MAUREEN
The winding down of summer is sad. The air loses its heaviness, the hint of chill sneaks in at night. People start to get serious, drift away. The sense of fun, the possibility of magic wanes. August puffs up mightily, brutal and steamy, and then explodes, blowing us all away into the fall. I’ve always hated fall. Things dying, withering, growing old.
Maybe it’s Benny’s deadline rapidly approaching. Or maybe it’s just the general mood of Opal Beach, like everyone’s had enough. Even the sun seems tired. Clyde’s fair is petering out, and Jacqueline says they’re all getting restless, releasing the last of the hermit crabs into the ocean, handing the kiddos stuffed monkeys on the sly, even if they don’t win the games. The surf shop is already advertising its summer clearance blowout sale, marking down its bodyboards 60 percent. The beach parties have started to die down, too, and Tammy and I spend a lot of our nights listening to the local late-night love show on the radio and putting together old jigsaw puzzles she found in her mother’s attic.
The latest one is a painting of a mansion on a hill, surrounded by an immaculate garden of lilacs. An estate for a king, unlike anything either of us has ever seen in real life. There are several different patches of lilacs, which makes it hard to find the right pieces. All that purple everywhere. Tammy’s singing along to Linda Ronstadt and munching on popcorn. I stop and watch her for a moment. She’s wearing a bright pink tank top with flamingos on it, concentrating hard on the puzzle while she sings. Happy.
“Tammy?”
She looks up, grins. “Is my singing that bad?”
The nice girl. How did I manage to stumble upon such a nice girl?
“Maureen, really. My voice isn’t that bad, is it?” Tammy’s smirking, waving her hand in front of my face. “Back to Earth?”
“Sorry,” I say, clutching the half heart charm at my neck. “I just—well, thanks.”
“For what?”
“For...well, for being you. And inviting me to live here.”
“My pleasure,” she says, but then she frowns. “You okay, Maureen?”
I nod, but I sense she knows I’m lying. My increasing dread about the money I owe Benny and what he might do if I don’t pay. Everything—even this safe, simple moment—is colored by it like a cancer. I have nightmares about Benny ambushing Tammy on a dark street corner, shoving her into a dark car. I wake up and feel a slicing pain in my chest. I can’t bear it. The person in Opal Beach who’s been the most kind, most generous to me when she had no reason to be? Benny’s not going to touch a hair on her head if I can help it.
I’ve asked around, but I can’t get any leads on other games, not anything beyond a bunch of boys playing for quarters and bragging rights, anyway. I even briefly considered sucking it up and asking for my job back at C&D, but one look at Desmond huffing through the carnival grounds, his hands shoved in his dirty jean shorts, changed my mind quickly.
“I just wanted you to know that I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” I say.
“Well, gee, that sounds like you’re leaving or something.” She reaches over, and I think she’s going to take my hand in hers, but instead she snags a piece of puzzle and presses it into place. Then she sticks out her tongue. “Lighten up, lady. Everything’s going to be just peachy. Pinkie swear it.”
Finally luck shows up long enough to grant me a measly job handing out daily special flyers for one of the crab shacks. It’s not a bad job, and it’s better than scraping seagull shit off the pier benches, but it pays next to nothing and requires so little thought that a surfboard could do it. The manager is a nice, stocky lady with good teeth, and on Mondays she closes the shack so that she and her husband can sing Irish folk songs at a pub in the next town over. She’s taken me under her wing, she thinks, always asking if I’m okay, talking about the benefits of owning your own business, spouting off all the daily vitamins I should use. She promises she’ll bring me on as a food server as soon as one of the summer kids quit, although I know at this point we’ve only really got Labor Day weekend to look forward to, and then her business is just going to keep slowing down as the tourists leave.
It would be too easy to swipe cash from the register at the end of the night—she’s a terrible bookkeeper. But each time I think about it, she says something nice, or pushes through the kitchen doors with her wide hips, whistling “Danny Boy,” and hands me a plastic bag stacked with leftover food to take home—“fill yer fridge”—and I can’t bring myself to pocket even one penny.
It’s Saturday. Six o’clock. I’m nearly done with my shift, but I don’t have it in me to approach more strangers with the buy-one entrée, get-one-free coupons. I feel bad dumping half of my pile into the trash can at the end of the pier. But there’s only so much smiling one girl can do each night. I lean against the railing. Clay told me once that his father wants to build a restaurant here at the edge, but I think it would be a shame to ruin the peaceful quiet.
My feet are killing me—I shouldn’t have worn new sandals with tiny straps. My right ankle’s rubbed raw, and I prop it on one of the benches that the seagulls shit all over.
A few couples stroll, holding hands. I bend over to scratch my ankle again and realize I smell like fried dough. Which Clay would still say is better than fried shrimp. I miss Clay. Thinking of him makes me sad, makes me realize how badly I’ve screwed everything up.
Benny’s going to want his money tomorrow, and I don’t have it. I should just leave, catch a ride to the next town. Start over. But if there’s any chance that I’ve put Tammy in danger, I can’t risk it.
I pull out the Super 8 camera. But there’s nothing much to film out here, so I start walking. It gets hotter as I reach the busier part of the pier. Other girls are passing out dinner flyers, but the crowds have already thinned, most everyone having already made their food choices for the evening. I stand on the side and film a group of boys shopping for surfboards, waiting until 6:30 p.m. so I can head back to the restaurant for my pay.
I like looking through a lens. How glamorous it must be to be a filmmaker, to get to set the world as you think it should be. How powerful it must be to replay life, to rewind and fast-forward, to edit out what you don’t like. Change things. To control your own destiny.
I notice a man taking photographs on the other side of the pier. He’s got a thick brown beard and the kind of tan that lifeguards get. I think I’ve seen him before, at the Opal Beach events, the Fourth of July parade and summer art festivals. I train my camera on him, zoom in, watch him watch a gaggle of bunnies giggling next to a sweets shop. He looks over at me and snaps a photo. In return, I lift my camera and point it his way. I film him until he finally wanders away, his camera down at his side, and he disappears into the night.