“You like a cockroach,” she says to me. “Showin’ up everywhere you don’t belong.”
I snort a laugh. “You don’t like me.”
“I don’t like nobody.”
“You like Nash,” I challenge. “And Cap.”
“Well.” She puts her hands on her curvy hips. “They ain’t blind as damn bats.”
“You were right what you said the other night,” I tell her.
“About?”
“Probably all of it.”
“Uh-huh,” she says with high brows as she drops into a beach chair. “Go on.”
This woman is a pain in the ass, but she cares about Nash in her own weird, aggressive way, and he cares for her. That truth keeps me talking.
“I’m a bit ... irrational when it comes to Nash,” I admit, tracking him as he walks down the beach. “Eight years ago, I told him to leave because he was chasing things I wasn’t.”
She adjusts her wide-brimmed hat, and out of nowhere, I want to come clean. Like maybe telling her will get me one step closer to telling him. I’m running out of time, and I’m stuck.
“And eight months later, I had a baby.”
Her face goes on a roller-coaster ride of understanding. “Oh no you didn’t just tell me that.” She curses through gritted teeth, once again an angry ventriloquist. “Tell me you just didn’t tell me that.”
I wince.
“Why you tellin’ me this?” She pulls her handheld fan out of a beach bag and blasts it toward her face. “I don’t want your secrets. I don’t even like you.”
With an odd sense of relief, I laugh. “I don’t know.”
“You still love him?”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“That ain’t even the same damn question.”
“I’m scared,” I admit. “That he’ll hate me when he finds out. That he won’t show up for her. That he’ll want to be with us out of obligation and not because it’s what he wants.” A wave explodes into foam at the shoreline, and a little boy runs by with a kite. “That I’ll do the wrong thing. My mom needs surgery and spends her free time trying to put me in an early grave. We’re broke. I—” I blow out a long exhale. “I don’t know what to do.”
She grabs Cap’s flask from his chair and takes a hefty slug. “You drive me to drink before lunchtime, honey child.”
She offers it to me and I take it. The rum slides down my throat with a burn.
“Nash tell you about my husband?” she asks.
I shake my head.
“Marine,” she says. “James was his name. Man loved being a Marine. Oorah’d every chance he’d get. Damn fool.” She smiles a real smile. “Three tours of duty, but he died in training at Camp Lejeune. Motherfucker drowned.”
For the first time since meeting her, she isn’t angry with me, she’s not an attack dog. Sunny is a woman who lost the man she loved.
She continues. “I was pregnant with JJ—James Junior, my youngest. Thought I’d surprise him when he got back. Made a cake. Bought some lingerie. I was gonna say, ‘James, you about to be a baby daddy again. Come take care of Mama ’fore I’m too big to get to gettin’.’” She snaps her fingers, sassy. We both laugh at this. “Bastard went and died ’fore I could even look sexy for him.”
She may use aggressive humor like a shield, but the sad smile on my face is a mirror image of hers. She misses her husband.
“The point of me draggin’ myself back through hell with this story is—” Her attitude is back in place as she mists herself with her fan. “We ain’t got nobody to tell us how many days we get. God don’t give a rat’s ass about our timeline or plans of bein’ sexy. We all here walkin’ each other home for as long as that walk gets to last. We wake up thinkin’ we have all the time in the damn world and gon’ have ourselves a special Wednesday, then life stops and ends as we know it.”
