Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
You cross onto Sugarberry the way you always have: over four miles of causeway, the marsh breathing on both sides, no structural reason to believe the bridge will hold.
The first time I made the drive I was twenty, in the back of a dying Camry, certain we were being delivered to an island that harvested organs.
This time I made it in a German SUV with a full tank, labeled packing cubes, and a divorce so fresh it still had casserole on it — and the organ-harvesting theory has, on balance, aged better than the marriage.
The island does not care that you are in crisis.
This is the single most therapeutic thing about it.
I rolled down the main stretch past the bait shop, the general store, and the one blinking traffic light that has presided over nothing since the seventies, and not one thing turned its head to ask how I was holding up.
The dunes did not bring a casserole. The pelicans, flying their grave little formations, declined to witness my collapse.
And then the boardwalk, and the cone.
The Whippy Dippy was the first thing on this island I ever loved, before I knew a thing about it, back when it was a dark, shuttered wreck with a fourteen-foot leaning cone on the roof that looked like it had started to lie down and changed its mind.
It does not look like that now. Last summer, my best friend bought it on a dare and a margarita, then spent a season raising it from the dead.
Now it stands at the end of the boardwalk in fresh paint, a line thirty people deep, the cone still leaning but scrubbed and gleaming white against a sky doing its level best to sell real estate.
People were eating ice cream on every available surface.
A toddler had achieved a state of chocolate I can only describe as total.
It was, in the late gold light, the most alive-looking thing I had seen in months — and I had just driven four hundred miles from a house full of foil dishes to look at it.
Greer found me before I’d gotten the car door shut.
She came down the boardwalk at a dead clip, brown as a field hand, a streak of something chocolate down one forearm, in a T-shirt that said PEARL’S and shorts I would not have been buried in.
She looked, I registered with a complicated lurch, fantastic.
Not rested — Greer looked like she hadn’t slept properly since the last administration.
But lit. Lit from somewhere I did not have an address for.
She took one look at me — the good blazer I’d put on at a gas station outside Brunswick, because I cannot arrive anywhere looking like I’ve been driving, the careful face, the whole apparatus — and she did not tip her head one degree off vertical.
She did not ask how I was, really. She said, “Oh, honey. You wore a blazer to a beach.” Then she hugged me so hard the apparatus cracked straight down the middle, and I stood on a boardwalk in front of thirty strangers and a chocolate toddler and did not cry, because we are not criers, but it was a near thing.
Greer held on through the near thing the way you hold a screen door in a wind.
I should have known I was in trouble the moment she took me behind the counter.
Out front, the Whippy Dippy was a triumph. Behind the counter, it was a crime scene.
I am not being dramatic. I run on order the way other people run on oxygen.
I know operational distress when I smell it.
And the back room of that parlor smelled like a small business being kept alive by one exhausted woman and the sheer force of a teenager’s contempt.
There was a shoebox. The shoebox, Greer explained without a flicker of embarrassment, was the accounting.
There was a scheduling whiteboard so painted-over it had achieved a kind of geology.
There was a supplier situation I understood the shape of in ninety seconds and wished I hadn’t, because the dairy was being ordered by a child off a hunch and the waffle-cone mix was being bought retail, at a markup that made me physically unwell.
I did not say any of this out loud. I had been on the premises eleven minutes, and even I know you do not walk into a woman’s resurrected dream and inform her that her cost of goods is a felony.
I just felt it — the way you feel a thermostat set wrong in someone else’s house.
A low, physical, almost moral discomfort that does not resolve until somebody lets you fix it.
The child in question was seventeen and named Mari, and she ran the place the way a tugboat runs a harbor — small, furious, and load-bearing. She watched me take in her shoebox and her whiteboard with the flat, unimpressed stare of a person calculating exactly how much trouble I intended to be.
“You’re one of the Atlanta ones,” she said.
It was not a question. It was not a welcome.
I told her I was Brooke. She said she knew who I was, that Greer talked, and that the dip station was off-limits to anyone wearing “that kind of watch.” I have never been put more precisely in my place by a person who cannot yet legally vote.
The barefoot man leaning in the doorway of the surf shop next door, watching all this with the proprietary calm of someone who’d been watching it for a year, turned out to be Jonah.
Greer had mentioned him on the phone the way you mention weather you’ve decided to enjoy.
He was barefoot at a place of business, in front of a paying public, and he caught me clocking it and said, “You must be the one with the binder.” I decided on the spot that I approved of him, as I approve a contractor’s bid — provisionally, pending references, with the clear understanding that I would be watching.
Odette, who had worked Pearl’s counter for nineteen years and now worked Greer’s with the serene tyranny of a woman who has outlived every man who ever doubted her, cleared a line of thirty in the time it took me to fully grasp the shoebox.
Tuck — enormous, gentle, permanently apologetic for the space he occupies — carried a hand truck of mix past me and said “ma’am” in a way that aged me a decade.
It was chaos. It was thriving, beloved, profitable-despite-itself chaos.
And every cell in my body that had just been fired from a marriage and a neighborhood stood up at once and said: here. this one. let me.
Dani found me at the rail after close.
She’d been on the island since the spring, a story that belongs to her and that she’ll tell when she’s ready.
The short version, visible to the naked eye, was that the most breakable of the four of us had come down here at a low ebb and quietly turned into a person who builds things.
She had sawdust in her hair. She had forearms now.
She stood beside me with two cones — she’d brought me one without asking, the way you do for someone who’s stopped being able to ask for things.
We watched the cone glow white over the boardwalk.
She did not say one word about Whit, which is how I knew she’d already heard the whole of it.
Down the dark water, a single boat was coming in late against the last of the light, running its own private schedule, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere.
I clocked it as I clock anything behind schedule — with mild personal offense — and then forgot it, which tells you how much I knew about anything.
Greer came out when the lights were down, and the boardwalk had emptied, and she leaned on the rail on my other side. For a minute, the three of us stood there as we’d stood at twenty, broke and certain of nothing, except now one of us owned the cone.
“Okay,” Greer said. “How are you. And I mean it, so don’t do the chin thing.”
Because it was her, in the dark, with the island not taking notes, I told her the truth. “I’m relieved,” I said. “That’s the problem. He left, and I felt the seatbelt click. Eighteen years, and my entire reaction was that I got my Tuesday back. What does that make me?”
Greer was quiet for a moment. “It makes you about a year behind me,” she said. She didn’t explain it. She didn’t have to.
We stood a while. Then, because I cannot help myself and never have been able to, I said, “Your accounting is in a shoebox.”
Greer laughed — the tired, honest laugh of a woman who knows precisely how bad it is.
“I know. I used to restructure divisions, Brooke. A CFO called me a savant once, to my face. And I cannot keep one ice cream stand from drowning me, because the second I sit down to do the books, forty people want a cone, the machine throws a belt, Mari needs a ride, and the whole thing’s held together with —“ she gestured at the dark, the cone, all of it “— that. You can’t put that in a spreadsheet.”
“You could put the rest of it in a spreadsheet,” I said. Lightly. The way you toss a match without once considering the curtains.
Greer looked at me a long moment, and something passed over her face that I was too tired to read and would have done well to. “Don’t tempt me,” she said. But she did not say no.
That night I lay in the narrow bed of the room over Earl’s general store — the one Greer had lived in her first summer, before the island got all the way into her — in a heat the window unit was losing a war with, and I did not think about Whit.
I did not think about the casseroles, or my mother, or the committee that had thanked me for my years of service. I thought about the shoebox.
I thought about the whiteboard, and the waffle-cone mix bought retail like an animal. Somewhere around two in the morning, I gave up, turned on the light, and dug a legal pad out of my bag, where I keep a legal pad the way other women keep a spare lipstick. I started a list.
I told myself it was only to be useful. I told myself I’d help a little — get the books square, leave the place better than I found it, the way you wipe down a kitchen in a rental.
I am, as established, very good at telling myself things.
What I did not write at the top of the page, though it was the truest line on offer, was that for the first time since a man named Whit ruined a perfectly good Tuesday, I had woken up with somewhere to put my hands.