Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
Iwoke the next morning knowing exactly what I had to do, and I did, instead, the thing I always do, which is to make a plan to do it.
I am not proud of the plan. I want to be clear that even as I built it, some new and recently-installed part of me — installed by a doorframe, a beach towel, a phone call, a birthday cone — stood off to the side and watched me build it with its mouth open.
I sat at the kitchen table at six in the morning, the worst night’s sleep of my adult life behind me, and I opened a clean page, and I wrote, across the top, in my own neat hand, LOCAL RE-ENGAGEMENT — PHASE ONE.
I got as far as bullet three. A loyalty program for island residents, proof of address, a discount tier.
A “Founders’ Wall” with the regulars’ names on it, which I would have laminated.
A standing weekly “Locals’ Hour,” six to seven, comped coffee, which I would have scheduled, which I would have put on a sign — and somewhere around the sign I heard it, heard what I was doing, heard myself trying to win back with a punch card the exact people I had lost with a pricing model, trying to fix the thing plans broke with a better plan, and I put the pen down like it had gone hot in my hand.
There is no phase one for this, the new part of me said, in a voice that sounded a little like Dani and a little like my daughter and mostly, unbearably, like the woman in the lake chair before I forgot her. You cannot shim it. You walk up the steps with empty hands, or you don’t go up at all.
So I drove to the bait shop. I want that on the record too, because it’s the closest I came, that morning, to being a person.
I drove the bridge road in the gray, and I parked across from Hutchins’s shed.
The trucks were there, the porch was full, I could see Odette through the window working her coffee urn, and I sat in my car with my empty hands on the wheel, and I could not make myself get out.
I watched them through the windshield like a documentary about a country I’d been deported from.
Earl had the good chair, the one with the arm that holds a coffee.
Boone was telling a story with his hands, and the Pruetts were already disagreeing with the ending of it, and somebody’s dog went down the porch steps and somebody’s grandchild went after the dog, and a biscuit box made its slow circuit, and the whole warm ordinary machinery of belonging turned over in the gray morning fifty feet from my car and did not have one part in it shaped like me.
I put my hand on the door handle. I did this several times.
I would get the handle halfway and then run, against my will, the projection — the porch going quiet, the faces turning, the long arithmetic of what a person could possibly say after what I’d done — and my hand would come off the handle on its own, the way it comes off a stove.
I sat there for eleven minutes. I counted them, because counting is what I do instead of praying.
And at the end of the eleven minutes, I put the car back in gear and drove away, because it turned out that knowing exactly what you have to do and being able to do it are separated by a distance no plan has ever once closed, and I had spent my whole life on the wrong side of it, and I did not get across that morning.
I just got to see, clearly, how wide it was.
The wreckage, laid out, on the morning I finally looked at it square:
Odette, gone to a shed. Mari, gone to her grandmother’s, her mother’s name back on a board she’d never see again.
The regulars, the whole morning crowd, decamped down the bridge road to a place that still stopped for a birthday.
Dot Mathers, who would not open her door to a milkshake.
Mae Eldridge and a six-year-old in a paper crown.
A parlor that made more money than it ever had and held no one I knew. And Hollis.
Hollis I had done last, and worst, because Hollis was the only one of them who had asked nothing of me and so was the only one I’d had to go out of my way to lose.
I had to drive past the marina to get anywhere, and so I saw him, that morning and the mornings after, and he was — civil.
That was the terrible thing. He lifted a hand from the deck of the Margaret Ann the way the whole polite island lifts a hand to the author of its disappointment.
He had not gone cold. Hollis doesn’t go cold; he just goes back to the unhurried distance he keeps with the whole world, the distance I had been, for a few weeks in July, the single exception to.
I had made myself a stranger to the one man who’d looked straight through my armor and liked what little he could see behind it, and he let me be one, because he had told me from the start he would never chase, and Hollis does not say things he doesn’t mean.
I had everything I had come south with. I had the competence, the numbers, the proof.
I had built, in one summer, on the one island that had ever felt like home, a flawless and profitable monument to the exact reason my marriage had been a very nice hotel.
And I sat in the middle of it, the most efficient woman on the Georgia coast, and understood that I had finally optimized my way into being completely, provably, record-breakingly alone.
I did not know how to fix it. For the first time in my adult life, I had a problem I could see clearly, all the way down, and I did not have a single lever that would move it, because every lever I owned was the thing that had done the damage.
So I did nothing, which for me is the rarest and most expensive thing there is.
I went to work. I made the cones the right shape, the numbers go up, the line move, and I waited, without knowing I was waiting, without knowing what for, for something larger than my own stubbornness to come and take the railing out of my hands.
I had run clean out of plan. I just didn’t have the first idea what a person does in the place where the plan runs out, because I had spent thirty-nine years making very sure I never once arrived there.