The Beach Trip Nora Was Left Out Of

The Lobby

The rental office sat in a low cedar-shingled building at the front of the property, with a bench along the window and a freezer case by the door. I bought Nora a strawberry cone and sat her on the bench, in plain view of the front desk. I told myself I had come only to say hello to Rod. That was not entirely true. I had come for the reason a person comes to anything: I wanted to see it.

Rod was what he had sounded like. Sixty, white eyebrows, sunburned neck, the company name stitched over his shirt pocket, working a crossword on the counter. He looked at me and at Nora and nodded once, the way you nod at a neighbor in a hardware store.

“That the girl with the bucket?”

Nora held up the cone in one hand and the whelk in the other. “It’s got a hole in it. That means a snail ate it.”

“Yes ma’am it does,” Rod said, with great respect.

Sunday is changeover day on the Gulf, and the lobby was filling: two families, a retired couple in matching windbreakers, a young man with a baby. At five to three, through the glass door, I saw a white van pull into the lot. I would know that van anywhere. It has a dent in the rear bumper from the time my father backed into a feed truck at the Co-op. It stopped in the fire lane, because my father has never parked in a space he did not have to, and the doors opened.

My father stepped down first, seventy-three, six foot two, in a pressed short-sleeved shirt and a straw hat he must have bought for the occasion. He put his hands on his hips and looked at the water, and you could see the whole speech arrive on his face. Behind him my mother climbed out with her purse over her arm and the careful smile of a woman who has been told to look happy. Hal pulled at the seat of his shorts. Glenda dug for sunglasses. The silver car emptied behind them. Last, from the back of the van, came my husband with the cooler on his hip, laughing at something Hal had said. He looked tired, like a man who had driven two days with a secret in his shirt pocket.

One more car sat in the visitor’s row, a tan sedan, engine ticking. A man in a golf shirt and a woman in a pale blue visor got out and straightened their clothes. I knew them at once, and my stomach did a slow turn. They were the deacon of the church where my father has sat in the third pew for thirty-one years, and his wife, who bakes for every funeral in Maple Grove.

My father waved the way a man waves from a parade float, and the deacon waved back, and the whole group crossed the lot together. I heard my father before he reached the door. “Wait until you see this place. Five bedrooms. Right on the water. The whole family’s here. Just wait.”

The bell above the door jingled.

I did not move. I sat on the bench with my daughter and her cone and watched it arrive.

My father stopped inside the door and took off his hat. He saw the line, the towels, the flip-flops on the corkboard. Then his eyes found the bench, and found me, and his face did a thing I had never seen it do in my life. It went blank, like a television that has lost its signal.

“Cindy. What are you doing here?”

“Getting ice cream with Nora.”

My mother had stopped behind him as if she had hit a pane of glass. It was not guilt on her face, not yet. It was the plain bewilderment of a woman who has made a plan and watched the world decline to cooperate. Curt came in last and halted so abruptly that the cooler banged the door frame. “Cin. How did you.”

“Hello, Curt.”

Nora held up the whelk to him. He did not seem to know what to do with it.

“Well,” my father said, finding himself again, which takes him seconds. He clapped his hands. “Wonderful surprise. Then you can help us check in. It’s all under your name, ha ha.” He turned to the deacon and his wife and spread his arms. “My daughter handles the paperwork. Always has.”