Chapter 13 #2
I can handle that.
I can do this.
But when Nash steps in front of me, I nearly die. Every regulatory system in my body starts shutting down when he asks, “Water?”
I stare at him through my sunglasses, pinching my flannel around my throat.
He’s here. He’s right here. Holding a bottle of water and smiling.
Like I didn’t spend night after night wishing for him and hating him and loving him all at once.
Out of nowhere, I’m filled with longing—I want my fingertips on his skin.
I want to say, “Hey, Nash, it’s me. Long time no see.
” I want it so badly my skin and tongue tingle and my heart skips a beat.
Cap—Dad—returns with tickets and a wheelchair, breaking my trance. I snatch the water from Nash’s hands without saying a word and chug the entire thing.
“Where y’all visiting from?” Nash asks Cap conversationally, giving us each a map.
Cap looks between Nash and me as he drops into the wheelchair, arranging his oxygen tank and cane across his lap.
I shake my head then stare at my feet.
“Local,” Cap says.
“I love locals.” Without looking at him, I can hear his smile. “Maybe y’all can teach me a thing or two. Thanks for being here.”
When he moves to the next group, I let out the biggest exhale of my life.
“Seems nice,” Cap says.
“You sound like Mom,” I snap, wheeling him outside to the designated start area and position us at the back of the crowd and as far away from Nash as possible. “And he’s not nice.”
He chuckles.
And then I hear it.
The wail of a harmonica.
At the front of the crowd, Nash stands, harmonica in his hands—an old Hohner I’d recognize anywhere—and an effortless smile on his face. If he wasn’t wearing sunglasses, I’m sure his brown eyes would be squinting and bright.
I thought I’d show up and the history between eight years ago and now wouldn’t matter, but when he laughs his laugh—the unabashed one that comes from somewhere deep in his belly and trickles over gravel in his throat—it kicks my kneecaps. It’s like seeing him for the first time all over again.
“You’ll know I have something smart to say when you hear me pretending to be Tom Petty.” Nash wiggles the harmonica in the air with a grin and the crowd chuckles. He already has them eating out of the palm of his hand and we haven’t even gone anywhere.
I clutch the flannel at my chest before taking Cap’s water from his lap without asking and drain half of it.
What am I doing here? What in the actual hell is my plan?
“We going or what?” Cap snaps.
The group has moved down the street and Nash is already talking.
“Sorry.” I wedge the bottle into the back pocket of the wheelchair along with Cap’s canister of oxygen.
“Benjamin Franklin once said,” Nash is saying as we catch up with them, “‘There never was a good war or a bad peace.’ And while he wasn’t talking about Charleston specifically, boy does it apply.”
He’s still obsessed with Benjamin Franklin and has a job where he strolls around telling stories and playing a harmonica—this calms my nerves a bit.
Even if his career title has changed, he hasn’t.
Not one bit. If I looked up the address he sent me, I bet it’s to a hotel and his clothes are in trash bags.
He starts rattling off periods of hardship and flourishment of the city before leading us along at a leisurely stroll, each step a little easier than the last. Maybe the worst is over. Maybe seeing him was the rip of the Band-Aid and everything else will be smooth sailing.
“Our first taste of this lovely city is for the tea drinkers,” Nash says, stopping at a small café.
At the Charleston Teahouse, he cracks open the door and waves, letting the staff know we’ve arrived.
“Not to brag,” he says to us, “but as a little bit of an expert on the matter, the Teahouse makes the best London Fog in the city”—I freeze—“using tea grown right here in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.”
The worst is not over; the sailing is not smooth.
A barista appears with a tray of tiny cups, doling them out to each of us as Nash starts talking about the year the building was built and the earthquake it survived.
I stare at the cup in my hand like it’s a live bomb.
Like at any second, shrapnel of Earl Grey tea leaves, sweetened frothed milk, and vanilla will explode all over me.
I refuse to taste it. Refuse to acknowledge the fact that the first one he had in his life was with me in Fontain.
“It’ll change your life,” I promised with a cheeky grin.
He kissed my temple then said against my skin, “Not sure if lightning can strike twice in this town, Rue Conway, but let’s see it.”
“Never had one of these,” Cap says, the tiny cup looking doll-sized in his big, weathered hands. “Be better with rum.”
He chuckles, and I’m once again reeling, pushing the wheelchair like a drunk NASCAR driver as my untouched London Fog spills out of the cup and burns my hand.
There’s an alley up ahead; I crane my neck to see where it goes.
If I take it, it might loop us back to my car so I can come up with plan B.
Or C. Or D. One that doesn’t involve Nash.
One that involves me re-mailing the divorce papers like Jonathan suggested and solving this gold mystery without ever having to talk to him.
I’ll figure out another way to convince my mom to have the surgery and Bennie never has to know the truth.
I will take my lie to the grave and then into the fiery pits of hell where my soul will be damned for all eternity.
“Will you take it easy?” Cap shouts as I jostle him around a palm tree packed with oyster shells at its base. “You sure you’re not in love with him? You’re driving this damn thing like a damn criminal running from the damn cops.”
“Sorry.” I force myself to slow down, realizing I passed the alley exit. Shit. “I was thinking about the gold.” I toss my now empty cup into a trash can and wipe my hand on my flannel. “And he’s infuriating.”
“He didn’t even do anything,” Cap argues.
Like a scolded child, I stick my tongue out at the back of his captain’s hat. “Then maybe you should make him call you dad.”
He swats my words away with a hand in the air and a grunt, quiet a minute before asking, “What’s your kid’s name?”
“Bennie.” This at least makes me smile. At the next historic stop, I pull a picture up on my phone. “Bennie Francine.”
Cap studies the photo then gives me a long look as he hands the phone back. “She looks like him.”
He says it like he’s talking about the weather. Like it’s raining, and he’s said it’s raining, and he’s waiting for me to agree about what a deluge of rain there is. I want to whack him over the head with his cane.
“Shhh,” I hush. “I can’t hear.”
Nash points to a stone pineapple that looks more like a pinecone, saying something about hospitality before making a joke about our ears popping because we’ve reached the highest point in the city at some number of inches above sea level.
Nothing he’s spewing registers in my brain as I look at him.
Him. Nash. Telling stories like he used to all those years ago.
Even if the air wasn’t thick enough to cut with a knife and I wasn’t buttoned up in a flannel body bag, I’d be sweating.
A horse-drawn buggy clods down the street and pauses next to us, Chucktown Wagon Tours written in an elegant script on the side.
The blond woman standing at the front holding the reins smiles wide at Nash, clicking her tongue at the horse before saying to the people in the wagon, “For those of y’all who prefer wearing yourselves out on vacation, Mr. Fletcher here’s the man for the job. ”
Nash chuckles and gestures to the woman. “Folks, don’t listen to Miss Emma, she’s leaving out the snacks and drinks you’d miss out on.” He blows into his harmonica, and it lifts the hair on the back of my neck. “And live entertainment.”
“Hope y’all brought your earplugs.” Emma’s smile widens as she gently slaps the reins. “See you later, Nashy.”
Her Nashy makes me pause—that’s a term of endearment if there ever was one.
But it’s his response of “I’m sure you will” that turns my spine to stone. They know each other beyond passing through these historic streets. Intimately.
Good for them—great even. He should be with someone. I’m with someone. I love someone. I love someone so much I’m marrying them.
I wonder if he loves her, I think.
Only I don’t think it, I say it, because Cap says, “Thought he was infuriating?”
“He is.” I clear my throat, watching the buggy—mostly Emma—the entire time they clod away.
She’s spewing facts and smiling, and the people in the carriage laugh.
Her skin is dewy from the humidity in a way that makes her cute and my mortal enemy.
“I feel bad for her is all. She must not realize what he is yet.”
I wonder how they met and how long they’ve been together.
A poke at the rim of my hat and a crotchety “We going?” drags my attention away from her.
“Sorry,” I mumble.
“This ale house dates back to the early 1800s,” Nash says, opening a door at a restaurant as we approach. “We’ll taste a local brew from over on John’s Island and have one of my favorite southern snacks.”
I tuck my chin as I pass him. This isn’t roadside service like the last stop; we’re going inside.
At a cluster of reserved tables, I beeline to the farthest in the back, knocking Cap into chairs and tables, making him swear as I go. A family of four snags it before I can.
Dammit.
The only seats are up front . . . where Nash is standing.
“For those of you not from the South,” Nash explains as a server comes around with small glasses of beer and paper baskets. “You are looking at the official State Snack Food of South Carolina, and one of my favorite treats, the boiled peanut.”
The kids from the family of four gag at the notion of such a food, clearly from anywhere but the South. I’d laugh if anything was funny.