Page 83 of Lady and the Butcher
We did the Ripley’s thing after, because my grandparents think it is funny to watch me react to a six-foot man made of bottle caps. We bought a magnet for Grandma’s fridge and a candy I regretted the second it hit my stomach. It was perfect.
In the evening we went to my grandparents’ place for the promised pie. Grandpa cut slices like a surgeon and Grandma swatted his hand as if he could ruin sugar by touching it too much. We ate on the tiny back porch while a tiny lizard watched us from the railing like he had paid for a ticket. Dad told a story about teaching me to drive a stick in the church lot and how I had stalled the car three times and then cried and then refused to leave until I made it halfway up the little hill. I denied the crying and he denied the denial and my grandparents laughed.
It was all beautifully, perfectly normal.
When we got home, Dad kissed my forehead and said to lock up and walked down the hall to his room with the kind of trust that loosens your lungs.
I went out to the small porch and sat with my knees up. Somewhere, a radio tried to find a station and failed. I held myphone and didn’t open the thread. I looked at the sky until my eyes watered and then at the street until it blurred.
I wanted to call Atticus. I wanted to hear his voice and tell him I needed days and also tell him to come here and stand on this porch and breathe this air and see my father in a chair with his eyes closed. I wanted too many opposite things.
What was I going to do?
I didn’t fix any of it. I turned the phone off and took it inside and set it on the dresser, face down. I lay in the small bed with the window cracked and listened to the oak scrape the screen. I thought of the lighthouse again. The steady swing. The way it kept its promise whether anyone looked up or not.
I fell asleep with my hands flat on my ribs, counting the rise and fall like contractions I had coached a thousand times.
In. Out. Again.
When I woke later, in the dark, I knew only two things. I had made it one day without reaching for him. I wanted him, anyway.
27
Dad’s cottage woke up slow—coffee first, then gulls arguing across the street, then the neighbor’s radio trying again and failing to settle on a station.
I lay there listening to the palmetto fronds scrap the screen and tried to pretend my body wasn’t a live wire stretched taut from Charleston to here. The oak outside made a small, old-house shadow on the wall. I watched it jump as a squirrel leapt branch to branch. It was a relief to care about gravity instead of a man. Brief, fragile relief.
I slipped out of bed and jogged the three blocks to the beach before Dad’s kettle boiled. Morning on Anastasia Island had its own church service—pelicans low and deliberate, sandpipers stitching the edge of water to land, runners with salt already drying white on their shirts. The surf made that hush-hush sound like someone kindly shushing a nervous system.
It was like Charleston, yet different. I loved both places.
Halfway down the strand, I clocked two men walking where the sand was firm. Not unusual. Except their shoes were wrong—city soles that slid over coquina like they weren’t built for it. One pretended to be on his phone. The other scanned, not leering,not friendly. The air prickled up the back of my neck the way it did when a labor room changed—when something invisible shifted its weight.
I told myself I was jumpy. I was a woman alone at dawn. Jumpiness was a survival skill.
When I turned around, so did they.
I veered toward the pier where other bodies clustered—fishermen with five-gallon buckets, a kid trying to make his skimboard behave, an old man in a straw hat untangling line. I pretended to stretch by a trash can and got my breath back while my heart raced ahead without me. The men kept going, past me, not even looking. I laughed at myself, and the laugh sounded like a hiccup.
What, was I going to be paranoid now?
Back at the cottage, Dad had coffee in a thermos and two paper bags on the counter.
“Ham biscuits from the corner place,” he said, as if he were reporting vital news. “They were out of hot sauce packets, so I committed to a bottle.”
“You’re a hero,” I said, and kissed his cheek.
We ate on the steps with our feet on the sand-streaked bricks. Grandpa called to say he’d found grapefruit “the size of righteous hearts” and would be over in an hour to force us into a historical trolley tour. Dad said, “We’ll pretend to resist.” I agreed to be kidnapped.
Normal. Good.
I showered, pulled on cutoff shorts, a white tee, sandals. When I came back through the front room, a small rectangle of white had been pushed under the door. Junk mail, I thought, reaching for it.
It wasn’t.
No return address. No stamp. Just my name in block letters.
My stomach dropped so fast my knees went weak.
