not wave.
Just then Fitz and Martha spotted us and walked over to speak. Both were in flip-flops and green bathing suits and both wore white cotton sun hats. Fitz had a towel around his neck and looked trim enough for a sixty-five- year-old man, Martha wore a short white beach jacket and her legs were still good.
“A police detective’s looking for y’all,” I said.
“He can just keep looking,” said Martha. “We plan to get a swim in before lunch and the pool gets too hot.”
As they started to move away after the usual pleasantries, Martha said, “Oh, look! There’s Rosemary and Dave.”
Chelsea Ann groaned when she saw Rosemary join Dave on the balcony. She, too, wore a terry robe. Although her belt was tied tightly, it was clear that she had nothing on underneath.
“I’m so glad they’re back together again,” said Martha, effectively squelching any hope Chelsea Ann might have harbored that none of our colleagues suspected that the marriage was in trouble or that they would witness anything that looked like condonation on Rosemary’s part.
She looked so troubled that I jumped to my feet and tried to pull her up, too. “We’re paying beach rates for our hotel rooms here, so let’s get our money’s worth. I’ll get us an umbrella, you go change and meet me out there, okay?”
“Okay.” She said it with all the enthusiasm of someone who darkly suspected there would be jellyfish.
Ten minutes later, one of the cabana boys pitched my bright coral umbrella on a fairly empty stretch of sand. I tipped him, then spread out my towels and took off my jungle print skirt. I rolled both shirt and skirt into a rough semblance of a pillow and lay down to wait for Chelsea Ann to join me.
The sand beneath my towels was warm and relaxing, and waves and gulls created a white sound that almost drowned out the squeals of laughter from the children who played in the shade of the lifeguard’s stand a few hundred feet away. I told myself that I was only going to rest my eyes till Chelsea Ann came, but last night’s late hours caught up with me.
I’m not sure how long I had been sleeping when I became aware of footsteps scrunching on the sand as they approached. They stopped at the edge of my towel. Thinking it was Chelsea Ann, I turned my head and looked up into the face of the bearded man who had spoken to Jeffreys last night.
“Well, hey, darlin’,” he said.
CHAPTER
9
I sat up so abruptly that I banged my head on one of the umbrella’s wooden ribs.
“
“Same as you, darlin’. Enjoying the beach. It belongs to us’ns in the Triad just as much as y’all in the Triangle.”
“Don’t call me darling,” I snapped.
“Aw now, you ain’t still mad at me, are you, Debbie?”
“And don’t call me Debbie,” I said, enunciating each word as forcefully as I could without actually snarling.
“Well, I’m sure as hell not gonna call you Your Honor. Not after all we’ve been to each other.”
He squatted down on his heels next to my towel and I saw that his arms and legs were as muscular as ever despite more flecks of gray in his thick brown hair and beard than when we’d last crossed paths. His white swim trunks and dark blue golf shirt were too loose for me to tell if he was still built like a brick outhouse. Too, his shirt sleeves were too long to see the full-color American flag tattooed high on one deltoid and the pair of black-and- white checkered flags on the other, but I figured they were probably still there. Once upon a brief time I had known his body almost as well as my own.
Ten or twelve years older than me, he had spent a lot of his boyhood at his uncle’s farm, a farm that touched our land on the southeast. The uncle was a roughneck shade-tree mechanic, but his wife had a kind heart for a boy who was being reared up by the scruff of the neck by a trashy woman who was more into men and booze than motherhood. When Allen got tired of being punched on by the string of “uncles” his mother kept bringing home, he would run away to his real uncle and stay as long as he could till he was hauled back to Charlotte, where he eventually grew big enough to punch back.
His talent for repairing car engines was greater than his talent for drag racing, although he scraped together a living doing both at some of the state’s smaller racetracks.
We had absolutely nothing in common, except that he was around the autumn after Mother died. I was mad with God that fall, mad with Daddy, not talking to eight of my brothers and six of my sisters-in-law, even mad with Mother for not finding a way to keep living. I quit college, ready to dance with the devil, and there was Allen Stancil, tapping his toe to the devil’s fiddle.
We stopped by a Martinsville magistrate’s office for a two-minute ceremony before going over to the racetrack where he was crewing for one of the drivers. I knew I’d made a stupid mistake before the magistrate’s signature was dry on the marriage certificate, but by then I was so high on pot and tequila, I really didn’t care. About a week later, Allen called me Debbie one time too many while I had a rusty butcher knife in my hand. The racing friends we were crashing with got him to the hospital before he bled to death, at which point I took a saltshaker and crawled into a tequila bottle, hunting for the worm.
Soon as I heard Allen was going to live, I headed north and stayed gone for two years. While I was “off,” Daddy
