“How about you bury me in the sand, kiddo?” he says. “Never had my kid at the beach before.”
I laugh at the absurdity of it, but he’s serious.
Jayden, Justin, and JJ take one look at his half leg and scream.
“Cappy baby,” Sunny says. “You gotta get some sun on that thing. Looks like a damn peeled potato comin’ out ya shorts.”
It really does.
I look at the boys. “Y’all wanna help?”
They nod, and together, we bury my one-legged dad in the sand. I prop his tank of oxygen on a makeshift sand pillow and affix his captain’s hat on his head. Sunny hollers that we’re missing spots while Nash sits next to her, sipping a beer with his patented smile a permanent fixture on his face.
More than once, I feel Nash’s eyes all over me; more than once, I meet them with an appreciative gaze of my own.
With Cap packed under a mound of sand and lined with seashells, the boys play with his prosthetic leg. Sunny takes a picture of me kneeling next to him to send to my mom and sisters. In it, I’m smiling wide, my skin and hair covered with salt and sunshine, and Cap, who insists that his gold necklace and charm lie on top of the sand, looks about the same as he always does.
My mom responds instantly:I knew it.
I’m still mad at her, but I know what she means.
“Say,” Cap says, still tucked under sand and shells. “What say we go flounder giggin’ tonight?”
My answer is instant and without thought. “I’ve always wanted to learn to gig.”
Sunny doesn’t come gigging. After what happened to James, she told me she never plans on puttingone big toe on a damn boatfor the rest of her life.
When the sun sinks and with gigs in our hands—long forked spears—and on a small boat called a skiff, Nash and I stand awaiting Cap’s instruction.
Nash is just as bad as I am. Over and over, we jab our gigs into the water just to pull them out empty.
“Missed a damn doormat, Nash,” my dad barks.
Eventually, we each spear a flounder—me screaming through it all, my dad grinning between coughs and hits of Penny, and Nash laughing the way he does.
As we shine flashlights into the dark, shallow water on the edge of the marsh, Cap repeats “Crazy sons of bitches,” along with “You’re as bad as your mother was.”
At forty-two, I feel like a child on an adventure, no clue what to expect or what’s going to happen next.
In Nash’s kitchen, my dad cleans the fish and cooks them up, looking almost as at home there as he did behind the helm of the boat.
Even having experienced it, even as good as the flounder tastes, I don’t get his obsession with the damn things. That’s how quirks are, I guess. Nonsensical layers of likes and dislikes to make people become exactly who they are.
“You think we’ll find something downtown tomorrow?” I ask as the fun of the day is slowly replaced by the harsh realities of my life. Today was great, perfect even, but perfect days aren’t why I’m here. Perfect days don’t pay for laptops, surgeries, and roofers.
Cap says, “I think we’ll find it where we least expect.” When he catches Nash and me giving each other heart eyes, he barks, “Now take me back to my damn boat!”
Nash does just that, giving me a wink as he strolls out the door.
While I’m in the shower, Jonathan calls twice.
This time, I don’t call him back.
Thirty-Four
Since the first day Nash strolled into Old Vines, there’s been a connection between us. A draw. Much like these recent days around him, I spent that whole first summer trapped in a magnetic field of him and me.
It was that unbridled attraction that led to all the mistakes we made. Led him to take a job without talking to me first, and me having a baby he doesn’t have a clue exists.
