mom made my stomach curdle. How would she react? Because she had been so young when we left, she didn’t harbor any of the negative memories I did, or at least not as many. And she had a more forgiving nature than I.

  What if she were eager to accept Mom, to reestablish a relationship? What if I lost Lindsay to Mom? I swallowed the bile that threatened to gag me.

  I was silent during the ride to Twentieth and Ocean. Greg kept looking at me with concern.

  “Okay,” he said after he parked the pickup at the foot of the boardwalk ramp. “Give. What happened between when I last saw you and now?”

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t want to tell him because it would show all too clearly my petty and spiritually immature nature.

  “Don’t give me that.” He studied me through narrowed eyes. “As a rule you’re pretty perky, and you’ve lost all your perk.”

  Perky? I was so not perky. Ever. Cheerleaders were perky. Ingénues were perky. I was—well, not perky.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Liar.”

  I glared at him and he smiled back, his eyes full of sympathy. “Come on. Give.”

  A tear slid down my cheek. He reached out and caught it with his index finger.

  “Trust me, Carrie.”

  That was all he said, and I started talking, words hemorrhaging without the moderating effect of an emotional tourniquet. “She’s here … lost me! … looks beautiful … has money … handsome husband … novels … not fair! Greg, it’s so not fair!”

  “No, it’s not. But who said life was fair?”

  Just because what he said was true didn’t mean I wanted to hear it. I wanted to wrap my blue funk around me like a hair shirt and suffer. I didn’t want veracity. I wanted sympathy and poor me.

  “Remember I told you I couldn’t handle being near her? That it would make me into this awful person I didn’t want to be? Well, that was when I thought she was still the unreliable drunk I knew.” I drew a shuddering breath. “Being near her like she is now, when she’s—she’s—”

  “Everything you’d want a mother to be?” he suggested.

  “But never was. Never!”

  “But never was.” He nodded.

  “It’s awful!” I dropped my face to my hands. “I’m awful! The one who’s good is her!”

  He gently pushed some hair back from my forehead and pulled my hands down.

  “I look blotchy, don’t I? I always look blotchy when I cry. Lindsay cries pretty, but I don’t.”

  “Your nose is red.” He leaned over and kissed it, surprising me. “It’s cute.”

  Cute. And perky. Who was this fictitious person Greg thought I was?

  Then he leaned over and kissed me on the lips. It was a kiss that held so much promise my throat ached. When he pulled back, I sat with my eyes closed for a few moments more, holding the beauty of him close while ignoring the truth of me. Then I looked at him, letting my pain and anger show so he’d see the real me, the ugly me.

  “Oh, Greg, I feel so terrible. I hate her. I hate what she does to me. I hate me.” Tears fell again.

  He didn’t seem fazed. “You know, what you’re suffering is a kind of posttraumatic stress thing.”

  Oh, great. More rational thinking.

  “Seeing her has set off all the hurtful memories. It’s sucking you back.”

  That was certainly true. “But I’m not sixteen anymore. I’m thirty-three! I should be able to do better. Be better.”

  “Like being thirty-three means you shouldn’t have flashback fever? I’m older than you, and I get it.”

  Of course he did. Who wouldn’t with stuff like he’d suffered? “She writes novels, for Pete’s sake.”

  “And this is bad how?”

  “I don’t know!”

  He took my hand in his across the distance between our seats. “Well, I’m not sure what a counselor or Pastor Paul would say, but I suspect they’d tell you that you have to talk to her for your own emotional and spiritual health. Now me, I’m going to tell you that you don’t have to do it this very minute. Give yourself time to get used to the idea of her being here. For now let’s go fish and let the ocean breezes clear your head. And, Lord, teach Carrie what to do and when.” The last was a prayer.

  Somehow his giving me permission to take my time and his prayer for the Lord’s help eased the iron bands constricting my chest. I took a deep breath and thought how wonderful the timing was between us. Even three days ago I wouldn’t have been able to confide in him no matter how much I longed to.

  “No guy’s ever prayed for me before.” If guys knew what it did to a girl, it’d be in all the how-to-date books as the number one way to a girl’s heart.

  He gave my hand a gentle squeeze. “I hope I get the chance to pray for you for a long time to come.”

  Really? I studied his face and asked the question. “Greg, why did you say Ginny’s name the other day?”

  He blinked and looked out the window toward the beach. My stomach lurched. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “It’s going to sound so strange. It sounds weird, even to me.” He cleared his throat. “Ginny spoke to me. Or at least it sure sounded like her.”

  Whatever I’d expected, this wasn’t it. “She spoke to you? You heard an audible voice?”

  “Yes and no.” He looked thoroughly discomfited.

  I waited, knowing that somehow what he had to say would make or break whatever it was we had growing between us. What if I found my unwanted mother and lost the very-much-wanted Greg, all on the same day?

  Greg cleared his throat again, a sure sign he wasn’t certain of my reaction to what was coming. “I was sitting at your kitchen table won
dering how long I’d been aware on some subconscious level of how special you were and questioning my intelligence because I’d been too dumb to realize it sooner. Then I wondered if it made me somehow unfaithful to Ginny—which I knew was ridiculous even as I thought it. That’s when it sounded like she spoke. Not out loud, of course, but in my head or heart or wherever.”

  I remembered my stomach falling when I heard his soft whisper of her name. Right now it felt like oceans of acid were forming a giant whirlpool down there. “And what did she say?”

  Greg gave me a lopsided smile. “She said, I like her. I do. Meaning you.”

  I stared at him, my mouth probably hanging open.

  “Then she said, Go for it, Greg. With my blessing. It’s time.”

  “You heard Ginny’s blessing?” My voice cracked, but my abdominal whirlpool began to settle.

  He nodded. “Weird, huh?”

  I watched him, hope and uncertainty battling it out inside. “Unusual at the very least.”

  He reached out and ran a knuckle down my cheek. “Even before I heard that voice, I’d already decided to pursue things with you. I just hadn’t acted on my decision yet. It’s important you realize that. Maybe the voice—which, by the way, I’ve decided was the Holy Spirit prompting me—made me act more quickly, but I already knew deep inside.”

  “You did?” The whirlpool had become a placid, sun-splashed sea.

  He nodded with a smile that curled my toes. “I finally figured out the reason I loved coming to the café. For a long time I was stupid enough to think it was the café itself, but it’s just a building. It was the woman inside who was sharing her warmth and calm. You gave me a peace and ease I couldn’t find anywhere else, completing my healing.”

  I stared at him, struck dumb.

  “You’re a wonder, Carrie Carter.”

  No! No, I wasn’t. At least not in the wonderful way Greg made me sound. “But I’m a mess, Greg.”

  He shrugged. “At the moment maybe. But you cared when I was a mess. Now I’ll return the favor. And hopefully someday we’ll both be fine at the same time. Now let’s go get us some stripers.”