“I heard that on the radio driving down.”
“Are you staying in town?” he asked. There was a single hotel, an old ramshackle place right off the beach, with peeling clapboard and tiny, sandy rooms warmed by electric baseboard heat.
“No. I was only planning to stay for the day.”
“You need to find a place to shelter during the storm.”
“Is there any place in town?”
“There’s a market, but it closes down in storms. Everyone goes home, locks down tight.”
“Oh.”
“You’re welcome to come to my cabin,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t think him a creep. “I’m a retired police officer, but don’t hold that against me. I’m okay. Really. I moved down here with my late wife, Marjorie.”
Larry wondered if he was making a mistake. He was not in the habit of inviting strangers home. But he didn’t want to leave the young woman out in the storm.
“You know what they say. Any port in a storm,” he said.
A single fat raindrop hit her face, a warning. She blinked at the black clouds racing overhead. The ocean looked like it was poised to jump ashore.
“You don’t want to be outside for one of our storms,” he said. “Trust me.”
“What about my car?” she asked, as if it were a dog.
“It’ll be okay; you’re out from under those trees.”
“Okay.”
She followed him down the road to his cabin, where for the first time, it felt like the light he had left on had made a difference. Once inside, he lit a fire, and when the wind howled the smoke right back down the chimney, he laughed and fixed the draft, saying he had been in the Boy Scouts, after all.
All he had in the house was leftover spaghetti bake and scalloped potatoes from the market and some tuna fish to eat with crackers, all of which he offered her, feeling embarrassed.I should have learned how to cook, he wanted to say, but that wasn’t true. When Marjorie was alive, he was the one who liked to tie on an apron and make dinner. There was something about the frilly white apron tied around his fat ass that made his wife laugh, and helped her shake off the day.
Amanda politely declined the food, but he thought she might be hungry, so he found a bag of Brazil nuts, and they sat in front of the fire, cracking those and eating them by the handful. To go along, they had icy cold beers, and for the first time in months, Larry began to feel human.
“You mind me asking why you came here?” he asked, scooping nutshells from his lap and tossing them into the fire, where they turned black and hissed.
She turned from the fire, her face glowing with the light. Outside,there was a sudden clap of thunder, and the eaves began to shake. The sky broke open, and the rain poured down. They could hear it on the roof.
“I was adopted as a newborn,” she said.
He smiled encouragingly at her.
“It was a private adoption. Right after I was born, my mom disappeared. I have good parents—great parents. I never felt a reason to go looking for my birth mother. Then recently, I started wondering. What parts of me are me, and what parts are her? So I decided to look for her. I had her name, so it wasn’t hard.”
She looked at the fire.
“It turned out she’d died not that long after I was born. Alcoholism. But here’s the surprise: Three years before she had me, my mom had a boy. He was taken away from her and ended up in foster care.”
Larry reached into the nut bowl.
“His name was Dennis Owen,” she said.
“He was your brother.”
“Yes. My older brother.”
She studied the fire. He could tell she had spent a lot of nights since finding out thinking about fate.
