“I take it Mr. Daniels is somewhat laid-back?”
“If Boone was any more laid-back,” Cheerful says, “he'd be horizontal.”
8
Boone walks up Garnet Avenue from the beach in the company of Sunny.
Nothing unusual about that-they've been in and out of each other's company for coming on ten years.
Sunny originally flashed onto The Dawn Patrol like daytime lightning. Paddled out, took her place in the lineup like she'd been born there. Boone was about to launch into a six-foot right break when Sunny jumped in and took it from him. Boone was still poised on the lip when this blond image zipped past him as if he were a buoy.
Dave laughed. “Man, that babe just ripped your heart out and fed it to you.”
Boone wasn't so freaking amused. He caught the next wave in and found her coming back out through the white water.
“Yo, Blondie,” Boone said. “You jumped my wave.”
“My name isn't ‘Blondie,’” Sunny said. “And when did you buy the beach?”
“I was lined up.”
“You were late.”
“My ass I was.”
“Your ass was late,” Sunny said. “What's the matter, the big man can't take getting beat by a girl?”
“I can take it,” Boone said. Even to himself, it sounded lame.
“Apparently not,” Sunny said.
Boone took a closer look at her. “Do I know you?”
“I don't know,” Sunny said. “Do you?”
She lay out on her board and started to paddle back out. Boone had no choice but to follow. Catching up with her wasn't easy.
“You go to Pac High?” Boone asked when he got alongside.
“Used to,” Sunny said. “I'm at SDSU now.”
“I went to Pac High,” Boone said.
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I remember you,” Sunny said.
“Uh, I guess I don't remember you.”
“I know.”
She kicked it up and paddled away from him. Then she spent the rest of the session kicking his ass. She took over the water like she owned it, which she did, that afternoon.
“She's a specimen,” Dave said as he and Boone watched her from the lineup.
“Eyes off,” Boone said. “She's mine.”
“If she'll have you.” Dave snorted.
Turned out she would. She outsurfed him until the sun went down, then waited for him on the beach until he dragged his ass in.
“I could get used to this,” Boone said to her.
“Get used to what?”
“Getting beat by a girl.”
“My name's Sunny Day,” she said ruefully.
“I'm not laughing,” he said. “Mine's Boone Daniels.”
They went to dinner and then they went to bed. It was natural, inevitable-they both knew that neither one of them could swim out of that current. As if either one of them wanted to.
After that, they were inseparable.
“You and Boone should get married and produce offspring,” Johnny Banzai told them a few weeks later. “You owe it to the world of surfing.”
Like, the child of Boone and Sunny would be some sort of mutant superfreak. But marriage?
Not happening.
“CCBHS” is how Sunny explained herself on this issue. “Classic California broken home syndrome. There ought to be a telethon.”
Emily Wendelin's hippie dad had left her hippie mom when Emily was three years old. Her mom never got over it, and neither did Emily, who learned not to give her heart to a man because men don't stay.
Emily's mom retreated into herself, becoming “emotionally unavailable,” as the shrinks would say, and it was her grandmother-her mother's mother-who really raised the girl. Eleanor Day imbued Emily with her strength, her grace, and her warmth, and it was Eleanor who gave the girl the nickname “Sunny,” because her granddaughter lit up her life. When Sunny turned eighteen, she changed her surname to Day, regardless of how pseudohippie it sounded.
“I'm matrilineal,” she explained.
It was her grandmother who persuaded her to go to college, and her grandmother who understood when, after the first year, Sunny decided that higher education, at least in a formal setting, wasn't for her.
“It's my fault,” Eleanor had said.
Her house was a block and a half from the beach, and Eleanor had taken her granddaughter there almost every day. When eight-year-old Sunny said that she wanted to surf, it was Eleanor who saw that a board was under the Christmas tree. It was Eleanor who stood on the beach while the girl rode wave after wave, Eleanor who smiled patiently when the sun went down and Emily would wave from the break, holding up one imploring finger, which meant “Please, Grandma, one more wave.” It was Eleanor who went to the early tournaments, who sat calmly in the ER with the girl, assuring her that the stitches in her chin wouldn't leave a scar, and that if they did, it would be an interesting one.
So when Sunny came to her and explained that she didn't want to go to college, and tearfully apologized for letting her down, Eleanor said that it was her fault for introducing Emily to the ocean.
“So what do you intend to do?” Eleanor asked.
“I want to be a professional surfer.”
Eleanor didn't raise an eyebrow. Or laugh, or argue, or scoff. She simply said, “Well, be a great one.”
Bea great surfer, not marry one.
Not like the options were mutually exclusive, but neither Sunny nor Boone was interested in getting married, or even living together. Life was just fine the way it was-surfing, hanging out, making love, and surfing. It was all one and the same thing, one long, unbroken rhythm.
Good days.
Sunny waited tables in PB while she worked on her surfing career; Boone was happy being a cop, a uniformed patrolman with the SDPD.
What busted it up was a girl named Rain Sweeny.
Things changed after Rain Sweeny. After she was gone, Boone never really came back. It was like there was this distance between Boone and Sunny now, like a deep, slow current pulling them apart.
And now this big swell is coming, and they both sense that it's bringing a bigger change.
They stand outside Boone's office.
“So… late,” Sunny says.
“Late.”
Walking away, Sunny wonders if it's too late.
Like she's already lost something she didn't even know she wanted.
9
