Chapter 1
“You need anything else?” she asks, fumbling with her purse. She’s on her way to the store for some basics.
“Fruit?” I suggest. “Oh, and granola bars.”
My mother leans over the counter and scribbles on a scrap of paper. I peer over her shoulder and see the word “Candy.”
“Please just get some real food too, okay?” I ask.
“I will. Promise.” She blows me a kiss in the air and like that, she drives off.
I’m alone at last, standing in the middle of the trailer. Our entire living area is eight feet in both directions. Bed, tiny bathroom, kitchen, sitting/dining/foldout. She’s giving me the bed, while she’s claiming the couch/kitchen, which she will also use as her office.
With nothing else to do, I decide to try the shower.
I pull the window curtains and strip, realizing that next year I’ll be living with roommates in a dorm.
Maybe getting used to the cramped space and sharing a bathroom with another person will be good experience.
I step into the tiny stall and turn on the water.
I try to avoid looking in the mirror directly across from the shower but it’s almost impossible unless I close my eyes.
Blind, I bang my elbow into the wall while washing my hair, and drop the soap.
“Crap,” I grumble. I use my foot to shimmy the soap halfway up the wall so I can reach it. With two fingers I attempt to pick it up, but the shower water is in my eyes and my butt is pressed against the wall. I’m in my own personal version of shower Twister. Then the water stops.
Completely.
“Mom?” I yell, hoping this is just some case of you can’t use the sink and the shower at the same time. “Mom!”
I drop the bar to the floor with a thud before pushing the soapy hair out of my face and stick my head out of the shower.
Nothing. The camper is quiet. I do hear talking outside.
After grabbing a towel, I run over to look out a window.
Two people stand over my water hookup. “Hell no,” I mutter, and wrap my hair in a towel and my body in my mother’s soft cotton robe and storm outside.
“What did you do?” I ask, running up to them. They’re an odd pair. An older woman and younger man. She stands over him in a terry cloth dress while he unhooks the pipe I watched Jimmy attach two hours ago. Shampoo suds drip down the back of my neck and I wipe them with my towel.
“You stole my water!” the woman shouted. She’s older, in her seventies at least, and her finger is in my face. Over her shoulder is a newly parked camper. She must have just pulled in.
“No I didn’t! We just hooked up where they told us.”
“Young lady, I’ve had this lot every summer since 1984. I know which hook-up is mine.” She pointed to my now-unattached pipe. “That one is mine. Yours is the other one.”
“Does it even matter?” I glance at the man, who so far has said nothing. I’d like to say he’s following the conversation but he’s staring at my chest. I look down and see my robe has slipped. “Nice,” I say. I cinch the belt.
“Dorothy is right,” he says. “You’re hooked to the wrong spot, but it’s no big deal. Let me reattach.”
“No big deal? You could have knocked first or something.”
He looks at me with a pair of amused, familiar, turquoise blue eyes.
Oh no.
“I knocked. No one answered.”
“I was in the shower.”
His eyes travel up and down my body, landing on the towel in my hair. “I noticed.”
He’s wearing an orange cap. My eyes search his arm and spot the tattoo. It’s the serial killer from this morning! Did he follow us here? It seems unlikely, since he knows Dorothy’s name.
Great. Now he knows where I live. I glace around for the other guy but don’t see him.
“Well, are you going to fix it?” I ask, wrapping my arms around my waist.
“It’s not really my job.”
I try to determine if he’s joking or not.
The amused look is gone, replaced with a challenging smirk.
I don’t know who this jerk is, but I can feel the shampoo caking in my hair and dripping down my legs.
“What? You helped her.” I point to the retreating form of the old woman, who, now that she has water, no longer cares about the two of us.
“I’ve known Dorothy since I was six. She makes me biscuits and homemade jam.
No way I’m pissing her off.” He leans against the side of my camper and I notice that, beneath the smug expression and scruffy beard, he’s all sharp bone structure.
Not girly. Masculine with a lean jaw and those obnoxious, pretty eyes.
He’s not just a potential serial killer. He’s a handsome jerk, too.
“So you’re blackmailing me for baked goods to fix my water?”
“Something like that.”
“Something like what?”
He crouches on the ground and attaches what I assume is the water service underneath my camper. It only takes him a minute, and when he stands up he brushes off his hands. “I’ll let you know,” he says with a cheesy wink, and once again I watch him leave while I stand alone by my trailer.
Sleeping in the camper proves more comfortable than I hoped.
Or maybe I’m just exhausted, because I don’t wake up until mid-morning.
From my bed I can see my mother is in what we call “The Zone.” She spent last night setting up her work station.
This includes a laptop, several notebooks, three pencils, a pen, and a couple of other current objects she likes to have around.
An electronic owl with a moving head peeks at me from its perch on the counter.
I’m not surprised she’s already working.
It took us three days to travel here, which is enough time for her to get antsy to begin writing. I plan a quick exit from the camper.
Behind the curtain in my “room” I wrangle myself into a bathing suit.
It’s a two-piece, kind of. I mean, technically it’s a two-piece, but I’ve never been that comfortable parading around half naked, so the edges of the top and bottom of this one almost touch.
I tug a cover-up over the swimsuit and head out the door with a container of yogurt and a fast, “bye,” to my occupied mother.
Two new beach chairs, with the price tags still on from the Jiffy Mart, lean against the camper. I take one and grab my beach bag and set off in the direction of the shore.
Ocean Beach Family Campground is located on the edge of the Inter Coastal Waterway, which is kind of like a salt water river between the mainland and the outer islands.
Ocean Beach is directly across from us, a mere swim away, where quaint cottages intermix with massive waterfront homes.
I stare at the waterway and the boats cruising in front of the campground beach and pretend for a moment there are not a hundred trailers behind me, including the one with a plastic bald eagle mounted on its ‘porch’.
The weather is perfect for the first of June.
Warm, but not too hot. I open and set my chair in the sand, facing the sun.
I’m happy to be out of the cramped quarters for a while.
My mother and I have one of those more-friends-than-mother-daughter things going on due to me being an only child and her being a single mom.
She started writing professionally when I turned eight, starting with a book about a murder in our community.
From there she acquired an agent and publisher, and now she’s written over twenty books on true crimes and mysteries across the country.
Her genre is popular, but dime store cheap.
It’s enough to live on, and she provided me with a good childhood, even if she wasn’t around all the time.
Even when she was home, my mother spent a lot of time in her head.
I learned to fend for myself; cooking and laundry.
My dad wasn’t around—divorced and living with a new starter family in Chattanooga.
I stare across the water and promise myself for the gazillionth time not to become a single mother.
God knows what your kid will get up to when no one’s paying attention.
Who knows who they will meet, decide to trust, and break down barriers for.
I push that thought away and stare out into the water.
“You’re gonna burn,” I hear over the lapping waves and noise off the waterway some time later. I must have dozed off.
I shade my eyes and see a girl, or woman I guess, with three kids in tow, all scurrying toward the water.
She’s carrying a rusty chair and a bag of beach toys.
“You put on sunscreen? Your chest is super red.” The word red drags out into two distinct syllables.
Before I can answer she looks to the water and shouts, “JT! Stop pushing your sister!” I see the little boy, about three years old, smile wickedly but wade into the water, leaving his sister alone.
I hear a clatter as the woman drops the bag of toys and she tosses something in my direction. I catch the bottle before it flies past. In the purest southern accent I’ve ever heard, she says, “Put some of that on.”
“Okay,” I say, squeezing a glob of sunscreen into my hand and slathering on my skin.
“I’m Anita,” she says, dropping into her chair. “Number 46.”
“Forty-six?”
“Yeah.” She takes a sip out of a diet drink can. “My lot number. You’re in 19.”
Of course.
“Oh, okay, I’m Summer,” I say. I look at this woman—she isn’t very old, close to my age. Her dark hair is long and in a thick braid. For a mom, her body is pretty hot. The bikini she has on is tiny, showing twice as much skin as I am.
I frown at the kids in the water and try to do the math on their suspected ages and how old I think she may be.
“Only one of those is mine,” she laughs, seeing the confusion on my face. “The little one. Sibley. The others are her cousins.”
“You seemed a little young for three kids,” I confess.
“Pretty normal around here. My brother had his oldest,” she points to JT, “when he was still in high school.”