She didn’t take it well.
Still in the entryway, dizzy on my feet, I watch her glide to the counter and ask for a smoothie. Her minidress is white cotton, pretty against her brown skin. Her legs go on forever. On her feet are my shoes—espadrilles she borrowed for last weekend’s party.
I think an uncharitable word—bitch—because how dare she?
I duck out of Clementine’s holding my bowl of blended tropical fruit in shaking hands, blinking back tears.
I don’t need Gabi.
I don’t need anyone.
I walk until I’ve regained a fragile hold on my emotions. That’s when I catch my distorted reflection in a hair salon’s front window. Blue Sugar Bay Marine Conservation Park T-shirt, denim cutoffs, and white Vans purchased specifically for my new job. My hair’s slipping out of its knot. Wispy blond coils frame my face like a halo.
I’m no angel.
Gabi will attest to that.
Inside the salon, a stylist wearing head-to-toe black is sweeping shorn hair into a pile. She looks bored. I push through thedoor, and the bell above it jingles. She looks up.
“Do you have availability?” I ask. “Like, right now?”
She smiles and points to her chair. “Have a seat.”
Henry
My dad drives a jacked-up cherry-red Ram 1500 Big Horn with an upgraded exhaust system that roars like a pissed-off lion everytime he accelerates.
I’m embarrassed on his behalf.
Even more so when the engine growls out of the parking lot of the tiny airport that serves the Florida panhandle. The land is flat and unchallenging, safely traversed by Subarus and Wranglers with soft tops. Dad’s truck looks like it belongs on a rocky mountain, like an actual ram.
He’s got the windows down as we rumble toward Sugar Bay, a resort town on the Gulf of Mexico. Its population is less than fourteen thousand, though that number balloons during the tourist season. Sugar Bay boasts a putt-putt course, a few nationally renowned golf courses, a go-kart track, a marine conservation park, a couple of arcades, and various pontoon rental shacks. There are a shit ton of beach-themed seafood restaurants, a bunch of hotels, and countless Airbnbs along the shore.
I know this because I’ve been to Sugar Bay once before, three years ago, for a weeklong visit a few months before my dad opened his sports bar.
“How was your trip?” he asks, his attention split between the highway and me. The sun’s working its way toward the horizon, and the sky’s blazing with light. Ahead, there’s a line of scrubby long-leafed pines and somewhere beyond them, the beach.
I shrug. “Long. Boring.”
I’d forgotten how long and how boring. The last time I was on a plane was two years ago, when my mom and I flew to Phoenix to visit my grandma. That was a single three-hour flight—easy. It’s taken me a whole day to get to Sugar Bay: Washington to Utah to Georgia and then finally to Florida. My neck hurts from the kink I earned trying to sleep somewhere over Missouri.
Dad pulls his focus from the road. He’s sporting the sort of mirrored sunglasses a motorcycle cop would choose. Even though his eyes are hidden, I can tell my lackluster tone has set off alarm bells.
“It was good,” I amend. “Uneventful.”
It was my idea to come to Florida this summer. I should play nice.
Dad moved here from Spokane, where he and my mom were born and raised, same as me. Four years ago, when I was thirteen, he decided it was his calling to open a sports bar—but not in Eastern Washington. He wanted to live near the beach. Other than my single trip to Sugar Bay, I’ve seen him a couple of times a year: in September, when he treks back to Spokane to hang outwith me for my birthday, and then at Christmastime, when we spend a few days shredding the slopes together.
I figured it was my turn to make an effort.
“You hungry?” he asks.
“Not really. I grabbed barbecue during my layover in Atlanta.”
“Tired, I bet.”
“I’m good. It’s only, like, three back home.”
