Edie steps back a few paces, like Lo is suddenly crowding her in, and her voice is gruff when she replies, “Geneva’s dealingwith some inn maintenance stuff, not going out for an evening stroll.”
I cut my eyes at Edie, silently trying to convey,Maybe don’t snap at a guest?
But Lo doesn’t seem offended. She just nods and reaches past me to grab a poncho for herself. “Well, Auggie is plugged in to his headphones and his laptop working on the book, and I’m bored, so consider me a temporary Rosalie Inn employee.”
“Oh, you really don’t have to—” I start, but Lo just holds her arms out to her sides, looking down at her now pink vinyl–clad body.
“Too late, already in the poncho,” she says, and I can’t help but laugh.
“No arguing with that,” I say, smiling at her.
I glance over at Edie, expecting her to be smiling as well, but instead, she’s still watching Lo, her brows tight together, her lips rolled inward.
This is the second time Edie has been cold to Lo, and while Edie has always had an edge to her, she’s never beencold.
I make a mental note to talk to her about it later. Maybe Lo was rude to her or something, hard as that is to imagine.
“We’ve got this,” I say to Edie now. “Go on and get home before the rain starts.”
Her eyes shift back to me, and I can tell she wants to argue some more, but finally, she just gives a curt nod and says, “Text me once you’re back safe.”
“Will do,” I assure her.
Lo moves past me, opening the door to the porch, and a gust of wind yanks it out of her hand, sending it crashing back against the wall with a thump that rattles the pictures on the wall.
“Ooh!” She laughs, faux stumbling back like the wind haspushed her, too. Then she lifts her chin, taking a deep breath through her nose as she closes her eyes. “Oh, that smells likehome.”
It smells like salt water and mud and pine and metal, and underlying all of it is the distant stench of rotting fish, but I know what she means. Storms around here always seem to concentrate the various smells of St. Medard’s Bay, and I think I’d done the same thing when Chris and I first came back here—stuck my head out the window of our car, breathed deep, and felt the past settle into my bones.
Lo smiles as she looks over at me, and I realize I’m smiling back. “People ask why I came back,” I say. “But I sometimes wonder how I ever left.”
Something in Lo’s face dims just a little bit, her smile drooping before it’s replaced with another, even brighter grin. “Well, I don’t have to wonder that,” she says with a shrug. “I left because everyone thought I was a murderous whore.”
And with that, she steps out onto the porch and into the rising storm.
FOR THE FIRSTfew minutes of our walk down the beach, we’re both quiet, lost in our own thoughts. The rain hasn’t started, but the sky is getting darker, the air heavier, and the wind blowing off the water is surprisingly cool in the hot July evening. Our pink ponchos flap in the wind, the sound unnaturally loud, and finally, Lo just yanks hers off, balling it up in one hand and throwing over her shoulder, “I’ll put it back on if the rain actually starts.”
We pass my trailer, but I don’t bother mentioning it. To our left, the surf pounds, and ahead of us on the right, the trees growthicker, signaling the beginning of the preserve. We’re about halfway to it when Lo stops, turning to face the ocean.
“It’s just out there, you know,” she says, pointing. “TheRosalie.”
Mom and Dad loved telling the story to guests, how some bootlegger had been running liquor in the ’20s and got caught in a storm. How his boat—theRosalie, named after his daughter—sank right out from underneath him. Mom’s grandfather had apparently gone out into the raging waters himself trying to save the guy, but it was already too late.
Never once did they mention that “some bootlegger” was actually a Fitzroy ancestor—the same Fitzroy who had presided over our statehouse, whose photograph hung on the wall in my kindergarten classroom, next to President George H. W. Bush.
Before I can tell Lo any of that, she adds, “Landon took me out to the wreck once. He wanted us to snorkel around it. It’s not down all that deep, you know.”
“It is now,” I reply, and she turns to me, her eyes widening in surprise.
“What do you mean?”
The wind fades a little bit, my poncho deflating around me as I step closer and point at a spot a little to the right of where Lo was gesturing. “After Hurricane Peggy in ninety-eight. I guess what was left of the wreck was so insubstantial that the waves were able to move it. Some pieces of it even washed up here on the beach, or at least that’s what we assumed it was. The rest of it was carried farther out.”
It had been eerie, walking along the beach that next day, the sky clear and sparkling after hours and hours of wind and rain, seeing those little flecks of metal, or a tangled and nearly disintegrated piece of rope.
“I told my mom it felt like a threat or something. Like the ocean going, ‘Just in case you forgot, I’m a real bitch!’”
Lo throws her head back and laughs at that. “Like anyone who grew up in this town needs that reminder!”
