The Beach Trip Nora Was Left Out Of
Nine People And Three Cars
They left Saturday at five in the morning. Curt went with them. He carried his duffel and a cooler of sandwiches I had not made out to my father’s van in the dark, like a man leaving for work. At the door he said, “Sure you don’t want to just come, Cin? We can sort the other thing out down there.”
The other thing. That was what Nora was now.
“Have a safe drive,” I said.
Nine people, three vehicles: my parents in the van, Hal and Glenda in the truck, their son and his wife and daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend in a small silver car. Twelve hundred miles on the strength of a house I had already given back, because my father had decided an app glitch would not stop him from arriving like a man who owned the place. He had told the Elks coffee group. He had told his church. And, I learned later, he had phoned the deacon he has spent twenty years trying to impress, and the deacon’s wife, who winter in a condo in Orange Beach, and invited them to meet him in the lobby of the rental office at three on the first afternoon, to see what a family of means looked like when it arrived.
I knew none of that yet. Nora and I flew out of Omaha that same morning with a small blue suitcase and a bucket with her name on it, rented a car in Pensacola, and drove the last hour with the windows down. Our unit was a small ground-floor place with a screened porch and a path of sea oats to the dunes. On the way, when the water showed through a gap between two condominium towers, a flat bright green line at the edge of the world, she said nothing for a long while. Then:
“It’s bigger than I thought.”
“It’s very big.”
“Is the other side too far to see?”
“I think so.”
“Good,” she said, as she had in March.
On Sunday she found three sand dollars, a piece of green glass she was certain was an emerald, and a whelk with a hole in it. At two-thirty I told her we were walking down to the lobby for ice cream.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I have to see a man about a house,” I said.