The Beach Trip Nora Was Left Out Of

Something Else I Did

I did not cancel the beach for Nora.

At eleven I called Sandpiper Cove’s front office, only to ask whether they had a small place, a room with a pool, for the same dates. A man answered with the slow voice of someone who has stood at a counter in the sun a long time. He said his name was Rod and he was the property manager.

I told him I had just released a five-bedroom reservation and wanted something small for myself and a seven-year-old.

“Ma’am, I saw that come through,” he said. “Let me ask you something. Is anybody going to show up at my desk expecting a house?”

“They believe they are,” I said. “My father is the secondary contact. He thinks the app is glitching. I haven’t told anyone anything.”

I heard a screen door slap behind him. “I’ve done this twenty-two years,” Rod said. “I don’t like a family driving twelve hundred miles on a rumor. When they check in, I have to talk to whoever’s listed as the contact, and I’d rather do it face to face than leave a voicemail they won’t hear until they’re on I-65. I won’t say a word that isn’t the plain facts. That all right with you?”

“That works.”

“I’ve got a two-bedroom in the back building, ground floor, yard backs onto the dunes. Eight-ninety for three nights. Does the little girl like shells?”

“She has a bucket with her name on it.”

“Then she’s gonna be fine,” Rod said.

“Not with us.”

“Okay,” she said, and went to the kitchen and tore off two loops, one for the morning she had missed and one for the morning to come.

Fifteen Calls

For three days nothing happened, and I want you to know how strange that ordinary quiet was. My mother texted a sunscreen link. My father texted Curt, not me, a photograph of a fishing rod. Curt asked on Monday where his swim trunks were, and I said the second drawer, and he said, “Thanks, Cin.” He did not mention the picnic. Neither did I.

On Wednesday my phone began to buzz on the counter. Mom. Mom. Mom. Fifteen missed calls before noon, and four voicemails. In the first, my mother said the app was doing something, the reservation said pending, and Leon said it was my card. By the third her voice had become the one she uses on the county clerk. Then a text in capitals: DID YOU CHANGE THE RESERVATION. A minute later: Cindy Lindgren Aldridge.

I did not tell him I had seen the guest list. I wanted to know what he would do when he thought nobody was watching.