“Are you dating anyone, Asher?” Nancy asked.
“Nancy!” Polly admonished, but Nancy waved for her to be quiet.
He squared his jaw. “No, ma’am.”
“Why not? You’re young and muy guapo!” Rosa said.
Walt chimed in. “You need to find a good young lady.”
How could Asher explain to them that losing people was just too hard? He couldn’t go through that again. He wasn’t close to anyone, and that’s the way he wanted it to remain. Safe.
“I have at least twenty ladies in my life.” He winked subtly at Polly, who blushed and fanned herself. “And that’s more than enough for me.”
“Palms residents don’t count,” Don said.
Harry ushered him out, but Asher heard someone say his name on the other side of the closed door. Harry took him by the elbow and walked him away a few steps.
“I think I found a saltshaker that looks pretty close,” Harry said. “Do you want to come by later and see it?”
“Can you bring it by my office tomorrow?” If he went by Harry’s house, Virginia would convince him to stay for dinner and then ask questions about his life, and he didn’t want to have to dodge that all evening
“Are you sure? Virginia is making her famous roast beef.”
Yep, he was right. “I’ll look for you tomorrow.”
Harry agreed, and Asher left him to his meeting.
Asher rode his bike around town as the sun set, stopping to grab a burger, and then took his usual route through a small neighborhood with an unmaintained road that jutted off toward the beach. Most people didn’t know about the road, since the cracks in the asphalt made it impractical for driving… and it didn’t lead anywhere except the beach. He drove almost to the end and tucked his bike between two overgrown trees.
He stayed close to the tree line until the Palms came into sight, and with it, his grandpa’s bungalow.
It sat at the edge of the beach, the very last bungalow in the row before the private beach turned public. The Palms allowed him to continue to rent it while he cleaned out his late-grandfathers many, many belongings.
What they didn’t know was that he’d been secretly living there for the past year. The Palms’ resident flamingos—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—had wandered toward his grandpa’s bungalow in a row as if steadily moving forward in an amusement park line. He couldn’t tell the four of them apart, but some of his patients could, and they loved to regale him with stories of the flamingo’s antics.
He made sure no one—no human, at least—on the beach could spot him, and then he raced across the sand to his grandpa’s bungalow. It didn’t matter if anyone saw him there—he was supposed to be there cleaning. The problem came when they never saw him leaving, so it was better to stay completely under the radar.
The familiar musty scent of his grandpa’s bungalow greeted him as he walked inside. Something about his house—whether it was Grandpa’s seventies-aesthetic decorating choices, the large stacks of boxes pushed to every corner, or the brown blinds that remained closed no matter what time of day it was—exuded a dull-golden feel. Like an old sepia-toned photograph found at the bottom of a dusty box. Or the set of John Wayne VHS tapes his grandpa love and probably still had stored in one of those boxes.
Brownish-yellow and dusty could also describe Asher’s life. The vibrant colors that came with experiencing a range of emotions or activities had leeched away, and he didn’t have the desire—or energy—to get them back.
Except for blue. Specifically, the blue of the ocean—not the stormy blue of Eliana’s eyes when she realized he’d had her car towed.
What had he been thinking, letting Don convince him it was the best course of action? Asher needed to lay low, not make waves, stay off people’s radar. Not start a fight when he was perfectly capable of walking.
Tonight called for swimming, so he changed into his trunks. He loved any and all water sports—surfing, snorkeling, scuba diving, windsurfing, swimming, whatever he had time for. He appreciated the wildness and beauty of the ocean, but also her rhythmic dependability. The tide always came in. The waves always crashed. The water that inevitably found its way into his mouth always tasted like fish and salt.
He tried to vary which beaches he swam at, but The Palms was his favorite. As long as no one noticed him there too often, they wouldn’t question his presence. A lot of employees stayed late to use the amenities, one of the perks of working at The Palms.
His entire body relaxed the moment he stepped into the ocean. Meter by meter, as his arms cut through the water, he was able to pack each of his worries tighter into the box in his mind, not unlike the boxes in his grandpa’s house. The ones he had every intention of going through at some point, but some point never came, and so they stayed taped shut and pushed aside. But always present, unfortunately.
After he swam so hard his arms and legs were jelly and his lungs burned with exertion, he lay on the sandy beach and stared up at the darkening sky.
The very edge of the moon glistened, and he continued to watch as star after star poked through the sky, defying the sunlight still clinging to the edges of night with the kind of tenacity he admired but couldn’t emulate.
He dug his fingers deep into the damp sand to ground him. He was eventually going to have to leave his grandpa’s bungalow. He couldn’t live there forever. Shouldn’t even be living there now.
Yet, he wasn’t ready for anything to change. Not yet.
