Jennie sniffed as she cracked eggs for a quiche. “I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “He should be my home, right?”
“But you love it here,” I said. I handed her an oven mitt with the sparkly outlines of the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign on it, and Jennie took a tray of sheet cake out of the oven.
“I’ve never felt more at home anywhere.” She set down the cake and stood with her mitted hand on her hip, brushing a stray curl out of her face with the other. “Maybe I’m just selfish. I’m supposed to want him to be happy, too.”
I gathered a handful of eggshells and threw them in the trash. “But if you’d both be happier in different places, then you’re not being selfish at all.”
Austin clattered down the back stairs and into the kitchen, Walter on his heels. Austin and Jennie high-fived. “What’s for breakfast?”
Jennie breathed deeply once, then took off the oven mitt and gave Austin the rundown on breakfast options. Walter pawed at Jennie’s legs, stretching his back into an inverted arch.
I was waiting for Austin to finish getting ready for school when Darth showed up, Walter yapping in room-echoing barks at his arrival. Darth had dark circles under his eyes, and I almost felt bad for him. “Is Jennifer around?” he asked, walking into the inn’s front room. I picked up Walter, and he lurched and lunged at Darth, scratching my arms.
“I think she’s baking,” I said.
Darth moved toward the kitchen, trench coat flowing in a shadowy trail. But Jennie came out, standing with one hand on the doorjamb. “Hey,” she said.
Darth took Jennie’s face in his hands. “Babe,” he said, “we can’t lose what we’ve got.” Darth kissed her. “The Force is strong with us.”
Austin thudded into the front room, his hair in his eyes. He was going through a Beatles phase. “Mom, where’s my homework?”
I handed him Walter. “Take him upstairs, and I’ll look down here.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” Jennie said. Then, her voice cracking, “I’m sorry.”
I looked for Austin’s homework, picking and sorting through piles of coffee table books.
“Then come home. What do you even see in this piece-of-shit string of sand where everyone’s always up in each other’s business? Let’s go home.” I looked up to see Darth tug Jennie’s hand toward him on that home.
Austin walked into the front room. “It’s not polite language to say shit,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, corralling Austin and pointing him toward a stack of magazines to search for his homework.
“Shit, Jennifer,” Darth said, glaring at Austin. “Come home with me. Let’s go home.”
“It is not polite at all,” Austin muttered. He threw a Redbook on the floor.
“Darth’s just upset,” Jennie said to him, coming over to help look for his homework. “He doesn’t mean to be—” Jennie paused. She knelt down and set magazines on the floor, one at a time. “He doesn’t mean to be impolite.” Jennie unearthed a blue-lined sheet of paper and handed it to Austin, then stood up and turned to Darth. “I need to get back to work,” she said.
“So we’re done?” Darth asked. He ran a hand through his hair and a strand floated down to the carpet.
“We’ve been done for an hour and a half.” Jennie turned and went back to the kitchen.
It took a few months for Nate and Jennie to start dating. Nate refused to ask her out for the longest time, stubbornly clinging to his heartbreak from Monet. But when he finally did, it was like they’d always been together. Like Jennie’s fingers had always laced snugly around Nate’s, like the crook of Nate’s arm had always matched the curve of Jennie’s neck. When Nate soaked Jennie with a water balloon at the Cape Hatteras School Festival of Fun, Jennie shrieked and wrapped him in a bear hug, shaking her wet curls in his face. When Jennie jumped on Nate’s back, Nate hooked his elbows under her knees. They latched like puzzle rings.
A few months later, Nate, Jennie, Austin, and I drove up to Manteo so Jennie could woo the owner of the Front Porch Café into carrying our baked goods. We went to the waterfront, Austin running off to the playground with its kid-sized plastic pirate ship. Nate and Jennie held hands, swinging in tandem as we walked toward the squat, red-roofed replica of the Roanoke Marshes lighthouse crouched in the sound. Soft gray clouds scudded across the sky, and I zipped my windbreaker. I glanced back at Austin, who’d found a stick and was swinging it through the air, thrusting and parrying with an imaginary foe. “Put that down if another kid comes to play,” I called to him. Austin didn’t answer, just yelled something gutturally unintelligible and swung his stick harder.
Nate raised an eyebrow. “He’s been pressing boundaries lately.”
“No shit,” I said.
“I think that’s something kids need to do,” Jennie said. Her hair blew into her face.
“But Dude Man’s taking it pretty far,” Nate said. We walked along the pebbly sidewalk, and Nate pointed out the weather tower to Jennie.
“How else is he going to learn?” Jennie asked.
I stared up at the flags flapping at the top of the tower. “Dear Abby says that kids push boundaries in their quest to mature.”
“There’s boundary pushing as a developmental phase, and then there’s just plain old bad behavior,” Nate said.
“Sure,” Jennie said. “I’m just saying that if kids don’t brush up against ways they’re not supposed to act, they won’t realize what’s appropriate and what’s not.”
“I’m supposed to set and maintain limits and consequences to teach him skills for a productive life,” I said. We walked toward Austin, who was thwacking the pirate ship’s plastic slide with his stick. “Otherwise he’ll grow up to be a douche bag.”
“Growing up doesn’t come easy,” Nate said.
“But are douche bags born or made?” Jennie asked. “That’s my question.”
“And what’s the statute of limitations on turning into one?” I asked. “I feel like by college, the die is pretty much cast. So maybe the cutoff is high school?”
We walked back to the pirate ship, the wind flattening my jacket to my back.
“I’m pretty sure I went to elementary school with some, though,” Nate said.
Austin threw down his stick and ran over to us. “Uncle Nate,” he said. “I just made up a joke. Want to hear it?”
Nate slung his arm around Austin’s shoulders and gave him a noogie. “Absolutely.”
“What kind of a sweater did the pirate wear?” Austin’s hair blew in his eyes, and he shook his head to toss it back. “Arrr-gyle,” he said. “Get it? Because pirates say arrr.”
Nate groaned and Jennie laughed, but they kept holding hands as we all walked back to the car.
It’s a couple of weeks after our trip to Duck, and Austin won’t stop talking about three things: Blackbeard, divorce, and Fiona Garcia. School’s started, and Austin and Fiona are in the same class and the same advanced reading group and have figured out that they both have divorced parents. This weekend, the Eastern Surfing Association’s having a competition in Buxton, so I drive Austin over and we meet Nate, Jennie, Dr. Garcia, and Fiona at the beach. The day is chilly and still, waves tumultuously green-gray. Austin and I walk past the old lighthouse site, and he breaks away to run down the beach when he spots Jennie waving. I trundle through the sand to their blanket and sit down beside Dr. Garcia.
The beach is crowded, and a guy keeps announcing heats through a loudspeaker, but I get entranced by the crash of waves, the way the surfers’ bodies carve water into fans of sea spray. I have one of those moments where I pause and step outside myself, just for a second. It’s a precarious, fragile, ordinary moment, a moment that will never ever happen again. Just for a second, I see the way I fit into the geometry of our blanket, my legs perpendicular to Dr. Garcia’s, Jennie and Nate at right angles to one another, Austin and Fiona sprawled on either side of them in arcs. For a moment, I sit outside my body, poised. And then the loudspeaker crack
les and Fiona shrieks because she sees a sand crab and Austin shows her how to pick it up without getting pinched, and time streams back along in the ordinary fashion.
Jennie touches my shoulder. “Evie,” she says. She beckons me closer and says into my ear, “You’re going to be an aunt.”
I shout and tackle Jennie to the sand, but when I sit up, it’s my brother I’m looking for, Nate’s eyes I search out. He’s looking at me with a grin on his face. I tackle him, too.
Austin tosses down his sand crab and stands over us. “Why are you guys being weird?”
Nate takes his sandy hand and pulls Austin’s ankle so he collapses with us and tells him he’s going to have a cousin to look after soon.
“Isn’t it going to live with you?” Austin asks.
“We thought we might keep it at your house,” Nate says. He throws a handful of sand at Austin. “It won’t take up that much space. You could empty out one of your dresser drawers.”
Austin snorts and throws sand at Nate.
I scoot out of the artillery zone and sit up to look at the water. Somewhere under those rhythmically rushing waves, a dude lobster forages for food. Maybe, as the dude lobster uppercuts a marlin, he secretly thinks, Must be nice to be a lady lobster and get to hang out at home, not realizing how trapped she feels. Maybe he’s one of those not-worth-it lobsters, the ones who’re like, I’m so lucky to be a dude lobster because I never have to shed my armor and the lady lobster is always going to be dependent on me. Or maybe, as he pries a ridged mussel off a gray rock, he worries that his lady is getting bored back at his lair, bored with him, is fantasizing about lobsters in Australia. Even though, seriously, there’s nothing special about Australian dude lobsters besides their crikey accents.
But maybe he decides to give her the plumpest mussel of the bunch. Maybe, as the dude lobster catches the current for home, he plans out where he and his lady will go for an adventure once she’s hardened back up. Perhaps Australia; it does have that Great Barrier Reef he’s heard so much about, and he likes throwing shrimp on the barbie as much as anyone. Maybe he doesn’t even mention the marlin incident and instead asks her what she thinks of the shag carpet, and if she has any idea of how they should rearrange the beanbag chairs in preparation for the baby lobsters’ arrival. Maybe he realizes his fondue pot doesn’t magically clean itself, just like mussels don’t magically appear on their Formica kitchen table. Maybe, after the dude lobster takes off his coat and hangs up his hat, he gently puts his claw around his lady’s pink, naked waist and spins her across the lair, dipping her to the music, swaying his lobster hips in time with hers.
Nine
Like an Eagle, a Real One
— 2016 —
Come with me to Vegas, the little Facebook message says. Facebook is a very valuable tool. It allows you to tell everybody you know that you ate a roasted red pepper sandwich for lunch; then, a few hours later, you can log on to tell them it gave you heartburn. Facebook will tell you when your ex-husband gets engaged to a twenty-two-year-old law student who insists your son call her “Mommie Casie,” both spelled with an “ie.” It’ll show you advertisements for dating millionaires and meeting Mature VIP Singles and, if you’re lucky, an ad for ordering a home STD testing kit. And it’ll connect you with long-lost pen pals from back before there was e-mail.
Eamon O’Shea, my long-lost pen pal from back before there was e-mail, wants me to come to Las Vegas with him for a long weekend. Eamon and I started writing when we were nine years old as part of a pen pal project at school. I made my Aunt Fay, God rest her recently departed soul, tell me endless stories of Irish pirate queens, and then I’d write to Eamon for confirmation that the stories were real. We wrote off and on until I went to college. I even met Eamon once when we were sixteen. He’d come from Cork, Ireland, to visit me in Hatteras, North Carolina. Eamon was cute and had an accent. I took him to all the tourist destinations: the lighthouse, the shipwrecks, up the beach to Jockey’s Ridge. We flirted. We kissed, once, right before he got back on the plane to Cork. But I haven’t talked to Eamon in eight years, except for three reconnecting, pre-Vegas-summons Facebook messages, where I learned that he’s now an investment banker living in Toronto.
No, I write back. I can’t afford it. Besides, it’ll be weird.
I pull out all of Eamon’s old letters and spread them on my bed. His handwriting is small and precise, lilting in a tight cursive across the wafer-thin airmail paper. He talks a lot about soccer in his letters, which he calls football. I can’t imagine I ever cared about soccer, but maybe I thought it was exciting back then. He talks about Ireland and books, and one letter deals entirely with the subject of clotted cream.
Eamon e-mails back. I’m already going. I’ve one seminar to attend, and the rest is vacation. I’ll pay for the hotel and the car and everything. Just get your flight and come!
I make a list of pros and cons.
Pros:
• nearly free vacation
• nearly free vacation where, for a few days, I can be someone who doesn’t have to manage rental properties and sell houses and raise a kid all at the same time
• chance to rekindle affections with tasty Irishman
Cons:
• tasty Irishman could have grown up to be a serial killer who just wants to get in my pants, whereas I’m at a point in my life where I need to not get murdered and not indiscriminately sleep with people with whom I am not in a relationship
• tasty Irishman was considered tasty by my sixteen-year-old self, who, in a few short years, would marry one of the biggest jackasses in the free world, who was likewise considered tasty
• plane tickets are still expensive
I take the list to show my mom. We sit in the new dining room she and my father just added to their inn, at a pretty table overlooking the Pamlico Sound. It’s June, and tourist season is just heating up, but it’s late enough in the day that we can sit and chat about the Vegas summons.
“Why would you think this is a good idea?” my mother says. She stabs at the cheesecake she’s eating. My mother is little and wiry, and her hair falls in her face as she stabs.
I bite back my snappy retort. I’ve been talking to a therapist once a week ever since the day I shoved Austin. It was just once. And in my defense, he was acting like a real turd that day, absolutely refusing to put on his shoes when we were late, and I hadn’t slept more than four hours a night for a week because I was studying, so I was already on edge, but I hate myself for snapping. I’m broke, but I’m charging therapy sessions to my Discover card. I’m working on anger management issues, though I refuse to admit to anybody that I have issues. “He says all I have to pay for is my ticket,” I tell my mother. I steal a swirl of mango topping off her cheesecake. “And I need a vacation. And I want to see Vegas. And maybe I’ll get lucky with Eamon.” I don’t tell her that, secretly, I’m hoping maybe, just maybe, lucky will turn into something more. I don’t tell her that I’m lonely. I don’t tell her that I don’t care about upping my numbers anymore. Despite my reputation in high school, I’ve only ever technically slept with three men.
My mother grimaces. She still can’t get used to me talking like I have a sex life, which, in all honesty, I haven’t had in a few years. “You can’t afford it,” she says.
I know this. I know I’m a single, working mother. “Maybe I’ll hit the jackpot,” I tell her.
“Or else the jackpot’ll hit you,” my mother says.
“I have no idea what that means,” I say.
Mom stands up and takes her plate toward the kitchen. “You’ve already made up your mind,” she says, “so I guess I’m babysitting Austin.” She shakes her head back and forth the way she always does, the way that means my daughter is a fool.
Well, maybe so. Maybe I am a fool.
“And don’t you dare,” my mother yells from the kitchen, “come back married.”
But the way I figure it, you don’t win the crapshoot if you don’t blow on the dice
, or something like that.
“Even if the minister is Elvis?” I ask her.
I’m a fool on her way to Las Vegas.
When I see Eamon O’Shea at baggage claim, the first thing I notice is that he’s wearing carpenter jeans. I’d expected him to wear khakis and an Oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up, or else a suit—something investment bankerish. And they’re stonewashed carpenter jeans. This violates my code of fashion. Carpenter jeans are only okay for a guy to wear if he’s doing actual carpentry and has a hammer thrust into the little side loop thing. Aside from the pants, Eamon is not unattractive. He has dark hair and blue eyes, a long nose and a square jaw. He sees me and opens his arms. “Hi, Evie,” he says, and smiles. “It’s you.” The voice gets me, the way he says my name with a slant, Eavie. What girl isn’t a sucker for an accent? All in all, Eamon is rather good-looking. Tasty, even.
I give him a hug and do a quick assessment of sexual sparks based on skin-to-skin contact. Inconclusive. Though he smells nice, like man-pheromones coming through travel-worn deodorant. “So we’re in Vegas,” I say.
“Four days and three nights,” he says, and he kicks his bag into rolling position and starts walking toward the door.
“I’ve got to get my bag,” I say to his retreating back.
Eamon wheels around. “Right,” he says. “What does it look like?”
I see my bag trundling around the circle and point. “The one with the paisley that looks like amoebas,” I say. It’s also got duct tape holding the right top corner together, but I don’t want to call attention to that.
Eamon grabs for my bag. If he’d been Stephen, my ex-husband, he’d have let me pull the bag down myself. “And duct tape,” he says, placing the bag at my feet. He runs an appraising finger over the corner of my bag.
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