Chapter 18
Eighteen
While I morph into a manic mute, Nash and Cap carry on like old childhood pals catching up after too much time apart.
Nash shares his résumé, which I already know parts of from either our time together or what I surmised from the pictures on the postcards he sent.
He spent the first years after he left Fontain as a traveling substitute teacher until he got a job with the city of Boston. There, his career shifted paths and he started working as a tour guide part-time before ending up in Charleston and starting his own company.
He almost convinced me he’d turned over a responsible, root-bearing leaf until he said, “I’m thinking of expanding. See what else is out there.” He took an easy sip of his beer. “Have meetings in Savannah and St. Augustine over the next couple months to see if something sticks.”
It confirmed everything I’ve always known about him: Nash Fletcher is not a man built to stay.
And while I loved him for it before hating him for it, it’s not my heart I’m worried about this time, it’s Bennie’s.
A man who wants to bounce around can’t be two places at once.
You can’t be untethered if you’re tied to a kid.
My mother’s ridiculous demands might be for me to tell him about his daughter, but if I open that door and he hurts her the way he hurt me when he skips off to Savannah, St. Augustine, or whatever he decides next, I’ll never be able to live with myself.
Nash went on and on about how much he loved what he does and how great the people are.
Cap asked him where he got the idea for the name. “A girl I once knew,” was all he said.
I sent an oyster down my gullet and pretended not to hear. Pretended it wasn’t him and me staring at each other at the register of Old Vines when that phrase was hatched the first day we met.
And now here we are, him taking the words I said and making a whole grand business out of them.
I’m just so thrilled he’s living his best life when all I ever wanted for years was for that best life to be me.
Then I remember: I have Jonathan. And once I have this gold, my life will be perfect too. More perfect even.
Everything will be perfect for everyone.
When the conversation shifted to my father’s life story, it might as well have been written in saltwater.
He spent the better part of his life looking for the Anson Burns treasure and working odd jobs to support that mission. His favorite, of course, were his beloved Captain years and the flounder it revolved around.
Perhaps the most interesting was his time spent scraping barnacles off the bottoms of boats: That’s where he lost his leg.
He was underwater cleaning a yacht when the unknowing owner started the engine, chopping his leg right off in the prop.
Even with one leg, he went on to dive in the local rivers for logs and megalodon teeth—Nash had a lot of questions about this. There were a few other jobs, all centered around the water. For better or worse, Rueben Vance is a man of the sea.
After oysters and Bloody Marys and my pride insisting on me using more of my dwindling funds to pay for the entire meal—a whopping $136.
81 that brings me down to $368.48—we’re back at the parking lot across from Thirsty for History.
Which I now notice directly behind my station wagon is where Nash’s truck is parked.
A 1991 red and white Ford F150 that squeezes every particle of oxygen out of me and catapults me right back to the rusty bed of it all those summers ago.
We got married in a courthouse on a random Thursday afternoon, and I surprised him with the truck three days later.
“Surprised she still runs,” I say, taking in all the details. Triangular vent windows, shiny chrome details, and thick stripes of red and white paint down the side. “Thing’s over thirty years old.”
“Runs like a top.” He tosses the divorce papers onto the passenger side. “Where you staying? I have plenty of room at my place.”
Hard pass.
“A hotel.”
I haven’t booked one, but I’m sure there’s something in my new budget of twelve dollars a night nearby.
“Meet at my place tomorrow morning then. Eight?” He pulls a cellphone out of his pocket, clicks around on the screen, then faces it toward me. “That still your number?”
My heart stops. “You have a phone?”
“Had to adapt to the modern world in some ways,” he admits. “I’ll text you the address.”
I look back at the screen. My name and number. I wish he didn’t have it. It would sting less if he still only believed in postal worker-driven communication. If the reason he didn’t call after all these years was because he didn’t call anyone.
“You never called.” I don’t know why I say it—I told him not to call.
But for years I wished he would. Wished my phone would ring from an unknown number, I’d answer, and his voice would say, Let me come back, Rue Conway.
He’d tell me his need for us was stronger than his need to be anywhere else.
That call never came, I moved on—from the wish and him.
The quiet lasts the eight years he’s been gone.
“You never came to get me,” he finally says.
It hangs there, once again, both versions of the story truer than I want to admit.
Even though I didn’t have the postcards, I don’t know what I would have done with them if I had.
I was so hurt and mad he wasn’t with me, raising Bennie, there’s a chance I would have thrown them away.
If I didn’t know we were still married, I might not have done a damn thing, and we’d be sitting in this same parking lot.
“I’ll bring the letter,” Cap pipes in.
I say nothing, getting in my car and gesturing for Cap to do the same.
“Rue,” Nash says through my rolled-down window.
I look at him—really look at him. Really let it sink in that I’m here with the man I loved more than any other.
Who blew in and out of my life like a feather in the Fontain summer wind and turned me into a woman I barely recognized for a single season. “It’s good to see you.”
I hate him for saying it.
“Then sign the papers.”
Instead of letting him respond, I peel out of the parking lot only to find myself in anticlimactic bumper-to-bumper traffic. In my rearview mirror, Nash doesn’t hide how funny he finds that, making me fume the whole way to the marina.
“I like him,” Cap says as he gets out of the car. “See why you got married.”
It’s my turn to grunt.
He slings his tank of oxygen over his shoulder then taps the side of the station wagon with his cane. “See you in the morning, kiddo.”
I barely let him close the door before I hit the gas, once again letting burning rubber serve as my salutation.
I am completely unhinged by this day.
After scouring the internet for a cheap hotel, I end up at one that costs $232.65 for the night, nearly crying as I pay.
In the room, I go straight for a hot bath, grabbing my phone and trying to forget I’m down to $135.83.
There’s a text from Reese I read first. Mom said I’m supposed to give you a break, but we all know you’re a high-strung maniac so I’m sending you an update. Everything is good, Bennie is happy, Mom had a slight headache today and yelled at me for offering her water.
I pause, laughing slightly. I sink a little lower in the tub while my heart sinks a little lower in my chest. Mom has a brain tumor that we’re all trying to fix with water like a dead plant.
She also made me book us a hotel down there for next week.
If we were still real sisters, I’d feel bad for how stressed that must make you, but since we aren’t, I paid for two nights with a smile on my face.
Spoke to the neurologist and we can get Mom into surgery in 10 weeks.
Mid-August. I told him to pencil it in, and we can discuss after you’re done being Jack Sparrow.
Oh. The store’s website is antiquated (funny, right?) so I’m having a guy look it over.
He owes me. Bennie wants me to tell you hi and she’s having too much fun to talk.
Don’t respond, I have meetings the rest of the night.
But seriously, what’s it like to be the dirty secret of the family?
There’s so much to unpack in that text that my head spins until it hurts. Only family can cause such a distinct kind of pain without even being in the same room, city, or state.
I should remind her I don’t know how we’re going to pay for brain surgery in ten weeks, but there’s an unexpected crushing feeling on my chest when I see a timeline in black and white. It’s the right thing to do and it’s terrifying. Brain surgery. For my mother.
Reese plays tough, but I know she feels what I do. Instead of making this harder on either of us, I respond with: Guessing the same way it feels to be the bitch of the family.
She replies with a picture of her middle finger.
I click around the phone until Jonathan’s name is pulled up.
I should call him—I know I should. Other than texting him when I got to the marina, we haven’t spoken.
This day was awful and the last thing I want to hear is his calm, cool, and collected version of an I told you so.
It’s not uncommon for us to go a day or two without talking, especially when we’re busy.
He knows I’m here, I know he’s there. I know he thinks this plan is dumb, and right now it feels like it might be.
I start to set my phone down when it rings from a number I don’t recognize. I answer, but before I can get hello out, the wail of a harmonica blasts through the speaker.
“You forgot to mention how good I’ve gotten on this thing.”
I screw my eyes shut, annoyed, but my exhale comes with a hint of a laugh. “Because you’re somehow worse. What do you want, Nash?”
“I’m calling you,” he says, like it’s the most obvious answer.
I swirl my hand not holding the phone through the soapy water. “And?”
“And you said I never did.” Pause. “I thought maybe that meant you wanted me to.”
Once upon a time . . .
“Ha!” I spin the faucet with my toes. “I also told you to sign the divorce papers. You clearly haven’t learned to give a woman what she wants.”
His laugh trickles through the phone and into my ear. “Guess not.”
The quiet that follows is chock-full of what-ifs in the way it only can between two people who have a history that doesn’t work out.
“Anything else?”
“Nah,” he says. “Just wanted to see what it would be like if you answered, I guess.”
“And?” I should hang up. “What’s it like?”
There’s a silence so long I think he might not answer, and I’m so still there’s not a single ripple on the surface of the water.
“Just like I imagined,” he says. “I’ll send you my address.”
It’s hard to swallow around how those words lodge themselves in my throat. “Okay.”
“See you in the morning, Rue Conway.”
I end the call, toss the phone on a stack of towels, then hold my breath and slip under the water.