“A dentist,” Nash repeats, unbothered. “He know you keep your engagement ring in a pocket?”
“Prefers it actually.” This man is impossible. “And your attorney better be quick. We’re getting married. At the end of June.”
He presses his lips between his teeth, eyes going from the ring to my face.
“It’ll take him two weeks.” He grins; my jaw drops. “Tops. Y’all want oysters? They have the best in the city.”
“I love oysters,” Cap says gleefully.Gleefully!
I search my glass for more alcohol but find only Old Bay-covered ice cubes. I can’t afford two weeks. I’ll run out of money in days, and with these two tagging along, probably lose my mind.
“So, Cap,” Nash says as he flags down the waitress. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Ah.” Cap settles back in his chair, tapping his cane. “That’s a long story, young man.”
“Perfect.” Nash smiles at him then looks at me sideways. “Sounds like we have two weeks.”
He’s still as charmingly disarming as ever.
Damn him.
Eighteen
While I morph into a manic mute, Nash and Cap carry on like old childhood pals catching up after too much time apart.
Nash shares his résumé, which I already know parts of from either our time together or what I surmised from the pictures on the postcards he sent.
He spent the first years after he left Fontain as a traveling substitute teacher until he got a job with the city of Boston. There, his career shifted paths and he started working as a tour guide part-time before ending up in Charleston and starting his own company.
He almost convinced me he’d turned over a responsible, root-bearing leaf until he said,“I’m thinking of expanding. See what else is out there.”He took an easy sip of his beer.“Have meetings in Savannah and St. Augustine over the next couple months to see if something sticks.”
It confirmed everything I’ve always known about him: Nash Fletcher is not a man built to stay. And while I loved him for it before hating him for it, it’s not my heart I’m worried about this time, it’s Bennie’s. A man who wants to bounce around can’t be two places at once. You can’t be untethered if you’re tied to akid. My mother’s ridiculous demands might be for me to tell him about his daughter, but if I open that door and he hurts her the way he hurt me when he skips off to Savannah, St. Augustine, or whatever he decides next, I’ll never be able to live with myself.
Nash went on and on about how much he loved what he does and how great the people are.
Cap asked him where he got the idea for the name.“A girl I once knew,”was all he said.
I sent an oyster down my gullet and pretended not to hear. Pretended it wasn’t him and me staring at each other at the register of Old Vines when that phrase was hatched the first day we met.
And now here we are, him taking the words I said and making a whole grand business out of them.
I’m just so thrilled he’s living his best life when all I ever wanted for years was for that best life to be me.
Then I remember: I have Jonathan. And once I have this gold, my life will be perfect too. More perfect even.
Everything will be perfect for everyone.
When the conversation shifted to my father’s life story, it might as well have been written in saltwater.
He spent the better part of his life looking for the Anson Burns treasure and working odd jobs to support that mission. His favorite, of course, were his beloved Captain years and the flounder it revolved around.
Perhaps the most interesting was his time spent scraping barnacles off the bottoms of boats: That’s where he lost his leg.
He was underwater cleaning a yacht when the unknowing owner started the engine, chopping his leg right off in the prop.
Even with one leg, he went on to dive in the local rivers for logs and megalodon teeth—Nash had a lot of questions about this. There were a few other jobs, all centered around the water. For better or worse, Rueben Vance is a man of the sea.
After oysters and Bloody Marys and my pride insisting on me using more of my dwindling funds to pay for the entire meal—a whopping $136.81 that brings me down to $368.48—we’re back at the parking lot across from Thirsty for History. Which I now notice directly behind my station wagon is where Nash’s truck is parked. A 1991 red and white Ford F150 that squeezes every particle of oxygen out of me and catapults me right back to the rusty bed of it all those summers ago. We got married in a courthouse on a random Thursday afternoon, and I surprised him with the truck three days later.
