“Hello, Abby,” I said, and I leaned down to try to get a look at her baby. The child’s head rested against Abby’s shoulder. It had to be a girl. Her eyes were closed, but her lashes lay long and curled on her pudgy cheeks. “And who’s this?” I asked.
“My granddaughter, Clare,” Ethan said. He reached up and rubbed his hand softly over the little girl’s back.
“She’s gorgeous,” I said.
“Clare and I are just leaving.” Abby smiled at me. “I’m glad I got to see you, Julie, if only for two seconds,” she said.
“You, too, Abby.”
Ethan put his arm around his daughter. “See you Sunday for dinner,” he said.
“You got it.” Abby stood on tiptoe to kiss her father’s cheek. “I love you,” she said, stepping away. Then she walked toward the white Beetle convertible parked in front of the house.
“Love you, too,” Ethan called after her. He grinned, watching his daughter and granddaughter get settled into the little car. He looked at me. “I am one lucky dude,” he said.
I nodded. “Abby’s really a lovely young woman,” I said, but I was thinking about Shannon, trying to remember the last time she had told me she loved me. I told her all the time. When had she started responding to those words with “okay” or the occasional cherished “you, too”?
“Hand me your bag and we can go in the house,” Ethan said.
I rolled my overnight bag toward him and reached into my pocketbook for my eyeglass case. I traded my prescription sunglasses for my regular glasses, then followed him into the house. Once inside, I realized that I had very little memory of its interior. When Ethan and I had played together indoors as kids—rarely, unless it rained—it had usually been at my house. We’d play cards on the porch or board games on the linoleum living-room floor. What had definitely changed inside the Chapmans’ house, though, was its furniture. The first thing that greeted me in the living room was a striking, floor-to-ceiling entertainment center in a pale wood, the craftsmanship exceptional even to my untrained eye. That was only the first of Ethan’s creations I noticed. Everywhere I turned, I saw evidence of his gift. There were end tables and a coffee table. Beautiful chairs with curved backs and silky smooth arms. The kitchen cabinets were a pale maple, and even the countertops were made of a eye-catching striated wood I couldn’t resist running my hand over.
“Tiger maple,” Ethan said. “I love the stuff. You’ll see it all over the house.”
I felt chastened by reality. I’d viewed his being a carpenter in negative terms. In my mind, I’d labeled him a man who worked with his hands instead of his head. But here were the results of his labor. He’d used not only his hands and head in the creative process, but there was plenty of evidence of his heart as well.
“The humidity here is terrible for the wood,” he said, smoothing his fingers over one of the cabinet doors. “But I don’t see the point of making beautiful things if you aren’t going to use them, so I use them.” Damn, he was cute, and I found myself smiling at him. He radiated a relaxed, soft-voiced, blue-eyed charm. The goofy kid who had begged for fish guts was simply not in evidence, and the attraction I’d felt to him in the Spring Lake restaurant was back in spades.
I looked through the kitchen to a jalousied sunroom.
“You enclosed your porch!” I said. Through the open jalousies, I could see the backyard and canal. “Let’s go out there.” I wasn’t sure if I truly wanted to be in the backyard we’d once shared or if I simply wanted to get it over with.
“Sure,” he said.
As we walked onto the sunporch, I squinted my eyes toward the opposite side of the canal. The weathered wooden bulkhead was gone. In its place was a steel bulkhead the color of rust. “What happened to the bulkhead?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you,” Ethan said. “Come on.” He led me through the porch with its white wicker love seat and chaise longue. Once outside, I saw that our two yards were now separated by a decorative wire fence, nearly the color of the sand.
“Who lives there?” I found myself whispering.
He took my elbow. “Come on,” he said again. “Let’s sit down and I can fill you in on the neighborhood.”
There was a beautiful boat in Ethan’s double-wide dock. I no longer knew a thing about boats, but I could tell this one had power and speed.
Ethan pulled two of the handmade wooden beach chairs closer together and patted the back of one, encouraging me to sit.
I sat on the chair, a few feet behind the chain-link fence that separated us from the water.
“God.” I shook my head. “I can’t tell you how strange this feels to be here. To see this water. I feel like I was here just last week, it’s so familiar to me. And look across the canal.” I pointed to the thick green reeds where George and Wanda and their cousins used to fish. No one was fishing there this afternoon. “It’s still undeveloped,” I said.
“Right,” Ethan said. “One of the few areas on the canal.”
“The Rooster Man’s shack is gone, though,” I said, marveling at the cluster of angular gray buildings that stood where the shack had once been.
“Condos,” Ethan said. “If you’ve got about $ 800,000, you can get one with two bedrooms.”
I looked at him, openmouthed. “Are you kidding?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know how much your old house is worth,” he said.
I winced. “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t.” The current value of the bungalow didn’t matter. My grandparents would have sold it even if they’d had a crystal ball to see the future of real estate in the area.
Ethan told me about the old wooden bulkhead succumbing to erosion and being replaced by the rust-colored
