Daniel had the radio in his truck turned to a station I’d never listened to before—an all-oldies station called SURF-101.
I’d never heard this particular song before either, but it was obviously a favorite of his. He sang along with gusto, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, not the least bit shy about singing in front of me—although his voice was awful, loud, off-key, nowhere close to being able to hit any of the high notes.
The whole song was full of sexual innuendo, sixty minutes of teasing and sixty minutes of pleasing, etc. I looked out the window and tried to act like I was somewhere else.
When the song was over, he nodded his head in appreciation.
“Want some free advice?” I asked.
“Depends.”
“Don’t quit your day job,” I said.
“You don’t like Boxcar Willy?” He looked hurt.
“I never heard of Boxcar Willy.”
“Man,” he said. “I guess that means you’re not a beach music fan, huh?”
“You mean, like, the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean? That kind of thing? I guess they’re all right, just not really my generation. Not yours either, come to think of it.”
“I’m not talking about the Beach Boys,” Daniel said. “Although I like their early stuff. No, I mean real beach music, you know, the Drifters, the Tams, the Platters, the Swinging Medallions. Some people call it Carolina beach music, some people call it shag music, ’cause it’s music you can shag to.”
By now we were on Highway 80, crossing the last bridge over Lazaretto Creek before you came onto Tybee Island proper. The water below was calm, and half a dozen shrimp boats were dotted about the surface.
“Oldies,” I said, wrinkling my nose a little. I liked classic rock, myself. “Aren’t you a little young for sixties music?”
“Never,” he said. “My older brother, Richard, he’s the one who turned me onto beach music. He had a hell of a record collection. Still got it too. Vintage vinyl. Beach music is young music, you know, ‘be young, be foolish, be happy.’ That kind of stuff.”
“Well, I like that one,” I said. When was the last time somebody had urged me to be foolish, let alone happy?
Traffic was backed up on the other side of the bridge, a line of cars making the right-hand turn into Chu’s convenience store. It was Monday, but still, the traffic was heavy. Tybee gets like that in the summer, when all of south Georgia shows up for a day at the beach.
“Look at that,” Daniel said, shaking his head and pointing to a billboard on the right side of the street.
“Coming Soon—Exclusive Community of Riverfront Townhomes. From the $200s.”
“You should see those things,” he said, disgust dripping from his voice. “Prefab shoe boxes, crowded right up on the edge of the marsh, all of ’em painted a different color. Really fruity looking.”
“With striped awnings over the front doors, and lots of tacky pseudo-Victorian gingerbread trim,” I added.
“You’ve seen ’em?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you’re looking to buy one of those pieces of crap.”
I laughed. “Not hardly. My ex designed them.” And I pointed back at the sign, at the bottom, where it said: “Designed by Evans & Associates, Architects.”
“Sorry,” Daniel said.
“Don’t be. They are pieces of crap. There was a time when Tal would have laughed at anybody who’d suggest he’d design something like those. But after the divorce, he needed money. Caroline is—I mean—was pretty high maintenance. The firm took one of the end units in trade, instead of a fee. I think he and Caroline planned to make it their little beach love nest. Until…”
I looked away.
“You want to talk about it?” Daniel asked. “I, uh, I’m really not a blabbermouth, despite what I said to you before, about knowing about your divorce and all.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I am just really sick of talking about this right now. No offense. OK?”
“OK.”
He drove down Butler Avenue to the far end, past Tybee City Hall and the new DeSoto Motel, a drab concrete cartoon that came nowhere near the funky grace of the place that had been bulldozed for its successor, and then he made a left onto Delores Street, and another quick left onto Gladys.
Cars were double-parked all along the street, most of the tags from out of town, beachgoers too cheap to feed the meters in the public lots.
Half a block down, he pulled into a yard that was more sand than weeds.
He cut the truck’s engine. “Here it is. The tiltin’ Hilton.”
Daniel had called the house a cottage, but it was, to be accurate, more a shack on steroids. It had probably been painted once, but time had combined with windblown sand and salt to scrape away all but the faintest vestiges of pale blue paint.
Low-slung and single story at the front, with a two-story wing at the back, it was built of cedar shingles, with a tattered screened porch that appeared to run all the way around the house. No two windows in the front were of the same size or configuration, and the porch’s brick underpinnings had a definite sag.
The yard was littered with the markings of a total remodel—rusted-out harvest gold refrigerator, stacks of cheap fiberboard paneling, a pile of moldy gold shag carpeting, and stacks of lumber, new brick, even a small cement mixer.
“That carpet’s the first thing I tore up,” Daniel said, climbing out of the truck. “And right after that, the paneling came out.”
“Good move,” I said. Cheap paneling was the bane of my existence. I had torn a mountain of it out of the Charlton Street house.
“Is it safe to go inside?” I asked. The front door, with three or four jalousies missing, was standing ajar.
“It’s OK,” Daniel said, walking in ahead of me. “My brother Derek was out here this morning. He’s a plumber. He put in a new water heater for me.”
“You’ve got a brother who’s a plumber?” I was pea green with envy. Tal was a whiz with plans and design, but anything like plumbing, and especially wiring, he considered beneath him. I had mastered the basics of electricity, but I was absolutely helpless when it came to plumbing.
Daniel took my question all wrong. Like it was an insult.
“Yeah, I got a brother who’s a plumber. And I’m a cook, and Richard drives a long-haul truck. Is that a problem for you? Do you have a problem with decent, hardworking people who maybe don’t wear a pin-striped suit and call their stockbroker from their cell phone?”
“No,” I said, trying to unscramble things. “Daniel, I didn’t mean it like that.”
He stood in the doorway, his face hard. “Sure sounded like you meant it that way. You know what I think, Eloise Foley? I think you’re a fuckin’ snob. Who thinks maybe you’re just a little bit better than everybody else.”
“No,” I said, my voice weak. “Really.”
“Really what?”
The sun was beating down on my neck, and I could feel my pale freckled skin sizzle, feel the blisters starting to form.
“God,” I moaned. “I didn’t mean that at all. What I meant was, a plumber? You’ve got a brother who can install a hot-water heater? Can I adopt him? Borrow him, is he married?”
Daniel’s eyes crinkled a little bit. The blue was so bright against his dark skin. I found myself wondering if he worked outside a lot. If he took his shirt off, if he was that tan all over. And what would he look like without a shirt? The gangly teenager I remembered was long gone. Daniel was maybe a foot taller than I was, but he was compact, muscular, with arms that looked like they could easily heft a stack of lumber. His threadbare jeans were baggy, except in the seat. And what a sweet seat he had, I thought, remembering BeBe’s praise of Daniel’s behind. God, what was wrong with me?
“Richard would like you,” Daniel was saying. “But he’s big-time married. And Rochelle would tear you a new asshole if you as much as looked at her husband.”
“I won’t. I swear,” I said. “So, are we all right?”
He sighed. “Yeah. You know, this isn’t going like I planned it.”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. “Wait a minute. Oh shit. Oh no. I’m gonna kill BeBe. I swear to God, she is a dead woman. Could you please take me home?”
Daniel was shaking his head, back and forth. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
“A setup,” I said. “A stinking setup. And she swore it was all an accident, us meeting at the sale. Just an innocent coincidence.”
“Hey,” he said, grabbing my arm. “That part of it was just a coincidence.”
I jerked my arm away. “Right. Like I’m going to believe you.”
“I had no idea you were going to be there,” Daniel said, tight-lipped. “First I knew of it was when I ran into BeBe. She was paying for her stuff, and she told me you were there too.”
“And that’s when you set it up.”
“Christ, Weezie,” Daniel pleaded. “It’s hot as hell out here. Will you just come inside and we can talk about this without making a scene for the whole neighborhood?”
“And then you’ll take me home?”
“I’ll call you a cab,” he muttered. “What a pain in the ass you are.”
It was twenty degrees cooler on the porch of the house.
“In here,” he said stiffly, opening the door into the house proper.
The inside looked like a big blank box, but had a smell I adored: sawdust. And fresh nails. And paint. I inhaled deeply and sat down on a pile of two-by-fours.
“Tell me about your plan,” I said.
“I just wanted to show you the house,” he said, pleading. “Maybe fix you some lunch. Let you see I’m not a horny teenager looking to climb your frame. Is that a federal crime?”
“Not if you tell me that’s the plan,” I said.
“I told you I wanted to fix you lunch and show you the house.”
“You told me BeBe had to go to the restaurant because there was an emergency,” I corrected him.
“It was an emergency,” Daniel said. “There was no other way I could get you to give me the time of day. So we fibbed a little. Is that so awful?”
“Whose idea was it to have BeBe take the truck and leave me stranded?”
“Hers,” he admitted. “You know how she is.”
“I know.”
He stared down at his shoes for a while. Tattered, paint-splattered black high-tops. “You want lunch?”
“All right.”
He gave me a hand up and took me on a quick tour of the house. “We tore down most of the interior walls,” he said. “There were about a dozen tiny rooms in here. I’m just gonna have a few. The living and dining room, the kitchen, my bedroom and bath, and in the second floor, at the back, eventually I’ll have a couple guest bedrooms and a bath.”
“Nice floors,” I said, looking down at the stripped floorboards.
“Heart pine,” he said proudly. “I must have pulled about a million carpet tacks out of ’em. I’ve still gotta do a final sand yet.”
The living and dining room consisted of a big rectangle. New windows, with the manufacturer’s label still attached, made up the back wall of the room.
“Can you believe it?” he asked. “This wall was solid, except for one little dinky window. Derek and I put in these windows ourselves. Got ’em at a salvage yard on the Westside, and I bet they still cost more than this whole house cost in sixty-eight when my uncles built the place.”
“Wow,” I said, looking out the windows. Through the screened porch, which was currently minus screens, you could see two huge sand dunes, and in a valley between the dunes, an emerald slice of Atlantic.
“And this,” he said, pointing to the left, toward the entrance into the two-story wing of the house, “is gonna be my favorite spot in the whole house. My kitchen. Or, it will be when it’s done.”
Right now his kitchen seemed to consist of a bronze Hotpoint range sitting beside an old round-shouldered Frigidaire refrigerator. He’d fashioned a counter from an old door laid across a couple of sawhorses, and an unpainted pegboard on a back wall bristled with cooking utensils.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, running my hand over the 1940s fridge.
“It was out in the shed,” he said, liking that I liked it. “My uncle used it to keep crab bait and beer. Still works great too, although I have to defrost the freezer if I ever want to use it for more than a couple trays of ice.”
“It’s adorable,” I said, and he winced.
“Handsome,” I corrected myself. I opened the door, expecting to see typical bachelor fare, beer, maybe some hot dogs. Instead, the thing was packed. Fresh fruit, white wine, vegetables, half a dozen kinds of mustard, neatly labeled plastic containers, and a six-pack of beer, yes, but imported beer.
“You really do like to cook,” I said.
“The lunch part was no joke,” he said. “You like soup?”
“Soup? Isn’t it kind of hot to make soup? I was expecting maybe peanut butter and jelly, or grilled cheese.”
“Sit,” he said, pointing to a battered wooden step stool in the corner. “You want some wine?”
“No thanks,” I said, shuddering at the memory of this morning’s hangover.
“Water, then.” He took a pitcher from the fridge and poured me a glass.
I sat on the stool and watched. BeBe was right. People would pay money to watch Daniel cook.
His movements were quick, economical. He pulled a container from the fridge, opened it, and showed me the shell pink contents.
“Chilled seafood bisque,” he said. “You like seafood, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
In seconds, he’d chopped a handful of herbs and dropped them into the soup, then whisked in some white wine from an open bottle in the fridge.
From a basket under the makeshift countertop he pulled a long loaf of French bread, which he quickly sliced into six-inch segments. From another basket he produced two huge tomatoes, which he cut into thick slices, which were in turn topped with some kind of creamy white cheese that was stored in a water-filled dish in the fridge.
“Buffalo-milk mozzarella,” he told me, seeing my look of interest. “We get it flown in from Atlanta.”
Once he’d built the sandwiches to his liking, he brought out a paper-towel-wrapped packet of herbs and placed a few leaves on top of each sandwich.
“Basil,” he said. “I grew it in pots in town. I’m hoping it’ll do well out here too.” Over the basil he poured a quick slick of olive oil from a half-gallon tin he kept on the countertop.
He ladled soup into two mismatched bowls, which he placed on a tray with the sandwiches and two bottles of the Amstel beer.
“Let’s eat on the porch,” he said.
We sat on upended Sheetrock paste buckets, and I ate the finest picnic I’d ever tasted in my life.
When we were done, I washed the dishes while Daniel unloaded his treasures from the truck.
“Want to go for a swim?” he asked, coming back into the kitchen.
“No suit,” I said apologetically.
“Hmm.” He said, running his hands through his hair.
“Never mind that,” I said. “This has been wonderful, Daniel, but I really need to get home.”
“OK,” he said. “But the ocean will still be here. And the invitation stands.”
“Maybe another time. When I have a bathing suit,” I said.
“Whatever,” he said.