Chapter 9
Chapter
Nine
Cam arrived the way weather arrives, which is to say without an itinerary and slightly ahead of the forecast.
She was supposed to come on Saturday. She came Wednesday, at one in the afternoon, in a cab from the Brunswick airport driven by a man she had already, over the course of forty minutes, convinced to consider leaving his wife’s brother’s roofing company and going out on his own.
Cam does this. Cam cannot buy a coffee without rearranging the barista’s life for the better and leaving no contact information.
She got out of the cab in a linen thing that should have looked absurd after a transatlantic flight, and instead looked like the flight had been fortunate to have her.
She took one look at me on the boardwalk with a clipboard and a lanyard — I had made myself a lanyard — and she started laughing before she’d even paid the man.
“A LANYARD,” she said, by way of hello, across thirty feet of boardwalk.
“Your husband left you nine days ago, and you have laminated yourself a credential. Oh, Brooke. I have missed you.” She reached me and took my face in both hands and looked at me hard — the only person alive who looks at me harder than my mother and arrives at the opposite verdict.
“Okay. Tell me true, and I’ll know if you lie, I always know. Are you wrecked, or are you free?”
Because it was Cam, who has never once in her life wanted me smaller or sadder than I am, I told her the truth I had told exactly one other person. “Free,” I said. “It’s awful. I feel free, and I feel like a monster.”
“FINALLY,” Cam bellowed, to the boardwalk, to the pelicans, to God. “Finally. I have been waiting eighteen years for you to feel free of that beige man.” She kissed my forehead. “You’re not a monster. You’re just late. Now. Who do I have to thank, and who do I have to ruin?”
I told her there was no one to ruin — that it had been almost insultingly civil, that Whit had left me for the Pilates instructor I’d recommended, and that we were dividing the good cars by email.
Cam absorbed this with the gravity of a general receiving intelligence.
“The Pilates girl. You recommended her.” A beat.
“Brooke, that’s not a divorce, that’s a logistics failure.
You outsourced your own replacement.” Which was, of course, precisely the thing I had been thinking and had not let myself say — and hearing it out loud, in Cam’s mouth, in the sun, I laughed for the first time since the chicken.
We did the thing we always do on the first night, which is colonize the end of Tansy’s deck and decline to vacate it.
Tansy, who has been feeding the four of us since we washed up here at twenty, brought a pitcher without being asked and confirmed the rules had not changed: she would cut us off when she felt like it and not one second sooner, and if we sang, she would hose us.
It was the first time all four of us had been in one place since Dani’s bad year, and we all felt it, and none of us said it, which is the whole grammar of a long friendship.
Greer was brown and easy, and kept getting up to check a machine that no longer needed her, out of muscle memory.
Dani was quiet and present and laughed at the right things, more of them than last year.
Cam held court. And I sat over a drink I was nursing because someone had to drive, and felt, for one evening, the specific peace of being a known quantity among people who had known me before I was anybody’s anything.
That was the thing about the three of them, and I felt it that night without yet having words for it: none of them needed a single thing from me.
Cam couldn’t be helped, Dani wouldn’t be, and Greer had her own island now.
There was nothing on that deck for me to fix, arrange, chair, or rescue — and they had kept me anyway, for twenty years, for no reason I could put in a column.
I did not know what to do with being kept for no reason.
It made me want to get up and refill the pitcher, which Tansy had already refilled, which left me sitting in the unbearable luxury of being wanted by people who did not need me, a thing I had been so hungry for so long that I had lost the ability to recognize it as food.
Cam had, since we’d last seen her, sold the second of two companies she’d started and grown bored of, ended things with a Portuguese architect named Jo?o who’d wanted to marry her and build her a house, and decided — over the course, she claimed, of a single long lunch — that houses were a trap and she would spend the next year “finding out what she was for.” She said it lightly, the way Cam says everything, and only I caught the thing underneath it, because it was a cousin of the thing underneath me.
Cam at thirty-nine had outrun every root anyone ever tried to put on her, and she wore it like freedom.
Once or twice that night, when she thought no one was looking, she watched Greer get up to fuss over her machine and Dani turn a joint in her sawdust-callused hands, and something crossed her face that she would have denied to the grave.
But that, like everything with Cam, is a story for another summer.
We talked about all of it and none of it.
Greer told the one about Mari and the health inspector.
Dani told us, shyly, about a cabinet she’d built that a woman in Savannah had paid real money for, and we made her describe the dovetails until she went pink and told us to stop.
We did not talk about Whit, or Jo?o, or the man Dani doesn’t talk about, because the deck rule — established at twenty, never once revised — is that the heavy things wait on the deck until you’re ready to hand them over, and the wit gets the first hour, always, by law.
It lasted until Cam found out about the captain.
She found out as Cam finds out everything, which is by asking a question so direct it goes around your defenses before they can deploy.
“Who’s the boat man,” she said, apropos of nothing, watching me over her glass.
“Dani texted me ‘Brooke met a boat man’ three days ago and I have thought about almost nothing else since.”
“There is no boat man. There is a charter captain I booked for Thursday, who is rude, and old, and runs a business like a hammock?—”
“She’s said his name four times tonight,” Dani offered, to her drink.
“I have not?—”
“Hollis,” said Dani, Greer, and Cam, in chilling unison, and I understood that I had been the subject of a briefing to which I had not been invited.
Cam leaned in, all of her, full wattage.
“Here’s the assignment. Thursday, you go on that boat.
You do not bring the lanyard. You do not manage the sunset.
And you let one single thing happen to you that you did not schedule.
” She tapped the table once, a gavel. “I’m not even asking you to want him.
I’m asking you to find out whether you still know how to want anything at all. ”
I told Cam I would treat the boat as an assignment and the rest of it as an overreach.
But the assignment had already done its work, the way Cam’s do, which is by naming the thing you’ve been refusing to look at and then leaving the room before you can argue.
Whether you still know how to want anything at all.
I genuinely did not know. I had spent twenty years wanting what a person is supposed to want — the house, the marriage, the right schools, the approval of women like my mother — and somewhere in there the machinery of wanting on my own behalf had gone quiet, and I hadn’t noticed, because nobody bills you for a thing you’ve stopped using.
Cam also got me thinking about the parlor, because making people think bigger is Cam’s gift and her weapon, and she does not always know which one she is holding.
Walking back from the Sandbar, half a drink braver than I’d intended to be, I told her what I’d found in the books — the thin margin, the wasted capacity, the second register I could see as plainly as if it were already ringing.
“So do it,” Cam said, like it was the simplest thing on earth, because to Cam it was.
“Greer raised this place from the dead, and now she’s drowning in it.
You’re the one who can make it actually work.
Make it huge, Brooke. Make it a thing. Put a cart at the marina.
Put Pearl’s cones in every cooler from here to Savannah.
” She threw an arm wide at the dark island, the cone glowing white down the boardwalk, the whole sleepy unmonetized beauty of it.
“Why should something this good stay this small?”
It was the most dangerous sentence anyone said to me all summer, and she said it kindly, with love, in a linen dress.
I took it home and slept on it like a woman handed exactly the permission she’d been hunting for.
Why should a thing this good stay this small.
I lay in the dark over Earl’s and let myself answer it — which is the one thing a woman like me should never, ever do — and by morning I had a list.