The Best of Me(85)
“Sorry, man,” Paul said when she turned around, horrified. “I was just playing a joke on my brother.”
The woman had many thin bracelets on, and they jangled as she brushed her hand against the back of her head.
“You called her ‘man,’” I said to him after she walked off.
“For real?” he asked.
Amy mimicked him perfectly. “For real?”
Over the phone, my brother, like me, is often mistaken for a woman. As we continued shopping, he told us that his van had recently broken down and that when he called for a tow truck the dispatcher said, “We’ll be right out, sweetie.” He lowered a watermelon into the cart and turned to his daughter. “Maddy’s got a daddy who talks like a lady, but she don’t care, do she?”
Giggling, she punched him in the stomach, and I was struck by how comfortable the two of them are with each other. Our father was a figure of authority, while Paul is more of a playmate.
When we went to the beach as children, on or about the fourth day, our father would say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to buy a cottage down here?” We’d get our hopes up, and then he would bring practical concerns into it. They weren’t petty—buying a house that will eventually get blown away by a hurricane probably isn’t the best way to spend your money—but still we wanted one desperately. I told myself when I was young that one day I would buy a beach house and that it would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me for it. Thus it was that on Wednesday morning, midway through our vacation, Hugh and I contacted a real estate agent named Phyllis, who took us around to look at available properties. On Friday afternoon, we made an offer on an oceanfront cottage not far from the one we were renting, and before sunset our bid was accepted. I made the announcement at the dinner table and got the reaction I had expected.
“Now, wait a minute,” my father said. “You need to think clearly here.”
“I already have,” I told him.
“OK, then, how old is the roof? How many times has it been replaced in the last ten years?”
“When can we move in?” Gretchen asked.
Lisa wanted to know if she could bring her dogs, and Amy asked what the house was named.
“Right now it’s called Fantastic Place,” I told her, “but we’re going to change it.” I used to think the ideal name for a beach house was the Ship Shape. Now, though, I had a better idea. “We’re going to call it the Sea Section.”
My father put down his hamburger. “Oh no, you’re not.”
“But it’s perfect,” I argued. “The name’s supposed to be beachy, and if it’s a pun, all the better.”
I brought up a cottage we’d seen earlier in the day called Dune Our Thing, and my father winced. “How about naming it Tiffany?” he said.
Our silence translated to: Let’s pretend we didn’t hear that.
He picked his hamburger back up. “I think it’s a great idea. The perfect way to pay our respects.”
“If that’s the case we could name it after Mom,” I told him. “Or half after Tiffany and half after Mom. But it’s a house, not a tombstone, and it wouldn’t fit in with the names of the other houses.”
“Aw, baloney,” my father said. “Fitting in—that’s not who we are. That’s not what we’re about.”
Paul interrupted to nominate the Conch Sucker.
Amy’s suggestion had the word “Seaman” in it, and Gretchen’s was even dirtier.
“What’s wrong with the name it already has?” Lisa asked.
“No, no, no,” my father said, forgetting, I think, that this wasn’t his decision. A few days later, after the buyer’s remorse had kicked in, I’d wonder if I hadn’t bought the house as a way of saying, See, it’s just that easy. No hemming and hawing. No asking to look at the septic tank. Rather, you make your family happy and iron out the details later.
The cottage we bought is two stories tall and was built in 1978. It’s on proper stilts and has two rear decks, one above the other, overlooking the ocean. It was rented to vacationers until late September, but Phyllis allowed us to drop by and show it to the family the following morning, after we checked out of the house we’d been staying in. A place always looks different—worse, most often—after you’ve made the commitment to buy it, so while the others raced up and down the stairs, claiming their future bedrooms, I held my nose to a vent and caught a whiff of mildew. The sale included the furniture, so I also made an inventory of the Barcaloungers and massive TVs I would eventually be getting rid of, along with the shell-patterned bedspreads and cushions with anchors on them. “For our beach house, I want to have a train theme,” I announced. “Trains on the curtains, trains on the towels—we’re going to go all out.”
“Oh brother,” my father moaned.
We sketched a plan to return for Thanksgiving, and after saying good-bye to one another, my family splintered into groups and headed off to our respective homes. There’d been a breeze at the beach house, but once we left the island the air grew still. As the heat intensified, so did the general feeling of depression. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the road back to Raleigh took us past Smithfield and a billboard on the outskirts of town that read WELCOME TO KLAN COUNTRY. This time we took a different route, one my brother recommended. Hugh drove, and my father sat beside him. I slumped down in the backseat next to Amy, and every time I raised my head, I’d see the same soybean field or low-slung cinder-block building we’d seemingly passed twenty minutes earlier.