When morning came, it took Faye a full minute to remember that her friend had drowned and a hurricane had blown her surviving friends’ lives apart. During that minute, she enjoyed the sunshine through the window and the sound of Joe breathing at her side. She was glad for the roof over her sleeping children and for the unending sound of the waves on the shore of her island. And then she remembered that bad things had happened and that there would always be more coming.
She hauled herself out of bed, trying to ignore the shoulder that hurt all the time. It was time to wake the kids and get ready to go ashore. She moved quietly, so that Joe could sleep a little later while she made breakfast. The kids would complain because Joe’s cooking was sublime and Faye’s was merely adequate, but they’d survive. Her scrambled eggs weren’t that bad.
The kids ate her substandard eggs, then Joe appeared with his long black hair still wet from the shower. They all loaded themselves onto two boats. Amande was in hers because Faye had come home in it the night before, and families who lived on islands needed to choreograph their boats’ movements to avoid stranding somebody. Amande took off for shore without a look back.
Faye, Joe, and Michael piled into Faye’s oyster skiff and followed her. They all headed to the marina where their cars waited. And where Manny waited, too.
Sometimes Faye felt like Manny enjoyed having her family as a captive audience. They saw him way too often to suit her, but they also didn’t have many other options for traveling between home and shore. She’d kept a boat slip at the marina long before he bought it. Before she met Joe, in fact. Over the years, she’d done business with Wally, Liz, Wilma, and now Manny. Based on history, she had every likelihood of outlasting Manny, so there was no point in looking for another place to keep her boat.
Short of finding a place on Alligator Point or, even worse, going around it to get to Panacea, there were no commercial marinas within a reasonable distance. The hurricane had taken the only other reasonable alternative when it destroyed Emma’s dock. Faye and Joe had steadfastly refused to keep a car parked at Emma’s house so that they could save a few bucks on slip rental and parking. It was important to them to pay their own way.
Now that Emma was getting older, Faye had begun to rethink that position. Maybe it would help her to have them around more. Also, Faye was pretty sure that Emma would agree that it wasn’t a good thing for Amande to spend too much time with Manny. These points were moot since Emma’s dock was completely gone, along with her back deck and a big chunk of her roof. The only thing keeping rain off Emma’s concert grand piano was a blue tarp that Joe and Faye had spread over the missing shingles.
Thus, for the foreseeable future, Faye was forced to make pleasant conversation with Manny whenever she took a boat to the mainland, which had been every day since the storm. She had spent a little time feeling sheepish about her dislike for him after he was so kind in the immediate aftermath of Captain Eubank’s death, but twenty-four hours had passed. She’d had time to remember why he bugged her.
And now they were at the marina and Manny was seriously bugging her right at the moment. Here he was, greeting Amande dockside with the fancy coffee she liked. Faye could feel her attitude shift instantly from, “Maybe Manny is okay,” to “This man is going to ruin my daughter’s life.”
Whenever she felt this fear, she opened her mouth and stupid came out. Today, it was, “There was some interesting college mail for you yesterday, Amande. The Ivy League must have gotten a look at your SATs.”
Amande’s withering look said You’re going to start in on me before I’ve even had my coffee?
Faye knew that she’d said the wrong thing, but she also knew that she was right. An island was no place for a young adult like Amande, especially when nobody lived there but her immediate family. Her daughter liked to tell her how much she was learning from her online classes, but a brick-and-mortar college was about more than schooling. Young people needed friends and, yes, they needed love lives. Faye was terrified that Amande would get involved with Manny just because he was single and handy.
Nevertheless, behaving like an overbearing mother was not going to stop that from happening. She really needed to get a grip.
Amande stalked away from her and disappeared into the bar and grill. Joe did his usual conflict-avoidance thing of focusing his entire attention on tying up the boat. Wondering what to do next, Faye hauled herself out of the boat, hoisted a fussy Michael onto her hip, and got him out of his life jacket. Then she noticed that Manny was still standing there. He had a second cup of coffee, and he was holding it out in her direction.
“Sorry, Joe. I’d have brought you one, too, but I only have two hands.” He reached into a pocket, then stopped himself. “I have a B-A-N-A-N-A in here, if it’s okay for Michael to have it.”
Faye had one arm around Michael, but she totally had a free hand for coffee. Feeling like the worst possible hypocrite, she reached for the cup and wished she weren’t so suspicious of the man offering it. “Oh, absolutely. He loves bananas. Thank you! And thanks for this.”
“Look,” he said, “I get it that you’re protective of Amande. I am, too. I’ve known her since she wasn’t much bigger than this guy.”
If he was hoping to establish some kind of pecking order in Amande’s heart by reminding them that he’d met her first, Faye wasn’t going to stand for it.
Maybe Manny saw the thundercloud on her face, but he didn’t let on. He just kept talking. “I want the same things for her that you do. Honest, I do. She’s too smart and too hardworking to sell herself short. Any college would be lucky to get her, and she should absolutely go to one of them and get a degree. Two degrees. Three, maybe, like you. I remember taking her to the library when she was a little kid and watching her pick out books that were almost too big for her to carry. She was born to go to college.”
Faye couldn’t quite tell what the man was trying to say. Yeah, Amande was born to go to college. Any fool could see that, but nothing in his little speech said “I have no romantic interest in your daughter.” And if he did have that interest, then reminding Faye that he’d known Amande since she was a child just made everything ickier.
As she grappled with these thoughts, a stricken look crossed his face. “You think I’m…you think I want…oh no no no. No. When I look at Amande, I still see a little girl. Dirty face. Pigtails and all that jazz. I used to pretend like she was my little girl sometimes.”
Faye tried not to let her emotions show on her face. Jealousy was an ugly word for what she was feeling, but it was accurate.
“Why do you think I sold everything and moved here?” Manny asked. “When she left, there was nothing to distract me from the fact that my life was going nowhere. I looked at the losers all around me, and I knew I needed a new start. When she told me this place was for sale, I decided that it looked like as good a place as any. Business is better here, for sure, and there’s a community college right down the road. Maybe I’m not as smart as Amande, but there’s no reason I couldn’t take some business classes. And maybe some art classes for fun. Who wouldn’t want to paint this?”
He gestured at the sky, the birds, the boats, the watery horizon, everything.
“This is a place where my life can be different. And, yeah, I picked a place where I could see Amande, because I missed her. That’s all. I just missed her. And I wanted to make sure her new family was making her happy. Is any of that a crime?”
Faye didn’t know how to respond as she stood there holding Manny’s gift of coffee, but Joe did. He looked up from his task, stood up straight, and extended a hand to shake Manny’s. “I hope we’re making her happy. We’re trying.”
Faye found that she actually wanted to believe Manny. She had the coffee in one hand and the other arm was wrapped around the child at her side, but she was struggling to shift things around so that she, too, could shake Manny’s hand. Unfortunately, she didn’t manage it before she looked up and saw Amande, who was standing so close that she must have heard Manny defending himself from an accusation of being inappropriately interested in her. The fact that Faye hadn’t actually made that accusation—at least, not out loud—did not matter a bit.
The expression on Faye’s daughter’s face was a painful mix of mortification and blinding anger. She reached out, snatched Michael off his mother’s hip, and sat him on her own.
As she turned on her heel and stalked away, she spoke to nobody but him. “C’mon, Bubba. Thirsty people are out there waiting for me to bring them some water while you go play with Magda, Mike, and Rachel.” And then they had gone too far away for Faye to see them.