“Okay.” She gave him a quick smile, reassuring herself. “I’ll be fine.”
“Course you will.”
She grabbed a backpack from the back seat of her car, and he saw that she hadn’t brought much. The ocean, not tired of playing games, howled up the empty roads and threw sand at their ankles. It lifted her hair around her face so it looked like an aura, and he couldn’t help it, he thought, Poor girl.
He was up early the next day, feeling more excitement than he had in a long time. The storm had left a strange afterglow, a bruised pink against the windows. When he stepped outside, the mountains seemed closer than before, the pine branches covered in white raindrops.
He skirted the fallen trees on the road, seeing how the one and only road crew of Eagle Cove—a man named Joe—was already out, drinking coffee from a thermos while he hurled branches into his flatbed truck. The air was hazy with the scent of fresh pine dust and the memory of Joe’s chain saw.
The market was just opening, and the smell of boiling corn and hotmashed potatoes came out through the open door. The teen girl was sweeping in front.
He found Amanda in the cramped hotel office, pouring a cup of coffee from the pot and sniffing it suspiciously. She dumped in a bunch of the old powdered creamer next to the pot, and then some lumpy sugar from a box.
She turned to see him, and smiled, clearly relieved.
“I was just going to ask how long it might take to clear the roads,” she said, in her soft voice.
“As long as it takes,” the hotel manager said from behind his desk. Charlie was a tall, reed-thin man who was always grinning. No one knew why, and no one asked.
“I meant—”
“Maybe a day. Who knows?” He kept grinning. “Didn’t you hear the warning when you were coming down?”
Larry felt for Amanda in that moment. She looked like she was longing for home, though part of him wondered just how at home she felt anywhere. She had a sense of differentness about her, as if she lived apart from others.
“What’s the first thing you like to do in the morning?” he asked.
“Drink some coffee,” she said.
“Well, we already have a start on that. Let’s go out and sit on the beach. We can solve the problems of the world later.”
They sat on a driftwood log, overlooking the ocean. The sea rose in great dark swells that shattered like ice on the sand. Gulls ran along the shoreline, as if in celebration.
“You don’t seem to get a lot of visitors here,” she said.
“Summer brings a few tourists.”
“What do they do?”
“Scream at each other. Fling seaweed around. Look for shells and watch for the sneaker waves. Most of the time, they end up in the market, complaining about the price of everything without wondering how much it costs a truck to come over the passes. Then they leave.”
She smiled and sipped her coffee.
“You stayed,” she said.
“I came here because... because...” He couldn’t answer.
She was intuitive. “Was it your wife’s idea?”
“Yes.”
She fell silent, sipping. After a bit, she unwrapped a blueberry muffin from the hotel’s free continental breakfast, which had consisted of a few stale pastries and rock-hard bagels. She offered him a piece, and he shook his head. The muffin made crumbs all over her lap, and an inquisitive seagull landed nearby, curious. She threw it a crumb.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Larry told her. “There will be a hundred of them in a few minutes.”
Sure enough, they were soon surrounded by raucous gulls. Amanda picked up a stout stick and chucked it at them, surprising him. Afterward, she examined her fingers.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked her.