“He wasn’t hitting on me. He was showing me a crab trap. He’d been out crabbing.” Suddenly wishing I’d stayed at Iola’s, I pushed closer to the door as we swung onto the highway. I wanted to know more about the boxes, but after turning Ross down the night he got home, I was lucky he wasn’t hooked up with that girl from Captain Jack’s, taking her to the beach. She could probably run a video camera too.
It crossed my mind that I should’ve left a note for the kids, to let them know where I was. When Ross hit the water, there was really no telling how long he’d be there. I would’ve thought of that if I hadn’t been in such a hurry. Fortunately Zoey would look after J.T. this afternoon, whether there was a note or not. She’d gotten in the habit of not assuming anything.
“Yeah, right. He invite you over for a little crab dinner?” Ross was still sniffing down the same rabbit trail. The question had a sharp edge to it.
“Geez, Ross. No, he didn’t invite me over for dinner. I remembered my pap-pap having a crab trap like that, and I wanted to look at it, that’s all. I’d been there, like, a minute before you came.”
Ross whipped past an SUV with kayaks racked on top, then ducked back in so late that an oncoming delivery truck had started moving over. A gasp sucked backward into my throat. I swallowed it soundlessly, my fingernails clutching the armrest. Ross wasn’t usually wound quite this tight.
“So . . . tough time at work last week?” I tried to change the subject.
“What? Now I’m the one who’s got a problem? I come home from a trip, you make excuses not to come meet me, then I drive up and find you flirting with some loser in a howlie shirt.”
“I tried to call you back. You wouldn’t answer. I tried to find you yesterday, too.” No matter what I said now, it wasn’t going to make a difference. On the one hand, it felt good that Ross cared enough to be jealous. On the other hand, it was frustrating. Maybe we weren’t as solid as I thought we were. The idea scared me. Without Ross, we had no security here, no one to help us if we needed it.
“Yeah, whatever. That’s why I’ve got all two of those missed calls from you on my phone. That’s why I called your place, like, six times yesterday, and you weren’t there.” He grabbed his cell phone and held it up like it was proof of something.
“I told you I got a job finally. I was working yesterday. And I called you more than two times. You wouldn’t answer.”
“Whatever,” he said again.
I gave up talking and just looked out the window, letting Ross have some time to cool off. On a path toward Buxton Woods, a group of tourists on horseback plodded along. I’d seen riders go by on the trails along Mosey Creek a time or two.
“That looks like so much fun. I’ve never ridden on the beach.” I didn’t even realize I’d said it out loud, at first. The most carefree moments of my life had been spent on the back of a horse. When I was young, there were usually horses at home that needed riding, although we were lucky if any of them were actually fit for kids to be around. Daddy liked to buy horses with bad habits, ride the hair off them for a few weeks, then take them to the auction barn when they were dead-dog tired and put Gina or me in the saddle. We knew better than to act scared, even if we were. Buyers paid good money for something that seemed gentle enough for kids. We also knew that, by making a horse look good, we were probably saving a life. If the saddle-horse buyers didn’t outbid the slaughter buyers, those horses were headed for a dog food can. Either way, Daddy got his money.
“Yeah, well, maybe you can find some guy to take you out riding,” Ross snapped. “You want me to let you out?”
I rubbed the little drumbeat between my eyebrows and wished Ross hadn’t found me today after all, at least not when he was in a mood like this. It was hard to believe that not so long ago I was dropping the envelope into Jeremy’s truck and feeling like the day had magic sprinkled over it.
I tried to leave off analyzing things as we passed through Buxton and continued along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, where the beach houses gave way to wild, unspoiled country, the land so narrow at times that the sound peeked through on one side, placid and glassy, while the blue-green waters of the Atlantic churned against the dunes on the other. Ross chilled a little and turned on the radio as we passed by Avon, then drove the narrow strip to Salvo, Waves, and Rodanthe. The farther north we went, the more intense the leftover hurricane damage grew. Neighborhoods that had been filled with mansions on stilts now sported empty spaces next to massive beach homes that teetered uneven, the pilings splayed out like the legs of a new colt, the property owners unable to come up with the money for repairs. Caution tape and Condemned signs spoke the fate of homes now permanently off-kilter. Balconies dangled forlorn, and outside stairways had been removed, leaving the houses unreachable.
In my mind, I heard my grandfather complaining about people building multistory homes right on the beach. To him, the only things that belonged there were saltbox cottages like the ones in Old Nags Head, the nothing-fancy kind that were fully expected to die a death at sea sooner or later. What do they think —the storms will never come? You build a house on the sand, the sand shifts eventually, Tandi Jo. You remember that.
When we’d come here after the storm all those years ago, I’d thought Pap-pap could fix anything, including my parents. Now I knew that sometimes life is like those flooded houses. You can keep driving yourself crazy fighting the sea, or you can leave the past behind, find dry ground, and build somewhere new.
Somehow or other, I’d find a way to do that.
Ross’s mood took a turn for the better when we pulled off the road in a spot already packed with boards and cars with wet suits hanging on them. He was smiling from head to toe as he stepped out of the truck.
“Hey . . . Cowboy!” some surfer chick called to him as we crossed over the dunes. The surf crew all called him Cowboy, and you didn’t have to hang around with Ross long to know that even if he didn’t go for long hair and surfer duds, the other guys admired his skill with a board. He had soul, as they put it.
Within a few minutes, he was out of his jeans and shirt and into a Hurley wet suit over his swim trunks. He handed me the camera bag and a folding chair, knuckle-bumped with a couple of his bros on the beach, and then stood with a group of them talking over the conditions, their hands moving in surfer sign language, mimicking the shapes of the waves and reenacting some epic wipeouts.
I set up my beach chair, pressing the back of it into the sand until it was level, then settled in and took a big breath. The sun on my hair and the thrum of the tide made me feel good again. Compared to most of the guys who hung out on the water, Ross was more intense, less mellow than the surfer vibe called for, but even he couldn’t help getting relaxed out here.
The sand swirled around my toes, sun-warmed on top and cold underneath as I rolled up my jeans. You couldn’t have paid me to get in the water this time of year, but on the beach it was glorious today. A friend of Ross’s, a skinny, loose-jointed kid the guys called Gumby because he wore a lime-green wet suit, lifted a hand and waved at me. “Hey, Cowboy-girl. You gonna run video? You tape for me?”
I nodded and shot him the high sign, and he trotted off to get his camera. Ross’s friends had taken to calling me Cowboy’s girl at first and then just shortened it to Cowboy-girl when they found out I used to show horses. They thought that was cool, and they liked having someone around who could run a camera, check weather reports on an iPhone, operate a stopwatch, and mentally calculate the average period between waves by timing the frequency as they struck a pier or buoy.
The breeze combed my hair, and I closed my eyes, listening to the water. At the edge of the sea like this, it was hard to believe anything could be wrong. I loved being part of the surf crew, feeling like I had friends here after so many years of trying to fit in with Trammel’s social circle and still being labeled a gold digger, someone who’d used her horrific accident to worm her way into his life and his finances. That couldn’t have been further from the truth, but it didn’t matter anymore.