Chapter 16 #2
“You did break my heart.” He said it the way you’d state a fact about the tide tables. “And I suspect I broke yours. We were very young.”
“We were.”
Silence settled between them. A mullet jumped near the channel marker, silver flash, splash, and gone. The pelican on the piling tucked its bill against its chest.
“I’d like to photograph the lighthouse,” Sam said after a while. “For the book. It’s one of the finest surviving examples on this coast, and I’d be doing poor work to leave it out.”
Winnie studied his profile. The strong nose, the deep lines bracketing his mouth. She had loved this face once. Some stubborn part of her still recognized it, and she resented that recognition even as she felt it settle into her bones.
“Exterior only,” she said.
“Of course.”
“And you call ahead. Don’t just show up.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You already did. You showed up in my town without a word of warning.”
A small smile crossed his face. She looked away from it.
“That’s fair,” he said.
“I’ll tell Clint, my nephew, to expect you. He manages the property. He’s protective. Don’t take it personally if he hovers.”
“I won’t.”
Winnie stood because she needed to. If she sat on this bench much longer she would say something she wasn’t ready to say, or ask a question she wasn’t ready to hear the answer to. Her knees protested the movement, stiff from sitting, and she gripped the armrest for balance before straightening.
Sam stood too, slower, one hand braced on the bench back.
They faced each other in the afternoon light with the harbor spread behind them.
He was taller than her by nearly a foot, and she had to look up, which bothered her in a way she couldn’t quite separate from the other things that were bothering her.
“It was good to see you, Winnie.”
“It was strange to see you.”
He laughed, a short sound that held more surprise than humor. “That’s honest.”
“I’ve always been honest with you.” The words came out before she could stop them, and they both heard the lie sitting inside them. She had been honest about almost everything. She had lied about the one thing that mattered most.
Sam’s expression shifted to pain, or it might have been understanding. She couldn’t tell and wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“I’ll call ahead about the lighthouse,” he said.
“You do that.”
He turned and walked back toward Main Street.
Winnie watched him go. His long stride, the camera bag slung over one shoulder.
A slight stiffness in his left knee that hadn’t been there forty-five years ago.
He didn’t look back. She was grateful for that.
She was also disappointed, which made her grip the edge of the bench hard enough to feel the wood grain under her fingernails.
She sat back down on the bench.
The harbor went on doing what harbors did.
Boats rocked. Water lapped against pilings.
Two men on the dock were hosing down a cooler, their voices carrying across the water in bursts she couldn’t quite make out.
A charter came in from the Gulf and eased toward the marina, its wake sending gentle swells against the seawall.
Winnie sat with her hands in her lap. The ache was there, lodged under her ribs. She’d spent decades being steady for everyone else. Holding things together because someone had to, and she was the one who’d stayed.
Just once, she wanted to set that down. Just for the length of one afternoon on one bench.
Her father had sat on this same bench. She remembered it clearly, a Sunday afternoon when she was twelve or thirteen.
He’d brought two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and they’d eaten them watching the shrimp boats come in.
She’d asked him why they never took vacations like other families, and he’d said, “The light doesn’t take vacations, Winnie.
” And she’d accepted that because she was twelve and her father was the most trustworthy person in her world.
She wondered now, as she had wondered a thousand times since, what he would say if he could see what his instructions had cost her. Whether he’d still think the lighthouse was worth it.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there when Sally appeared.
Sally didn’t announce herself. She walked to the bench, set a paper bag from Bayview General on the slats between them, and sat in the space Sam had occupied.
“Marty saw you two from the bookstore window,” Sally said. “Called me before you’d even sat down, the busybody.”
“Of course he did.”
“I brought your picture-hanging wire. Figured you wouldn’t be going back for it.” Sally nudged the paper bag an inch closer.
Winnie looked at the bag. She had completely forgotten the wire. The errand that had brought her to town in the first place, gone from her head the moment she’d seen Sam on the sidewalk. Clint’s loose frame in Starfish Cottage. It seemed like it belonged to a different afternoon.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Winnie.”
“I know.”
Sally was quiet for a moment, studying her friend with the particular steadiness that a lifetime of shared history earned. “Oh, honey. What are you going to do?”
Winnie shook her head slowly. “Nothing.” She paused. The word hung there, inadequate and false. “Oh… I don’t know.”
Her right hand drifted to her left wrist. Her fingers closed around the bracelet there.
Sea glass, smooth and green, each piece drilled and threaded on silver wire.
Sam had made it for her the summer they were twenty-four.
He’d collected the glass from the cove below the lighthouse, spending mornings with his pockets full of broken pieces the Gulf had worn smooth.
She’d put it on the day he gave it to her. She had rarely taken it off.
Sally glanced at the bracelet, then back at the harbor.
She didn’t say anything else. She just sat there, warm and present, while the charter boat finished docking and a deckhand tossed a line to the pier and the afternoon sun stretched their shadows long across the concrete.
Winnie held the sea glass between her fingers and listened to the water.