The folks at the next table had gotten back to jawing, though at a lower volume on account of my being unfamiliar, I supposed. Between crunches of my dinner, I caught the gist: a body had washed ashore a little ways down the coast, where tourists rented beach houses. Maybe I shouldn’t have eavesdropped. But although I wasn’t a prosecutor anymore, I was probably never going to lose the habit of keeping a close eye on every local crime.
“Bunch of them Yankees was playing volleyball on the beach,” the man said. “You know, girls in their bikinis, one of them thousand-dollar gas grills fired up on the deck.” His voice held a mix of humor and scorn. “They were having themselves just a perfect vacation. And then this corpse washes up! This, I swear to you, decomposing corpse crashes the party!”
The table erupted with guffaws.
“So what’d they do?” a man said. “Hop in the Subarus and hightail it back to New York or wherever?”
“No, the thing is—and I heard this from my cousin, you know, the one working for the sheriff? The thing is, they thought a gator got him! Thought they had a gator in the water! And I’ll be damned if they weren’t pissing themselves like little girls, trying to get everybody back out of the water. Couple of them was so scared they started puking!”
They all lost it. One of them was so entertained he slammed a hand on the table, rattling the silverware. As the laughter started fading, one of them wondered aloud who the dead man might be.
“Aw, don’t matter none,” the storyteller said. “We ain’t missing nobody.”
I felt a sourness in my gut. I couldn’t go a day here without being reminded why I’d left. In Basking Rock, compassion for your fellow man was strictly circumscribed. Tourists got none. The wrong kind of people, whatever that meant, got none. Your family and lifelong friends could do no wrong, and everybody else could go straight to hell.
I signaled the waitress and asked for a doggie bag. Might as well finish eating at home, away from present company. She scowled, probably thinking I was switching to takeout to avoid leaving a tip. I scrounged through my wallet, sure I’d had a few ones in there and grudgingly set down a five knowing I was leaving more than necessary. Making any kind of enemy was not my style. You never knew who might help you out one day, if you’d taken care not to get on their bad side. More to the point, I knew from friends who worked in health code enforcement that there were few things stupider than making enemies of the folks who make your food.
I’d parked my Chevy outside. It used to be the beater, until the nice car was totaled in the accident. When I fired it up, the engine light came on again. I kept right on ignoring it. I’d yet to find a local mechanic I could trust. The one I knew of had been a bully back in high school, and from what I’d heard, age had only refined his techniques. If he thought you’d gotten too big for your britches—which I certainly had, what with my law degree and my former big-city career—he took his rage out on your wallet.
The Chevy heroically made it home once again. I parked beside the clump of fan palms that were starting to block the driveway. I needed to get them pruned, and to fix the wobbly porch railing that would’ve been a lawsuit waiting to happen if we ever had visitors. I needed a haircut. My geriatric Yorkie, Squatter, who limped to the door to greet me, needed a trip to the vet. The to-do list never stopped growing, and checking anything off it required money I no longer had.
I tossed the mail on the table and scratched the dog on the head. He’d come with the house—the landlord said he’d been abandoned by the previous tenants, and I couldn’t bring myself to dump him at the pound. As he wagged his tail, I called out to my son. “Noah?”
All I could hear was the breeze outside and Squatter’s nails scrabbling on the tile. I was no scientist—my major, long ago when I thought I was smart, was US history—but I knew physics did not allow a house to be that quiet if it contained a teenage boy. It looked like I’d be eating another dinner alone. I’d texted Noah when I got to the diner, to see if he wanted anything, but he hadn’t answered. I never knew where he was lately, unless he was at a doctor’s appointment I’d driven him to myself.
After feeding Squatter I pulled up a chair, took a bite of now-cold shrimp, and flipped through the mail. The monthly health insurance bill—nearly thirteen hundred bucks just for the two of us—went into the small pile of things I couldn’t get out of paying. Noah’s physical therapy bills did too; as long as he still needed PT, I couldn’t risk getting blacklisted there.
And he was going to need it for a good while yet, to have a shot at something like the life he’d been hoping for. We were both still hanging on to the thread of hope that he could get back into the shape that had earned him a baseball scholarship to USC in Columbia. The accident had cost him that, but he was determined to try again.
Or so he’d said at first. Lately he’d gotten depressed with how long it was taking, and how much fun he saw his high-school buddies having on Instagram. They’d gone to college and moved on with their lives. He’d started making new friends here, but to my
