Beach House Memories (6 page)

She felt the warmth of the sun as she pulled heavy brown bags of groceries from the car. It was just like the children to run off when she could use their help, she thought with a wry grin. She needed to get the milk, ice cream, and other frozen foods directly into the fridge. Her arms ached as she carried the bags up the precarious gravel path and struggled with the key. Pushing open the wood door, she was met by a wall of blistering heat and stale air in the closed-up house. She made a beeline to the small kitchen and, with a soft grunt, set the heavy bags down on the square pine table. Then with a prayer, she opened the ancient fridge. She smiled in relief hearing the low hum of electricity and feeling the blast of coolness.

Sweat beaded as she hurried to the large patio doors, unlocked them, and pushed them wide open. Next she went around the room and one by one pried open the stubborn windows. The onshore breezes whistled through the little house, smelling of salt and stirring the curtains.

Despite all the changes in her life—growing up, getting married, having children—nothing ever seemed to change at the beach house. It was always here, waiting for her. Constant, fixed, and reassuring. She slapped the dust from her hands, then spread them far out at her sides in a welcoming, open-fingered embrace.

She was home at last! Home on the Isle of Palms.

In a burst of enthusiasm, Lovie felt the young girl hiding deep within her spring to life. Chores could wait. Unpacking the rest of the car could wait. Cleaning and dusting could wait. At this precious moment in time, her children were out on the beach, playing in the sun. This, she knew, could not wait.

Lovie almost skipped to the linen closet to pull out three thick terry cloth towels. She didn’t usually use her better towels
for the beach, but sometimes one just had to break the rules. She tossed the towels in an empty grocery bag, grabbed her floppy purple hat, and hurried out the door.

Her heels dug deep into the soft sand as she raced along the narrow beach path. This early in the season, the sea oats were low and spring green, not yet the tall gold sentries they’d become as summer waned. She climbed the last dune . . . and suddenly the breadth of the ocean spread out before her. Her heart leaped in her chest. Above, the sky was impossibly blue with white puffs of clouds that matched the fringe of the surf as it rolled to the shore.

Immediately she spotted her children cavorting in the surf like shorebirds—Palmer a shorter, pale-chested sanderling, her dear “peep,” running on thin legs, dodging waves. Cara a sleek, slate-black hooded gull, raucously calling and laughing with joy.

Joy . . . It filled Lovie’s heart as she sprinted toward her children. She paused only to slip out of her shorts and tug her T-shirt from her body to toss on the sand. Her simple black maillot molded to her woman’s body, but she felt ageless as she raced to the waves. With a cry, she leaped into the water, splashing and surprising her children, who whooped in excitement at her arrival. She heard their calls—“Mama! Mama!”—as birdsong before she dove under the oncoming wave. The water was startlingly chilly yet refreshing.

Stroking beneath the water, she felt all the accumulated dust of the city wash away. Lovie kicked her legs, pushed with her arms, and burst to the surface. Gasping for air, tasting salt, she felt the warmth of the sun on her face.

Three

I
t was a glorious morning on the beach. Lovie pedaled her bike along the shoreline with a grin plastered across her face. She spied a long line of pelicans flying low over the ocean. Her daddy used to call them
bombardiers on patrol
.

She was back on turtle patrol. All fall, winter, and spring she was so busy she hardly had a moment to herself, but in the summer she had only one job—the turtles—and it was the one she cared most about.

She rode her bike along the beach early each morning. Her route began at Breach Inlet at the southern end of the island and ended way beyond the pier to where the maritime forest began. Some days she was able to enlist the help of a friend—usually her neighbors Flo Prescott and Kate Baker. She’d rather be consistent with a smaller patch of beach than inconsistent with the whole island.

The island had changed markedly during the ten years she’d been tending turtles, and it would change much more in the next ten. Yet there was a timeless quality to looking out over the ocean’s vastness. For turtle patrol, however, she kept her eye trained for turtle tracks.

Lovie admired the courage of the female loggerhead that, under the cloak of darkness, left her home—the sea—to risk all to lay her nest. She was the brave mother who dragged her three-hundred-plus-pound body in a desperate crawl to the dunes. One by one, she labored to lay more than one hundred eggs, and then, knowing she’d leave her unborn to survive alone, she camouflaged her treasures with thrown sand and returned to the sea.

Lovie had always felt she was the midwife of the nests, taking up for the mother to help the hatchlings survive against the odds. Each dawn, before beachcombers arrived, Lovie sometimes rode her bike, sometimes walked the pristine beach in search of the telltale line of tracks that stretched from the high tide line to the dunes. If she found a nest, she marked it so that she could watch it during the fifty- to sixty-day incubation period and, with luck and God’s grace, be there when the nest hatched to help the hatchlings make it safely into the sea.

No one knew this beach better than Lovie Rutledge. Most people didn’t look at a beach the same way she did. She knew where the winter storms had created scarps in the dunes, where the lights shone brightest at night, where dogs or raccoons might poach eggs, where the kids liked to spoon—all possible problems for the nesting turtles. Other than Flo and Kate, there were precious few people with whom she could share her passion about the turtles. Or who cared. Mostly they just rolled their eyes and smirked whenever she mentioned the turtles.

She reached up to wipe a line of sweat from her brow. But it was hard work, there was no denying it. The air had been cool when she’d stepped out on the beach, but already the sun was a red fireball rising over the ocean. The rising sun was her signal to head home. She veered away from the hard-packed sand of the shoreline to trudge through the softer, dry sand to the beach path. By the time she reached her house and parked her bike
under the porch, sweat streamed down her back. She kicked off her sand-crusted sandals and stepped inside.

“Cara?” she called out. “Palmer?” All was quiet and still.

She set down her backpack and hat and walked down the hall. Cara’s bedroom door was wide open. Peeking in, her weary shoulders slumped. It looked like a bomb had exploded in Cara’s suitcase, jettisoning all her clothes across the floor and bed. Lovie understood that Cara wasn’t consciously messy; she simply didn’t care if her shirt was wrinkled, a hem hung low, or there was a button missing. Lovie thought it was her duty to raise her to be neat and tidy and prepared to raise a family of her own. But sometimes, Lovie found it was easier just to pick up after her than nag.

She crossed the hall and opened Palmer’s door. She was met with the stale smell of a gym. They’d been here only a day, she thought with a sigh. How could it get that bad that quickly? She’d come in later and clean this room, too. Closing the door, she decided to let her son sleep in.

All the windows were wide open, and offshore breezes wafted through the house. Later today she’d roll up her sleeves and dive into the seasonal shake-up and cleaning of the house. It wasn’t mere housework for her. She loved her sweet cottage and the tending of it. In an odd way she couldn’t explain, sweeping and washing the floors, shining the windows, plumping pillows gave her a sense of belonging to the house.

But first, she’d rest a spell and have a nice cup of hot coffee. She hummed a nameless tune in the hopelessly out-of-date kitchen and reached up to choose a delicate pink Haviland cup from the collection of leftover china patterns collected by generations. Choosing a pattern was a game she played each morning, one that was pleasurable as much as comforting. The Haviland china had belonged to her beloved Grandmother Simmons, and remembering her brought a smile.

She leisurely poured out a cup, noticing that several of the boxes of sweet cereal were already missing. She poured in thick cream, then carried it outdoors along with a pad of paper and a pen and settled into one of the four white rocking chairs that faced the ocean. Straight ahead, across the long stretch of dunes covered with gnarled greenery and her beloved primroses, rolled the ocean. She closed her eyes and breathed in the heady scents of strong coffee mingled with pluff mud. The marsh mud was especially odiferous today, she thought, before taking a sip.

Lovie enjoyed this peaceful time of morning. Twiddling the pencil between her fingers, leisurely sipping coffee, she jotted a few notes in her sea turtle journal. Of all her summer rituals, this one was the most important to her. Stratton called her strict observance of the nests obsessive, but she knew better. Her sea turtle records faithfully tracked the nests on her side of the island and were, as far as she knew, the only such recorded documents. When she finished this, she began her to-do list. A short while later she was interrupted on
#9 Shake out the rugs
by a cry of anguish from the kitchen.

“Mama!”

Lovie dropped her pencil, rose, and followed the bellowing to the kitchen. She found Palmer standing in front of the open fridge in a T-shirt and baggy boxers. His face had the chalky color of sleep and his blond hair stuck out in odd angles from his head.

“We’re out of milk,” Palmer said in desperation.

“That’s not possible,” Lovie replied, relieved that it wasn’t blood or fire. “I brought a gallon with us.”

Palmer sighed with exaggeration and opened the fridge wider with one hand while with the other he ushered her closer to take a look for herself.

Lovie stepped forward and peered into the fridge, then
opened the cabinet below the sink. In the garbage she spied the empty carton of milk.

“Who drank it all?” she asked, stunned.

Palmer’s face clouded, and he slammed the fridge door shut, rattling bottles inside. “Cara did. She finished it off with her cereal and didn’t leave a drop for me.”

“Palmer, I’m quite certain she didn’t drink the whole gallon. How much did you drink last night?”

He scowled, and they both knew it was him.

“Mama, I need some milk,” he cried with teen angst, and his voice cracked.

Lovie looked with sympathy at her thirteen-year-old son who was smack in the middle of an awkward growth spurt. His whole body was at odds. The T-shirt was too small under his broadening shoulders, and his skinny legs stuck out from the baggy boxers. He’d read in one of his sports magazines that drinking lots of milk would make him grow bigger and stronger. Palmer was one of the shortest boys in his class, and it galled him that his sister was sprouting up like a weed. Palmer desperately wanted to be
big
—tall and broad so he could compete on the sports teams. So her short, slightly built son was guzzling gallons of milk. It was hard for a mother to witness without a twinge of the heart. Even if a glass of milk did nothing more than grow his confidence, it was a minor inconvenience to keep her fridge full.

“If you mind the house, I’ll run to the Red & White.” She grabbed her straw summer purse and slipped her hat back onto her head. “Do you think you can survive that long?”

“Yes,” he replied, missing the sarcasm.

She chuckled. “So, what are you going to do on your first day?”

He looked at her and his taciturn face sparked with excitement. “I’m heading to McKevlin’s. See who’s there.”

Of course, she thought. McKevlin’s was the local surf shop,
and from the first of summer to the last, Palmer hung out there with the boys or was on the ocean riding the waves. She was glad to see her son had a passion, too.

“Want to come along?”

“Nah,” he replied, grabbing a sweet cereal box and heading back to his room.

Lovie fired up the station wagon and began backing out when she heard Cara’s voice. She looked over her shoulder to see her daughter race toward the car. Like Palmer, Cara was growing fast, too. Not just in height. Growing bangs out was a terrible bother. The thick shock of dark hair was always falling into her eyes. At least they’d grow out fast in the summer, she told herself. This morning the raggedy lock was held firmly against her head with two bobby pins. At least she was wearing her glasses. Poor Cara, she hated them so and cried when she got them, saying how she’d be stuck with the dreadful glasses for life. Cara never forgave her traitorous teacher who had written Lovie a note reporting that Cara was always squinting at the blackboard.

“Mama! Where’re you going?”

“To the Red & White. Want to come along?”

“Sure.” She hopped into the front seat.

“What have you been up to this morning?” Lovie asked.

“Nothin.’ Just walking around.” Cara’s gaze was checking out the street, ever curious.

Lovie noticed the faint pinkening of Cara’s cheeks from the sun. She was glad to have Cara’s company. “We’re out of milk.”