Two Weeks Later
Vacation. It couldn’t get here soon enough, thought Julie, but looking out the window wouldn’t make Kayla and Aggie arrive any earlier; her two best friends since forever were always late. Notoriously late.
Girl Scouts, soccer camp, junior prom, the vacations they’d been taking together since college—they’d never yet arrived anywhere on time. Even as teachers the two of them were always running into the classroom along with the bell.
Julie had been doing a lot of waiting lately, for school to end, for vacation to begin. For something to happen. She needed this vacation to figure out how to get her life back on track.
She turned from the window and made one last mental sweep of her living room. Lamps unplugged, laptop packed, cell in purse, extra chargers in her suitcase. Printer off. Desk . . . not cleared.
The stack of travel brochures she’d been collecting for the last two years and that she’d meant to recycle the night before still sat there, a painful reminder of all the places she wouldn’t be going during the next school year. She’d put them out in the bin now.
She wouldn’t need them anymore, now that she’d been denied a leave of absence, and it was time she stopped thinking about what might have been.
Recycle bin, she reminded herself.
A prolonged honk jarred Julie back to the here and now.
At last. Vacation had arrived and—she glanced at her watch—only seventeen minutes late, practically early.
She hurried across the room and opened the door just as an electric-blue SUV stopped at the curb and Kayla and Aggie jumped out of the car. They were both in vacation mode, in short shorts and tees. Kayla was beanpole thin with shoulder-length dark hair, today tied back in a ponytail that she’d pulled through the back of a hot-pink baseball cap.
Aggie was unselfconsciously poured into a pair of stretchy short-shorter-shortest cutoffs and a tight T-shirt, proud to sport her hourglass-in-a-post-Twiggy-world figure.
Julie was wearing new shorts from Aritzia and a Freddie Mercury T-shirt. She’d attempted to clip up her curly hair into a twist with tenuous success. She’d even done a pre-vacation sit out in the backyard so she wouldn’t look like rice on the beach. Still, she felt not quite ready for prime time.
Kayla stopped at the back of the SUV and opened the hatch; Aggie made a beeline for the front door.
“Hurry up. Happy hour’s waiting! Is this all your stuff?” She breezed past to pick up Julie’s laptop. “Kayla’s making more space in the trunk. Good luck with that one.” She spotted the brochures that Julie had left on the desk.
“Oh goody, plans for our next vacation.”
“No! They’re not . . .”
Aggie shoved the brochures into Julie’s beach bag just as Julie lunged for them. “Man, this is heavy, what do you have in here?”
“Beach stuff and a few books.”
“Better be juicy romances and not a textbook.”
“My Contemporary Trends class starts in three weeks.”
Aggie rolled her eyes. “Another three points toward your master’s degree. I’m impressed, but I may be moved to toss it out the car window.”
“Very funny. I’m putting it in the trunk.”
Though right now Julie wouldn’t cry if Aggie did toss it. She was the only one of the three working on her master’s degree. Better salary, better job security. Better do it now, her mother had advised. So she had.
She hadn’t told Kayla and Aggie about her request for a leave. At first she didn’t want to share it in case it didn’t happen. Now that it had not happened, she wondered if she should mention it at all. She knew they would commiserate, be disappointed that she didn’t get it and angry that she’d been passed over, but they would also be relieved because they would still be together like always.
Well, she wasn’t going anywhere but back to school. No reason to mention it ever almost happened.
Aggie headed toward the open door. “Chop-chop. Time’s a’wasting.”
“You guys are the ones who were late,” Julie groused.
“We’re always late,” Aggie said cheerfully.
“True, and I love you anyway,” Julie said, following her out the door.
Kayla had even been late to her own wedding, but that was because the limo had had a flat tire on the way to the church. Not her fault. But it had probably been one of those signs that no one ever paid attention to until it was too late.
Seven years later, her two kids spent two weeks each summer with her ex-husband, and Aggie and Julie always planned their vacation accordingly.
Julie stopped to double-lock the front door and rolled her suitcase out to the SUV.
“I think we may need your organizational skills,” Kayla said, staring under the open cargo door.
It was a mess. Julie nudged Kayla aside and began removing the haphazardly balanced bags, cases, coolers, beach umbrellas, and backpacks. Several minutes later, she’d repacked and secured every piece while managing to leave a full view out the back window for the driver.
“Pure genius,” Kayla said, and slammed the hatch.
“All righty, girls, let’s rock ’n’ roll.” Aggie stuck up her hand. They all high-fived and jumped in the car, Aggie riding shotgun and Julie in the back.
They hadn’t gone two blocks before someone’s cell phone rang.
Kayla turned down the radio while they all listened.
“It’s mine,” Julie said, recognizing the “By the Seaside” ringtone she’d downloaded for the summer.
A few seconds of rummaging in her bag and she extracted the phone, looked at the caller ID. “It’s my mother.”
“I thought she was on that nurses’ cruise.”
“She is.” Julie connected. “Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, Louise,” Kayla and Aggie called from the front seat.
“What’s up? Everything okay?”
“No.”
Julie sucked in her breath. “Are you okay?”
Aggie turned around in her seat, looking worried.
“I’m fine. But Lucky’s missing.”
Julie shook her head. Tony Costa. Her mother’s younger brother—by seven minutes. Julie’s sometimes surrogate father. Always entertaining, often irresponsible, never reliable, Uncle “Lucky” was a favorite with her friends. For Julie, the jury was still out.
She relaxed and gave her companions a thumbs-up. “Oh, Mom, you know how he is.”
“I do and that’s why I’m worried. We talk every week without fail.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Maybe he couldn’t get access to your cell while you’re on the ship.”
“Of course he could.”
“Maybe his cell phone died or he doesn’t have reception on his end.” Maybe it fell in the ocean while he was out catching the big one.
“He’s in Delaware.”
“Delaware?” Julie glanced at her friends as a creeping sense of inevitability stole over her. She vaguely remembered that he had settled there . . . somewhere.
“Honey, you remember; he opened up that bar in wherever they have the big waves.”
“In Delaware?”
“Well, they’re biggish. And I’m sure it’s right on your way to Rehoboth.”
“We’re going to Dewey Beach.”
“It’s just a few minutes out of your way. He’s my twin brother. I can tell when something’s wrong.”
Leave it to her mother to pull the twins card when she was determined to have her way.
“Mom.”
“What’s wrong?” Aggie asked.
“Or maybe I can get them to airlift me off the ship . . .”
“Oh, Mom.”
“Put her on speaker,” said Kayla.
“Is that Kayla?”
“Yes. I’m putting you on speaker.”
“Hi, girls, I’m so glad I caught you. You don’t mind taking a little detour, do you?”
“It’s a four-hour trip,” Julie argued from the back seat, but no one paid any attention. She already knew they’d be detouring to check out Lucky’s “retirement” venture. Some surfer bar in some beach town that was not the beach town they were going to.
But Julie could never hold out against her friends or her mother—or even Lucky.
“Not at all,” Kayla said. “We’ve got this covered.”
Julie rolled her eyes heavenward. Her mother was an intelligent woman, hardworking. She’d raised Julie solo and done a good job of it, while also saving enough money to send Julie to college. But all that rationality and self-reliance flew out the window when it came to her twin brother.
Julie tried not to audibly sigh. “Okay, text me his number and address. I’ll phone you tonight.” She ended the call and sank back against the seat.
In the last two weeks, she’d been denied leave, almost quit her job, and in the midst of her existential crisis, they were driving not to their planned vacation but to look for her disappearing uncle. Okay, one more little detour, and her duties would be done. Then ten whole days of lying on the beach. Fun in the sun. Drinks with little umbrellas. Dancing in the moonlight.
A few minutes out of their way. What could possibly go wrong?
Though when her uncle was involved, you never knew. Uncle Lucky. Julie remembered the first day he’d shown up at their door, tanned to a crisp and wearing cutoff jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. With a gigantic nylon duffel bag by his sandaled feet and a surfboard tucked under one arm, he was the strangest creature Julie had ever seen. He looked nothing like his sister, except for his sun-streaked hair that fell well beyond his shoulders.
He’d missed her father’s funeral. He’d been in India or somewhere at a surfing competition. But he was here now, he said, and he was staying to take care of his sister and niece.
Her mother said, “Oh, Tony, we’re so lucky to have you.” And from that moment on, he became Uncle Lucky.
And he did take care of them. Sort of. Whenever he wasn’t riding the waves. When the other parts of his life or friends didn’t get in the way.
Her phone pinged: a text from her mother. “Oh man, listen to this address. Route One and Daly’s Junction.” She keyed it into her map app. “I don’t think it’s even a town. Good thing we have a long drive. It’ll give me time to find it.”
“Haven’t you been to visit him?”
“Nope. He used to move around all the time. I figured he still was. I mean, why would he settle down in Delaware? How challenging can the waves be?”
Kayla frowned at Julie in the rearview mirror. “He is getting older.”
“Fifty-two is not that old. Anyway, sorry we’re losing a beach day for what is most likely a wild-goose chase. We’ll probably find him lying on the beach with an open beer and an uncharged cell phone stuck in the sand.”
“Huh,” Aggie said. “Maybe it’s a sign.”
“Of what?” Julie said. “Annoyance?”
“No, that it’s time you broke radio silence.”
“The phone works both ways,” Julie said defensively.
“Maybe, but you started it.”
“Are we really going to beat this dead horse on our first day of vacation?”
“Oh, come on, Jules. It will be great to see him. We all loved him.”
“Yeah,” added Kayla. “He was like a . . .”
“A father?” Julie finished for her. She’d hoped he would be. He’d been like a father to all her friends, but Julie had wanted a father all her own.
“Well, he was . . . kind of,” Aggie said.
“She’s still bent because he missed her college graduation,” Kayla said.
“Am not. And he missed both my graduations,” Julie reminded them. “And I haven’t thought about that in years. We just fell out of touch.”
“No, you didn’t. He called to apologize. You told him you never wanted to see him again and hung up on him, remember?”
She did remember. She pushed the vague sense of guilt that she’d neglected him firmly back where it belonged. He was a grown man. He could have tried harder.
“I remember he sent you that huge bouquet of pink roses to make up for it,” Kayla said. “We were all so envious.”
“Yeah,” Aggie said. “All I got was dinner at Benny’s Pizzeria because that’s where my brothers wanted to go.”
Roses. There had been two dozen and they filled the entire entryway of their house. But Julie hadn’t wanted flowers. She wanted Lucky to be there with the other fathers, beaming proudly as she took her diploma.
“We really had some fun times with him, didn’t we?” Kayla said. “And he saved our bacon more times than I can count.”
“I’ll say.” Aggie twisted in her seat to see Julie. “Remember when we drank the punch at Susie Connor’s party? We didn’t know it was spiked. We called Uncle Lucky to come get us and he sobered us up before he took us home.”
Julie remembered. He’d even fooled Louise on that one. And saved them all from big trouble.
“Yeah,” said Kayla. “And when we decided to paint our camp cabin and you poured paint all over us.”
“The can fell off the ladder,” Aggie insisted.
“We had green hair for weeks,” Kayla said, laughing.
“I thought Louise was going to make me shave my head,” Julie said. “But he convinced her that everyone would think I had head lice.” She laughed. “I’ll never forget her face when he said that.”
“He taught us the hula.” Aggie wiggled in the front seat.
“And how to skateboard,” Kayla added.
And he’d taught Julie how to twirl a baton. Because for some irrational reason, the serious, studious, did-what-she-was-told Julie decided she wanted more than anything else to be on the middle school twirling team.
She didn’t even tell Kayla and Aggie. They were busy planning which outfits to wear and picking out the cute boys whom they might meet at their new school.
Her mother discouraged the idea—Julie didn’t know how to twirl; she didn’t have a baton. And there were all the reasons she didn’t say: they couldn’t afford the uniform or to send Julie on trips if she did make the squad.
Lucky didn’t argue, but the next day while her mother was at work, he took Julie into the backyard and pulled out a baton he’d bought at the local dime store. It had white and pink streamers on each end.
Every afternoon, they practiced in secret, Lucky imparting what little knowledge he found at the public library and by consulting Mrs. McCleary, an overweight matron who lived down the street and who had been a majorette many decades before.
All summer they practiced. Then school started and the day of tryouts came.
“You’ll be there, Uncle Lucky. Promise.”
“Wouldn’t miss it. You’ll be great. They’re gonna love you.”
The telephone rang. Lucky talked a few minutes. Julie didn’t notice his expression when he came back. She was too busy visualizing herself on the squad.
“Bring me one of those hair things,” he’d said. “We’ll put it up like Mrs. McCleary showed us.”
The afternoon of the tryouts, Julie came to the field where they were being held. All the girls had their hair piled in curls on the tops of their heads and had real batons, none of which had streamers on the ends. And they had cute little skirts and matching tops and were doing all sorts of fancy moves as they practiced.
They all watched Julie take out her baton from her backpack, then exchanged looks with one another. Julie looked down at her best shorts and T-shirt, looked for Lucky, but she couldn’t find him seated with the parents along the side of the field.
One after another the girls’ names were called and they showed what they could do. Some even had music to go with their act.
And still Uncle Lucky didn’t come.
Then it was Julie’s turn. She took her cheap baton out before the judges, took her pose, but without Lucky’s encouragement, her fingers turned to clay. She tried to roll the baton in her fingers but couldn’t get the rhythm; it went round and round limping like a flat tire. She couldn’t make anything work. She turned and the baton hit her in the leg, and she almost dropped it. Everyone was watching; she heard someone snicker. Several girls rolled their eyes.
She couldn’t do it. Nothing was working. Where was Lucky? She threw the baton in the air. Her big trick. It went up but arced away from her; she tried to run after it, to stretch out her arms and catch it, but she couldn’t move. The baton bounced and rolled out of reach.
Murmurs from the parents.
Even the judges looked away. They didn’t ask her to line up with the other girls.
Lucky was wrong. They didn’t love her. She should never have tried out. It was stupid to think she could make the team.
She grabbed her backpack and raced from the field. Ran all the way home and burst into the kitchen.
Her mother was at the sink.
“Good heavens, where have you been? Have you been crying? Why is your face all streaked with dirt?”
Julie ran her arm across her eyes. “He said they would like me. He said he would be there, and he wasn’t. He’s a liar. I hate him.”
“Who? What’s happened?”
And the story came pouring out.
“Well,” her mother said when Julie had gasped and hiccupped to the end. “It’s just as well. Those girls have far more experience than you. It was silly of Lucky to give you false hopes. And besides, they have to practice almost every afternoon. Better to spend your afternoons studying.”
And with that, her mother brushed away the dirt and Julie’s dream in one single swipe of her dish towel.
“He promised. I’ll never believe him ever again.”
“Go upstairs and clean up, things will look better after dinner.”
But Julie didn’t go upstairs; she went out the kitchen door and hurled the hateful baton into the garbage can. Then she ran to the very back corner of the yard and cried until she was afraid she was going to throw up.
She could never show her face in school again. They had laughed at her. And worse, they’d felt sorry for her. Even the grown-ups.
She felt something nudge her knee. She moved her hands away from her face to see the bulb of her cheap baton, its streamers crumpled and broken—and a dirty hand holding it. It was the boy Lucky had brought home a few days before. He’d been the dirtiest boy she’d ever seen.
“Here.” He thrust the baton at her. “Don’t quit. You’re good at it.”
“No, I’m not. I should have never tried. Lucky’s a liar.”
The boy’s fists clenched. “No, he’s not.”
“Oh yeah? He left you, too. Maybe he won’t even come back for you.”
His eyes blazed black; she stepped back from the intensity of his rage, then ran into the house and up the stairs and locked herself in her room.
She said she would never trust Lucky ever again. But she had, over and over. Sometimes he was there, sometimes he disappeared for days or weeks at a time, like he’d gone out and forgotten how to get home. He’d come back, looking tired and saying he was sorry, and she’d believe him, until the next time he let her down.
Missing her college graduation may have been the last straw, but it was missing her baton tryout that hurt the most.
“Hey, Jules,” Kayla said. “Are you sleeping back there?”
“Huh? No,” said Julie, her cheeks flushed with remembered humiliation. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe she’d been asleep for a long time.
They stopped as soon as they crossed the Delaware state line, long enough for Kayla to pass out ham and cheese sandwiches and bottled iced tea that she’d packed in one of the coolers.
When they hit the road again, Julie began scrolling the internet for information about Lucky’s Beach Bar and Grill.
She searched the usual “Ten Best Beach Bars on the Delaware Coast”–type sites. No Lucky’s BB and G.
She went on to the less popular sites. “Eureka. Number twenty on the ‘Other Places’ list. One dollar sign. Why am I not surprised? One review. ‘The shore’s best-kept secret for those who long for the old glory days of surfing.’”
“What about the current glory days of surfing?” Aggie asked. “Do you think there will be any surfers? That could be fun.”
Daly’s Junction turned out to be miles south of Rehoboth and Dewey Beach and a drive through a national park where the land was so narrow you could sometimes see the ocean and the bay merely by turning your head.
Julie was about to tell Kayla to turn around and head back to their motel when the GPS announced they had arrived at their destination: a four-way stop consisting of a convenience store, an empty lot, a gas station, and a boarded-over one-story building with a for lease sign in the window. But no Lucky’s.
“This doesn’t look promising,” Julie said.
“Well, the ocean’s on our left, so if it’s a beach bar . . .” Kayla made the turn onto a two-lane road only to be immediately surrounded by marshland.
“Really not promising,” added Julie.
“It’s an adventure,” Kayla said, sounding skeptical.
“There better be surfers at the end of this road,” Aggie said.
“I just hope there’s a way out,” Julie said. In more ways than one, she added to herself.
A few minutes later, they rounded a bend into a neighborhood of saltbox cottages lined up side by side and arranged in square blocks perpendicular to the main street.
Two blocks later they crossed over a narrow bridge, passed a modest-looking marina, and drove into a downtown area of colorfully painted Victorian storefronts.
“This is more like it,” Aggie said.
“Cute,” Kayla agreed. “Somebody should put up a sign on the highway.”
Even without a sign, it was fairly busy.
Kayla drove slowly, while Aggie and Julie scanned each side of the street for Lucky’s Beach Bar and Grill. There was a post office and Poppy’s Fish Market on the right. On the left, a yellow cottage had been repurposed into a convenience store. They had just passed a red-striped ice-cream stand at the end of the first block when Aggie pointed. “There it is!”
An opening between two buildings with a sign that said beach. And below it a sign for surf’s up. And below that beach bar and grill. The first word had been x-ed out and lucky’s had been painted over it in bright red lettering.
Julie slid a little lower in her seat, though the seat belt kept her from sliding out of sight. Which was what she’d like to do. He probably wouldn’t be there. But if he was, what was she going to say?
Maybe he didn’t even want to see her.
Kayla made the turn through a thicket of beach scrub and onto a wedge of hard-packed parking lot. Beyond the parking lot, a beach of white sand slid into a sparkling blue ocean stretching in both directions to the horizon.
“Wow,” Kayla said. “Talk about uninterrupted landscape.”
“Just look at that view,” Aggie added, her eyes following two surfers on their way to the water. “I’m thinking it doesn’t get much better than this.” She glanced at the other two. “And the beach isn’t bad, either.” She flashed them a cheeky grin.
It was beautiful, thought Julie.
“Now you can understand why they don’t advertise,” Kayla said. “They want to keep this all to themselves.”
Other than several cars parked around a small beach shack at the edge of the sand, the parking lot was mostly empty.
“There it is. Lucky’s Beach Bar and Grill.” Kayla hooked a right and brought the car to a stop next to a rusted-out dune buggy and a battered Jeep.
Julie just stared. Lucky’s BB and G was little better than a beach shack. It was a wide, sprawling wooden structure with a front porch and unpainted steps with a side area sheltered by a tattered canvas tent top that probably served as an outside bar. A wooden sign over the door was so faded that Julie didn’t know how Kayla had picked it out of the general malaise.
“Oh, come on,” Aggie said, opening her door. “It’s not that bad.”
Bad enough, Julie thought. And for a surprising second she felt a stab of compassion for the young surfer who had grown too old to compete and, as far as she knew, had never learned to do anything else. That’s what happens when you don’t prepare for life. Julie wondered if her mother had told Tony the same thing.
Julie had followed her mom’s advice. She was prepared, and she was miserable. And she still hadn’t told her two best friends in the world what she’d almost done. Though to quote her mom, almost didn’t count.
She and Aggie climbed out and joined Kayla, who was standing like Ponce de León searching for the Fountain of Youth.
“It’s really beautiful here.” Kayla let out a long sigh. “Calm.”
“It is,” Julie agreed. Would Kayla have rather gone to someplace quiet instead of a party-scene beach like Dewey? She’d never mentioned that.
Kayla dropped her hands to her sides. “Let’s go find Lucky.”
“Tony,” Julie corrected her. She’d determined long ago not to call Uncle Tony “Lucky” ever again. He’d fallen off her “Lucky” list, and he wasn’t doing much this trip to reestablish himself. He hadn’t been so lucky for her.
Aggie threw out an arm to stop her. “Whoa. Cute surfer dude alert at ten o’clock.”
Julie looked in spite of herself. Aggie’s radar never failed. Not one, but three cute surfers were coming out of a shack as dilapidated as the bar but nearer to the beach. Its wooden sign was painted in bright blue, yellow, and green.
“‘Surf’s Up.’ And so am I.” Aggie gave them a saucy grin. “Maybe we’ll get lucky while we’re looking for Lucky.”
Julie and Kayla rolled their eyes.
“Oh, come on, guys,” Aggie said. “What’s wrong with a little fun while we’re looking for Mr. Right?” Aggie had always loved to party, but lately some of her enthusiasm covered what she really wanted: a house, a husband, and her own kids. But Kayla and Julie went along with the ruse.
“Fine,” Kayla said, “but our Lucky first, that lucky later.” She nudged Julie up the splintered steps to the screen door, where a sign read no shirt, no shoes, no problem. An orange crate of mismatched flip-flops sat beneath it.
“It’s going to be fine,” Aggie said, and pushed Julie through the door.