Rhodes
TWENTY-FIVE
Encapsulation: When lead paint cannot be safely removed, it is sealed beneath a new coat and declared stable. The hazard has not gone anywhere. Every report written on that property afterward has to say so, in writing, forever.
She didn't knock last night. She quit knocking somewhere around the third night, and I haven't said one word about it, because whatever she decided and how she got here, I don’t want to disrupt it.
Ten days ago she sat across from me at Cowbell and told me not to complicate things. I said okay, even though it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I meant to respect that.
Then Friday I came in from the gym and found her sitting on my kitchen counter in her field clothes with her heels knocking the cabinet door, smelling like river mud and sunscreen, and she looked at me for about four seconds before she said, "Don't be smug about this.”
I have been working on not being smug about it ever since.
This morning the light comes in gray around the edge of the blind.
She's on her stomach beside me with the sheet twisted around one leg, propped on her elbows, with her phone in her hands.
She's been awake a while. I can tell because she's brighter and more alert than anyone should be without coffee.
"You're staring."
“My eyes are adjusting. A man can't stare if he can't see."
"I'm not buying it."
"I might have been admiring. Hard to say."
She doesn't answer that.
She doesn't know the half of it. The sheet's got one leg and none of the rest of her. The way she's propped on her elbows puts a curve in her back I keep coming back to.
"How long have you been awake?"
"Long enough. The report came back, and it's better than I hoped."
"Read it to me.”
That's the closest we've come to talking about Cowbell since Cowbell, and neither one of us is going to be the one who says a word that means something.
She told me what she had room for, and I told her okay.
What we do instead is this, where she comes down the hall, I don't ask her for one thing past breakfast, and the whole arrangement renews itself every night without a single person putting a name on it.
Her cold feet are hooked under my shin right now, and she's bursting at the seams to share with me shoreline report in the voice she saves for winning. There is nothing on this earth I'd trade for this right here.
"Listen to this part again." Tallulah shoves her hair off her face and props her head up on her elbow while holding her phone.
"The eastern bank isn't failing simply because the marsh is dying.
The wave energy is stripping away nutrients, killing the marsh, and leaving the bank exposed to erosion.
That's it. Waves keep chewing the toe of the bank, so the whole thing slumps forward, but the platform behind it is still high enough.
If Grandbank accepts this, then this is fixable, and we aren't losing value. "
"That's exactly what you said in February."
"I know I did." She grins without looking up. "But now Rockville Coastal put their license number on it. And Grandbank and my dad will listen to them over me."
She scrolls, her finger finding the elevation line on the screen and traces it like she's touching the actual mud.
"I still can't believe they turned this around in five days.
They just went out there Thursday, and now we have a full twenty-page report that couldn't be more favorable for my argument.
" She talks faster the deeper she gets. "See, right here.
Platform elevation stays above mean high water across the whole reach.
That's the ballgame. You put a reef sill along the toe to knock the wave energy down, you plant behind it, and the bank rebuilds itself, reversing the projected loss if we do nothing. "
I reach over and grab my water cup off the nightstand, take a sip, and set it back.
"Read me the sentence again," I say. "The one you like."
Her whole face changes as she scrolls back up to find it. I love seeing her light up like this.
"‘Site conditions remain favorable for a living-shoreline approach and are fundamentally intact. Oyster-bed restoration remains viable if wave energy can be adequately redirected.’"
She lets the phone drop against her chest. “‘Fundamentally intact.’ That’s a licensed firm saying it in writing.”
She looks up and smiles at me. I would pay good money to see that every morning. I watch her instead of the phone. This is the version of her I'd keep if I could pick one. Up on her elbow, arguing with a document that already agrees with her.
"There's one catch." She waves it off before she even says it. "A sill long enough to cover that whole reach would need a serious amount of cured shell. Way more than I've got. But that's a next-year problem. Or a phase-two problem. It doesn't change that this can work." She shrugs.
I stare at the ceiling for a second. She was right the whole time, and now she's got professionals saying so.
Which means this stops being about whether the bank can be saved and starts being about whether Granger wants quick money or a long-term strategy.
I'm betting their plan makes a hell of a lot more money.
She tosses the phone onto the blanket, the report still glowing, and falls back, stretching.
"I've got class starting at ten, then my meeting tonight." She says the last part lightly, without any difference if she were telling me she had lab or a study group. This makes me happier than I want to admit. I don’t want her feeling weird about her meeting with me.
"Come here," I say. "You're forgetting something."
Her mouth curves. "Am I?"
"I still owe you dessert."
She turns back to me, climbing on top. The phone slides off the blanket, landing with a thud on the hardwood. I get my hand in her hair, and she hums against my mouth.
It's a long, slow kiss, her hips moving against mine before she pulls back. "I really don't want to leave you, but I have to shower and get ready. I'd much prefer round two, but I can't be late again."
"You've got five minutes."
"You cannot do anything useful to me in five minutes."
"That's insulting."
"I wish I could," she says with a smile, then swings her legs off the bed. "Tonight."
"I'm going to hold you to it."
"As you should."
She hunts for her jeans on the floor, tugs them on, grabs a shirt off my chair, one she left there this weekend, and pulls her hair up as she walks out of the room.
By the time I get out of the shower, she's gone. The fridge gives me half a block of cheese, three eggs, and a jar of mustard. I take the cheese to the counter and cut off the end while the phone rattles on the granite.
Coop's face fills the screen, then freezes, then jerks back to life.
"Brother! Do you even go to class anymore?"
"I don't have class until noon, dickhead. Your sun is setting and my day is just getting started."
"I've got no idea what time it is anymore, and I don't care.
" He's outside somewhere, wind chewing up half his words, the sky behind him going gray-blue over water.
"I'm ready to be done with the classroom part.
I've got four more weeks there, then I have a couple of site visits, then I'm on a plane back home.
I still haven't decided if that means Charleston or New Orleans.
Since I let my apartment go, it's Charleston for now.
Unless you want to trade one Maybank for another.
I'm sure you're ready to have your house back to yourself, so I won't do that to you. "
"I guess we're going to have to be adults after graduation. When do you come back stateside, anyway?"
"End of May." He grins so wide it eats his whole face. "Twenty-ninth."
"Nice."
He means getting my house back like it's a gift. The flicker comes, and I let it pass.
"Yeah," I say. "I've gotten fond of having some noise in here, as it turns out."
"I don't know what I'd have done, Rhodes. Leaving her in my apartment alone right after Mama, I know I couldn't have gone. I won't forget what you did for our family. You have no idea."
"You'd have done it for me."
"I would've." He rubs the back of his neck. "How is she, anyway? Everything good?"
I could say it right now. She's more than okay, Coop. She's in my bed most nights, and I'm gone on her. The words are sitting right there.
I run it forward before I open my big mouth.
He tells Granger, Granger tells Banksie, and suddenly Tallulah walks into a room to fight for Oak Moss with three men looking at her differently because she’s sleeping with me.
Like that somehow says a damn thing about whether she knows what she’s doing out there.
It’s bullshit. It shouldn’t touch her credibility at all. But she told me the land comes first, and it’s not my call to trade her timing for my clean conscience.
"She's doing great," I say. "She's fighting for Oak Moss like it's her whole life. That company she found, Rockville Coastal, confirmed that she was right the whole time. You'd be proud."
"God, yeah." His whole body eases. "That's her. That's Mama's kid. I am proud of her and happy the old men are listening."
The twenty-ninth of May is eight weeks out. That's plenty of time for Oak Moss to settle before he comes back, if everything goes her way. Then she and I walk into that kitchen and tell him together. It's her news and her brother, so it comes out of her mouth with me.
I can only hope she gets that answer from Banksie before then.
We talk paella and some woman he met last week for ten more minutes before the wind wins and he's gone.
The bikes tick in front of us, cooling in the long light. Reeves hands me the second beer from the cooler and drops onto the step beside me. He doesn't drink yet. He just sets his forearms on his knees and looks out at the field we've been tearing up for two hours.
"You going to tell me who she is," he says, "or am I supposed to keep guessing?"
I take a pull. "Who what is?"