Chapter Eight #2
“The participants in the race are given socks to wear, so everyone is on an even footing, so to speak.”
“Let me guess, lobster socks?” Marit asked with a laugh.
“Of course. There are fifty wooden crates strung together across the harbor. Each crate is filled with seaweed to make them more buoyant. If they make it across all fifty, they turn around on the connecting platform and go back. They do that again and again until they fall into the water. The first record ever was a thousand crates. That was in the eighties. The all-time record is sixty-five hundred.”
“Holy crap . . . that’s a lot of running back and forth!” Marit said.
“A hundred and thirty times,” Linc said with a nod. “It was a tie that year, and neither Scarlett nor Harrison ever fell in. They finally just called it because it didn’t look like either kid was going to ever falter.”
“They were like . . . little,” Kash said with a small frown.
“Seven and nine,” Zach confirmed.
“I’m twelve. And taller than them.” Then he perked up. “But I’m not that much heavier than they were. That’s what Linc says.”
“That’s right. So forget about your age or weight. Concentrate on your foot placement and getting across. That’s all you need to do,” Zach assured him.
“What if I get tired?” Kash asked Linc.
Zach noticed for the first time that the boy looked at Linc as if he hung the moon.
He drank in every word of encouragement that left Linc’s lips.
It was obvious the boy had a bit of hero worship going on.
Something that Zach had himself when it came to his brother.
He was one of the most humble and brave men he’d ever had the pleasure of knowing.
“Then when you get to the platform, you ham it up. Play to the crowd. Make a stupid heart out of your hands. Smile and wave to the spectators. Lean over and pull up your socks. Stretch. Anything that will give you a moment to take a breath.”
Kash nodded solemnly, taking in every word Linc told him as if it was gospel. Then he turned to Marit. “Your turn!” he said excitedly.
“Oh joy,” she mumbled, but she smiled at the boy. “No laughing when I fall,” she told him.
Zach was doing his best not to stare at Marit.
She had on a perfectly modest one-piece suit.
Well, he thought it was one piece. It was possible it was a tank top with a bottom thing.
He didn’t know what women called them. All he knew was that she was just as sexy with all her private bits covered as she’d been naked as the day she was born in his bed last night.
But his attraction to her was more than just because of her looks. It was the way she spoke to Kash. How she seemed to understand that he had low self-esteem and did her best to lift him up. How she didn’t talk down to him.
“All right, what tips do you have for me?” she asked the boy as she walked toward the shore.
As she and Kash talked strategy, Zach’s mom sidled up next to him.
“She’s pretty,” she said with a little grin.
Zach rolled his eyes. “Don’t start, Mom.”
“What? I’m just saying.”
“Just because Chad and Britt got engaged, and she’s pregnant, doesn’t mean I’m going to follow suit.”
“I know. But . . . son, I’ve never seen you look at a woman the way you’re looking at Marit right now.”
For a second Zach was appalled, thinking his mom could see the lust in his eyes. Then she went on.
“You like her. I mean, really like her. You aren’t just with her for sex.”
“Mom! Stop!” Zach pleaded. He couldn’t talk about sex with his mom.
He learned all about the birds and the bees from his brothers.
Although, there was that one time when his mom had come home with a box of condoms and handed it to him before dinner, as if she was giving him a can of shaving cream. It had been horrifying and mortifying.
All she’d said was, “Make sure you use those if you feel the need to have sexual relations.”
His dad had simply chuckled, enjoying his son’s discomfort.
“All right, all right. But . . . for the record . . . I like her.”
Zach simply shook his head. His mom. He loved her more than anything, but she was as transparent as a piece of glass. She wasn’t satisfied with Chad and Britt giving her a grandbaby. She wanted more.
“All right, I’m going for it!” Marit called out, looking back to where Zach was standing on the pebbled shore with his mom.
“You got this!” he encouraged. “Be careful though, it’s pretty shallow here near the shore.”
“Are you hinting that I’m going to fall after the first crate?” she asked a little grumpily, putting her hands on her hips.
Zach held up his hands in capitulation. “No, no, no. Just sayin’.”
“Whatever,” Marit muttered. She looked at Kash. “Ready?”
“Ready!” the boy said eagerly, with a huge smile on his face.
Zach saw Marit take a deep breath before counting down.
“Three, two, one!” She dashed toward the crates. She stepped on the first . . .
And it sank under her weight.
She almost went down right then and there. Instead, she managed to regain her balance and was able to step on two more, before she finally fell with a loud screech.
Zach stepped toward the water, hoping she wasn’t hurt, but she popped up immediately, laughing hysterically.
“Okay, that was terrible. I want another shot!”
And thus began the start of an hour full of laughing, falling into the water, and cheering for Kash when he ran all the way to the end of the crates and dove into the cove time after time.
Zach even took a turn at running the crates.
But he was much heavier than when he’d won as a kid, and he wasn’t able to make it past more than five or six before falling into the water.
Marit improved enough that she eventually made it to the end of the fifteen crates Linc had scrounged up, and she and Kash whooped and hollered enough that someone would’ve thought they’d just won the Olympics or something.
His mom got hot in the sun, so she wandered back up to the deck to sit in the shade and drink some water while she watched . . . but not before putting a hand on Kash’s shoulder and saying, “You’ve got what it takes to win, Kash. Mark my words.”
Even more confidence bloomed across the young boy’s face.
When Kash finally got bored—or probably more accurately, tired—he asked Marit if she wanted to see Fort Bad Assery in the woods. She said of course she wanted to see this amazing fort. Zach and Linc both tagged along, content to let Marit and Kash talk among themselves.
When Kash started talking about asterisms, binary stars, and nebulas, Zach tuned him out.
Honestly, the information was over his head.
But it didn’t matter whether or not Marit understood a word the boy was saying.
She nodded and listened carefully, encouraging him to keep talking.
It seemed as if the kid didn’t get nearly enough chances to talk about his greatest passions. Space and stars.
He proudly showed Marit the fort he’d fixed up in the woods, near the property line between Lobster Cove and his granddad’s place.
Zach and Linc stayed outside, because there wasn’t nearly enough room for either of them inside the tiny little structure made out of sticks and random pieces of lumber Kash had used to strengthen the old fort.
“He’s a good kid,” Linc said softly.
“Yeah. You really think he has a chance at the crate race?” Zach asked his brother.
“I do. You saw him, he’s good. Better than we were.”
“True.”
“I don’t like that Victor seems to be as much a judgmental asshole toward his grandson as he is toward everyone else, though,” Linc said with a frown. “Why can’t he accept Kash the way he is? And why isn’t Harper sticking up for her son?”
Harper was Kash’s mom . . . and someone Linc had a not-so-great history with. They were in the same grade in school growing up, and apparently she was a typical “mean girl,” especially toward Linc. And he’d never forgotten.
Harper moved away right after high school, vowing never to return to the “hick town” of Rockville . . . but now here she was. Living back next door with her grump of a father, with a twelve-year-old kid in tow. No one knew her current story, or even saw much of her at all, for that matter.
Kash continued to babble on and on to Marit about his books and how dark it was out here at night and how well he could see the stars through his telescope.
“Maybe because she’s not around much. You know, because she’s working,” Zach suggested with a shrug.
“Maybe. But it sucks that Kash doesn’t think his grandfather approves of anything he does.”
Zach couldn’t disagree.
“Kash? Are you out here?”
The sound of a woman’s voice calling for the boy rang out through the trees.
Kash reacted immediately. His head popped out of the fort, and he had a panicked look on his face. His red hair was sticking up all over the place, still damp from swimming in the cove.
“Oh no! That’s my mom! She doesn’t know about Fort Bad Assery. If she knows I’m playing on Lobster Cove, she’ll be upset!” he fretted.
“I’ll pack everything up for you nice and tight. You go on home,” Marit told him calmly from inside the fort.
Kash didn’t hesitate. He nodded, then scrambled out of the fort on his hands and knees before standing and turning to run toward the property line.
“Hang on, Bud. I’ll go with you,” Linc told him, catching him before he could bolt by latching on to his arm.
The relief that crossed Kash’s face was easy to see. “You will? Thanks! You’ll tell Mom that you invited me over and we were practicing for the crate race, right? You won’t tell her about my fort or what I do here, will you?”
“Yes, and no. The fort can still be our secret. But do you really think she’ll be mad?”
“No. But she’ll worry. And she has enough to worry about.”
That was an extremely telling statement, and Zach saw that his brother realized it as well.
“All right. Well, let’s go make sure she’s not worried about you.”