He shakes his head. “No, I’ll come help finish prepping for the hurricane.”
“I got it. And I think Maria would rather have you help prepare at home.”
“I’m gonna enjoy my last few hours of freedom before I’m locked in with her.” Leo grins at me, and I know he’s joking. This man loves his wife with his whole chest. “Plus, I know you like to push how long you can stay open for.”
I can’t help but laugh at that. He’s right. It’s not that I’m foolish when it comes to hurricanes, but I’ve been through enough to know how much time I have to prepare.
My father, Sheriff Harrison Caldwell, keeps telling me I should fire Leo, but how can I? The man used to slip me Mazapán de la Rosa in its pretty packaging with the rose on top when I was six years old.
It’s still hot and humid, the kind of weather that makes your shirt stick to your skin, when I step outside the bait shop that evening. As much as I wish I could just take the hand-built wooden steps up the exterior of the building to my apartment above the store, I know there’s an empty fridge waiting for me if I don’t go grab groceries, and that’s no kind of hurricane prep.
The sky is muted, clouds are moving quickly, and a breeze is picking up. By morning, we’ll get rain.
The best parking spots at the bait shop are saved for customers, so I always park in the one farthest away from the entrance. As I open the truck, I look back at the original old building that squats on the edge of the water. It’s two stories tall but narrow, clad in weathered pine boards that have faded to a soft gray-brown that only moisture and sunlight can create. Each plank is individualized with raised and grainy eyes or knots in the wood.
The cafe sits overlooking a porch that wraps around the front of the building in a shallow overhang. There are six chairs out there, and it’s the perfect spot for sitting to watch the sun go down. I’ll often bring a glass of wine down from my apartment above the shop and sit and sip in the quiet of the evening. The flag with the store logo snaps in the wind, and I know the placedoesn’t seem like much, but it’s mine and has been my refuge for most of my life.
From the water, the building looks cinematic, like an old piece of history just waiting to be discovered.
The building next to it is much more modern. Airboats line up on the dock that juts out in front of it. The majority of it is a shuttered boathouse for the airboats, with some extra storeroom. But it also has a small hurricane-proof apartment built into the concrete structure for emergencies.
The dock stretches out behind it, the bleached wood giving way to reeds and slow-moving dark water.
It’s the old versus the new.
I remember the day I first thought of this as home, when my grandmother and grandfather, my mother’s parents, took me in at age eleven. My mom had run off with another man, according to my dad, and my grandparents refused to leave me to suffer my father’s cruelty. Then there was the legal tussle my father initiated to get me back, not because hewantedme back, but because it embarrassed him and called his parenting into question for me to not live with him. I cried for a week when the judge declared a daughter’s place was with her father, a fine upstanding citizen.
The judge didn’t listen when I told him how my father utterly diminished everything I am. How he told me my eyes were too close together to see anything clearly. And how my nose turned up like a pig snout. He complained that I embarrassed him with my grades, and then, when I improved them, he told me I was trying to prove I was better than him.
But the very worst violations were when he would rip up my paintings. I wanted to study art more than anything else—the history of the medium, how to paint with oils, with watercolors. I wanted to travel and see the masterpieces: TheMona Lisa, which everyone says is smaller than they expect.The NightWatchmen, which is bigger.The Sunflowers. Munch’s Scream series.
I’ve seen the world through art without leaving the US.
Art has been my friend when the rest of the world wouldn’t be. When I was forced to return to my father, my friends dropped away. My home was uncomfortable, my father overbearing and cruel. He wouldn’t let me socialize after school, and none of my friends wanted to hang out at acop’shouse.
Not that I had many friends.
And once my father killed Drew Stone, a popular member of the Iron Outlaws motorcycle club, my life got even harder. Kids at school connected to the club would vandalize my locker, knock my books out of my hands, trip me, and corner me whenever they could.
They were bigger, bolder, and stronger than I was. I wilted beneath the scrutiny, my confidence ebbing away until I was an angry shell. Filled with bitterness for a mom who’d left me, a legal system that had betrayed me, and a father who didn’t want me.
After that, the few people I had managed to cling to drifted away, and I was left alone.
The day I turned eighteen, I packed my bags and ran away to this building. My grandfather had fallen ill, and it was too much for my grandmother to manage on her own.
When he died, a piece of her died too. Figuratively, at first, then literally when she followed him seven months later.
So, instead of going to art school, I ended up running a bait shop in a town I never intended to stay in. Recently, I’ve been wondering what they would think if I sold it and moved away.
Maybe to Europe where I could see all the art I wanted.
I climb into the truck and begin to reverse out of the driveway when a motorcycle appears out of nowhere at high speeds andcuts across behind me. I slam on the brakes so hard that the seatbelt bites into my collarbone.
“Jesus,” I shout, even though the biker can’t hear me through the glass.
The motorcycle fishtails slightly before the rider gets control to stop, and I immediately recognize the machine and its biker.
Knox Stone.
