The last time our paths crossed, I had indeed been involved with a game warden from further up the coast, but he was ancient history.
“No.”
“That SBI guy who was always hanging around?”
“Dwight Bryant,” I said. “Last Christmas.”
I didn’t have to explain who Dwight was. They’ve known each other off and on since childhood. Whenever Allen ran away from home and fetched up at a neighbor’s house, he and his cousin became part of the gang of boys that hung out at our house to play whatever ball was in season at the time. Too, he had been a “person of interest” when our paths last crossed and Dwight had called him in for questioning.
“Well, I’ll be damned! Ol’ Dwight? Maybe if I’d had a badge on my shirt, you and me’d still be married.”
“We were never married,” I reminded him. “And the only badge anybody’d ever give you is maybe a dogcatcher’s.”
Tiffany Jane sat back on her heels. “Did you catch dogs, Daddy? And put them in jail?”
“Naw, honey. She’s just joking.”
At that moment young Tyler’s face brightened and the little girl cried, “Aunt Sally!”
Both children ran toward a bone-skinny woman who carried a large white plastic bag from one of the hamburger chains. An inch or two over five feet, she had lemon-yellow hair gathered up into a topknot tied with a peach-colored ribbon. Her sun visor was lime-green and so were her scoop-necked tank top and the frames of her oversized sunglasses. With her peach-colored slacks and stacked orange sandals, she was a walking fruit salad.
From a distance, with that sassy walk, she looked forty. As she got closer, I saw that she was past fifty. Her skin had the leathery look of someone who had either worked out in the sun all her life or else had her own tanning bed. “Time for lunch,” she called. “Y’all hungry?” Her voice had the husky timbre of an addicted smoker.
As the children danced around her, she sat down under Allen’s umbrella and spread the towels for a picnic.
The children immediately tore into the bag of food and the smell of french fries, onions, and pickles floated toward me and made my mouth water despite my full breakfast only two hours earlier. She unwrapped the hamburgers and poured juice into a sippy cup for the toddler, then paused to give me a quizzical look over the top of her colorful sunglasses.
“Hey there,” she said, reaching out a hand that felt like thin dry twigs. “I’m Sally Stancil.”
“I’m sorry,” Allen said “Sally, this here’s Judge Deborah Knott.”
“Judge? Really?” Her sunglasses slipped further down her thin nose and she looked me up and down. I automatically straightened my shoulders and sucked in my tummy, aware that my red bathing suit showed every extra ounce that I must have gained this weekend. Allen’s second ex-wife (and the woman he’d still been married to when he married me) lifted a well-plucked eyebrow. “Idn’t she the one almost cut off your balls?”
Happily, the children were too involved with their food to pick up on her question and Allen said, “Aw, that was just a little misunderstanding.”
Sally Stancil gave me a friendly smile of solidarity. “He’s a hound dog, idn’t he? You want a hamburger, honey? I got extra.”
“No thanks,” I told her and stood to walk back to my own umbrella. “Nice meeting you,” I said and waved goodbye to the little girl. The boy was carefully lining up french fries on his paper plate.
Allen jumped to his feet and followed me down the beach. “Sally’s gonna take ’em on up to her room for a nap soon as they finish eating, so how ’bout we go someplace where we can set down and have a real lunch? Ain’t no reason we can’t be friends, right?”
I looked up into his hopeful brown eyes. His neatly trimmed beard and mustache had almost as much salt as pepper these days, but if you overlooked the scars and tattoos, he still exuded a rough-hewn sexy charm and he really did seem to have finally settled down to a law-abiding life. I mean, how much more respectable can you get than installing seamless rain gutters?
“Friends? Yes,” I said and shook his work-hardened hand, “but I already made plans for lunch. Sorry.”
It was a lie, of course, but he pretended to believe me.
“Okay, then, darlin’. Catch you later, maybe.”
Inside the hotel, I stopped by the registration desk in the lobby to pick up my name tag and the thick packet of conference material.
Counting everyone who’s come out of retirement to take up the slack when emergencies arise, North Carolina has around three hundred district court judges, all of whom are required to attend at least one educational conference a year. Some go only to the fall conference up in the mountains, others only to the summer one here in Wrightsville, while still others opt for offerings at the School of Government in Chapel Hill. But the beach is usually pretty popular and the elevator I rode up in was jammed with colleagues who had just checked in. I knew most of them by sight, but none were special friends, so it was “How’s the beach?” and “How was your drive over?”
It reminded me that this was, after all, a professional conference and I was glad I’d pulled on a shirt and shorts over my bathing suit before leaving the beach. Back in my room, I showered and shampooed all the salt out of my sandy blonde hair, then lay down across the bed intending to look through the packet and familiarize myself with the issues that would be discussed. After a morning of sun and surf, though, good intentions fought with a pleasant inertia and inertia won hands down.
It was almost two o’clock before I was vertical again and ready to put on one of my favorite summer dresses. Made of soft blue cotton, the peasant skirt was topped by a matching tunic with bands of white embroidery around the keyhole neckline and along the edges of the three-quarter-length sleeves. I cinched my waist with a white straw belt and fastened a bracelet around my wrist that Mother had given Aunt Zell to keep until my wedding. Each slender gold link held a tiny blue enameled forget-me-not. As if I would ever forget her, with or without the bracelet.
