Life's a Beach (19 page)

It didn’t take us long to find three sponges and a bucket. We even found a Wiffle ball and bat set for Manny. While Riley and the twins chatted, I stopped at a huge bulletin board with little slots for flyers. I took one for every store that might possibly be interested in my earrings.

I also grabbed a Childfree by Choice flyer, because it made me remember the first time I met Noah. Apparently the revolution had made it all the way across the bridge and onto the Cape. If the health club was the new singles bar, maybe Childfree by Choice was the new playgroup, just minus the kids. “Children Should Be Neither Seen Nor Heard at the Following Events,” I read before I tucked it behind the other flyers.

“I thought you said I could drive,” Riley said when we all climbed into the rental car.

“Talk to me in another eight years or so,” I said.

The twins had started to giggle as soon as we came within sight of the car. I waited until they got themselves buckled into the backseat. “Okay,” I said. “Enough of this twin stuff. It’ll stunt your growth. I want names.”

I looked at them in the rearview mirror. “Come on. We don’t have all day.”

“Mackayla,” the one behind me said in a little voice.

“Mackenzie,” the other one said, in pretty much the same voice.

“All right, Mack and Mack, listen up. We’ll start with a simple apology, but I’m hoping for real redemption by the time this car is clean.”

20

WHEN ALLISON FLAGG PULLED INTO THE HOTEL PARKING
lot, my rental car was looking a tiny bit better and the kids were a whole lot wetter. For some crazy reason, the two Macks couldn’t wait to get back to their mother.

“Mom,” one of the Macks yelled. “Save us!”

“Can Riley eat over?” the other Mack yelled.

Allison Flagg climbed out of her car and reached back in for two pizza boxes. “Sure,” she said. “I bought extra just in case. We can have dinner down by the pool.”

“Well,” I said to give Riley an easy out. “It’s been kind of a long day. . . .”

Riley started jumping up and down. “Key, please. Key, please,” he chanted.

I pulled the room key card out of the pocket of my jeans. “See,” I said, “he’s really tired. Maybe another time.”

Riley was already running. “Bathing suit,” he yelled. “Be right back.”

“Make sure he has his cell phone,” Allison Flagg said. “So he can call you when we’re done. My twins need their beauty sleep.” She tilted her head. “And don’t go too far. No hot dates or anything.”

It seemed to me that there was plenty of pizza for all of us. “I don’t have any plans at all,” I said.

“I’ll take that as a thank-you,” she said.

After Riley got settled in at the pool, I headed out to my rental car to get the gaffer’s drill. It wasn’t as if I wanted to have pizza with Allison Flagg anyway, but she should have at least invited me.

I was trying to decide whether to order room service for dinner, or go for a quick drive and pick something up. I clicked the car doors shut and headed back toward the hotel again. Maybe by the time I got the drill to my room, I’d be able to make up my mind.

I heard a car door slam. I kept walking. “Hey, where’d you get that drill?” someone yelled behind me.

I turned around. “Are you actually following me?” I yelled to Tim Kelly.

“Yeah, that drill you’re carrying is implanted with a surveillance microchip. We call it the spy chip.”

I looked at the drill, then turned around again and kept walking.

Tim Kelly caught up to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “No,” he said. “Of course not. I’m staying here, too.”

I stopped. “Really?”

“Yeah, pretty much everybody is. It’s the only hotel they could get.”

We looked at the back of the Fisherman’s Lodge, where an ice machine was surrounded by logs to make it look like a woodshed. Or maybe an outhouse. “Can’t imagine why this one was still available,” I said.

“Got plans tonight?” the gaffer asked. His forehead wrinkled when he opened his hazel eyes wide, and there were streaks of blond and gray in his sandy curls.

I started walking again. His arm stayed attached to my shoulders. “Yup,” I lied. “Planning to hang out with my nephew.”

“Can’t you get a babysitter?” he asked.

I started to slide out from under his arm, and he squeezed my shoulder with his hand.

I elbowed him and ducked. “I
am
the babysitter,” I said.

“Ouch,” he said. “Okay, truce. How about if you go get your nephew and I’ll meet you both in the hotel café. My treat. I bet they have great buffalo here. Although we might have to shoot it ourselves.”

I looked at the long brown paper bag he was carrying. “Is that a sub?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s okay. I can save it for breakfast.”

“What kind is it?”

It turned out Tim Kelly’s turkey sub had cranberry sauce on it, just the way I liked it. We were sitting down by the stocked fishpond, dangling our feet off the bridge. We’d grabbed two bottled waters from the vending machine next to the ice cabin. I handed him a bottle of water. He handed me half of the sub.

“Thanks,” we both said. The gaffer took a long drink, then broke off a piece of sub roll and dropped it into the water. A school of fish immediately circled and attacked.

“Geesh,” I said. “Remind me never to swim here. They look like piranha.”

He gave me a tiny push.

I grabbed his arm to keep from falling, then let go quick. “Cute,” I said.

“Thanks. So tell me about this sorta boyfriend.”

I threw the fish another piece of sub roll. “Not much to tell. We had a big fight, and I don’t really know where we stand. We both have lots of baggage, I guess.”

Tim Kelly leaned back on his elbows. “Baggage? You want to talk baggage? Boy, have I got baggage.”

“Well,” I said. “Not to be competitive, but I have the carry-on, the garment bag, the weekender, and the sports bag.” I counted them off on my fingers, then leaned back on my elbows. “The complete Louis Vuitton monogrammed collection of baggage. Whatever that is.”

“I have a daughter,” he said quietly. “She’s six. Her name is Hannah.”

“You win,” I said. I sat up and poured some water into the pond to see if it would attract the fish. They didn’t fall for it for a second. “Did she come with a wife?”

“Ex.” He sat up and took another long drink from his water bottle, then carefully screwed the top back on. “We had no business being together in the first place. She wants someone who will be home for dinner, and I spend most of the year traveling, unless I luck out and get a movie close to home like this one. But Hannah’s amazing, and we’re doing a pretty good job coparenting her. I just called her a little while ago and she said, ‘Dad, I love you, but can I call you back later? I’m right in the middle of something.’ She’s
six
. Sorry, I didn’t mean to ramble.”

“That’s really cute.”

“Yeah, she’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” He finished off his last bite of sub, then crumpled up the white paper wrapping. “Okay, there’s a woman I see, off and on. She has kids. It’s complicated. Her husband has her two boys on the weekends, and weekends are when I spend time with Hannah . . . Never mind. Anyway, we’re pretty much off, I think.”

“Geesh,” I said. “You’re a really nice guy. Who knew?”

“Don’t believe it for a second.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “I can’t wait for work tomorrow, so I can tell everybody I got you into bed.”

“No way,” I said. “But you could probably get away with kissing me.”

TIM KELLY WAS
a seriously good kisser. It was a lucky thing Riley called when he did, or we might have been headed into OLA territory. An OLK was hazardous enough.

“Be right there,” I said to Riley. I grabbed the empty water bottles while Tim Kelly stuffed the sub wrapper into the paper bag.

“So,” I said. “Guess I better go get my nephew.”

“So,” he said. “Guess I better go wait for my daughter to call back.”

We looked at each other. “Take good care of my drill,” Tim Kelly said.

As soon as Riley and I got back to our hotel room, I went into the bathroom to check the rock tumbler. The broken beer bottle was halfway to sea glass already. I managed to fish out a piece without cutting off my finger and showed it to Riley. “Do you think I should add some more sand to it, or just let it tumble for another day?”

He wrinkled up his nose. “I wouldn’t mess with it. When the tumbler gets too heavy, it stops tumbling.”

It seemed like there might be a message in there that I could apply to the rest of my life, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Hey,” I said. “Did everything go okay down at the pool?”

Riley nodded.

“Good,” I said. “Let me know if you need me to knock any twins together or anything.”

Riley jumped up on his bed and arranged his pillows, then reached for the remote and turned on the TV.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go drill for a while. Do you and your people have everything you need?”

Riley was already lost in his show. I went back to the bathroom and picked out a dark green piece of sea glass, thinking it would be easier to see when I was drilling than something more translucent. Then I rolled a little piece of clay into a snake and made the snake into a circle. I pressed it onto the glass and filled it with water to create a miniature pool right where I wanted the hole to be. I put on Tim Kelly’s safety goggles. I plugged in his diamond bit drill. I turned his drill on.

Almost immediately, the drill bit skittered off the sea glass and landed on the sink countertop. I pushed the off button and inspected the gold-veined Formica for signs of damage. It was hard to tell.

There was a loud knock on the other side of the wall, over by the shower. I held the drill up in the air and turned it on again, just to see what would happen. The knock got louder.

Apparently I had two problems. At the very least. I repaired my tiny clay pool, but before I refilled it with water, I twisted the diamond drill bit back and forth by hand, just to get enough of a hole started so the bit would stay in place.

Then I unplugged the drill and headed out through the slider to our little cement balcony. “Excuse me,” I said when I walked between Riley and the televison. He didn’t even notice me.

There was more room to work out on the balcony, and luckily Tim Kelly had been kind enough to throw in an extension cord. I looked at the drill and took a moment to relive that kiss. It was a great kiss. I pushed it away again.

I plugged in the drill and turned it on.

“Hey, keep it down,” a loud voice yelled. “Some of us are trying to have a vacation around here.”

“Maintenance,” I yelled in a low voice. “Emergency structural repairs.”

“This place sucks,” the voice yelled back. “When you finish out there, how about you do something to make our ceiling stop dripping. It’s not like we haven’t called the front desk three times about it.”

“Will do,” I yelled.

Eventually I managed to drill through a few pieces of sea glass, but it was work. I decided to save the rest for when I got back home. I’d found an old drill out in the garage, which was what I’d used the first time I tried drilling sea glass. Maybe I could buy a diamond drill bit for that. I hoped it only sounded expensive.

I brought the drill inside and locked the slider, just in case anybody came hunting for that noisy repair person. All the commotion didn’t seem to have bothered Riley a bit. He was already asleep, curled up under the covers and hugging his stuffed shark. The remote was still in his hand. I peeled his fingers away and turned off the TV, and then I leaned down and gave him a kiss on his forehead. He made a funny face.

I put the freshly drilled sea glass pieces on my bedside table. I found the frog bead and put that there, too, right next to the little greenish statue of St. Christopher.

Under the glow of my clock radio, it looked like a shrine. If I’d had a candle to light, I would have. “Okay, help me out, you guys,” I whispered. “I’m looking for a little direction here.”

My cell phone rang, and I opened it fast before it could wake Riley. “Hello,” I whispered.

“Hey,” Noah’s voice said.

21

“I MISS YOU,” NOAH’S VOICE SAID NEXT.

“Thanks,” I whispered. I gave St. Christopher and the frog bead a little shrug, then tiptoed across the room and back out to the balcony. I slid the screen shut behind me and sat down on the little plastic chair.

“Did I get you at a bad time? You weren’t asleep already, were you?”

I watched the lights twinkling in the parking lot. “No, I was just trying to wrap my head around the fact that you actually called me. Do you even have my cell phone number?”

“I got it from your dad. Those kittens are pretty cute.”

“Mmm,” I said. “They are.”

“Anyway, I’m really sorry about what I said about not liking cats. You know that shredding thing the Boyster does with the newspapers? We turned a couple of them into collages. And they needed some color, so I gave him some acrylic paint in a cereal bowl and taught him how to dip his paws in. He took right to it. They’re pretty amazing. A real Jackson Pollock vibe. I’m thinking he could even have a show in a year or two.”