talking to, and Brigid felt almost surprised when Lance paid and picked up the beer and they left through a door that slid open and parted before them. The clerks looked on as though Brigid and Lance were shoplifters about to be stopped at the exit. But the door just slid magically open and they walked from the bleak fluorescence back into the bawdy sunshine, leaving nothing more than a wake of gossip.
They parked the truck in a pine clearing where the ground beneath them was rusty with fallen needles, the air infused with a rich, heady evergreen. When a breeze swept in from Dredgers’ Cove—the water was right there, just through the branches—the pine scent swirled with the briny smell of the sea. Lance carried the beer, Brigid the sack of food. Lance had forgotten the fishing poles. Brigid followed him down a narrow path toward the beach. It was strange, that line where the forest turned to seashore, as though someone had trucked a load of sand into the woods and thrown up a trompe l’oeil mural of the ocean horizon.
It was eleven or so, the sun high and hot. Brigid, at Lance’s suggestion, set the food down in the pine-shade.
“Should’ve bought ice . . .” Lance started to say, as he set the beer by the food, but they wouldn’t have had any use for ice, as he’d also neglected to bring a cooler.
Brigid walked toward the water. She took the towel from her beach bag and laid it out on the sand. Lance didn’t appear to have brought anything with him. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, work boots, as though it had never dawned on him to wear something different to the beach. He hung back on the periphery of the woods, inspecting things, checking out the place, jumping onto a great chunk of driftwood, kicking a horseshoe crab over onto its back to expose the brown skeletal legs, its underbelly. Another swift soccer kick, a crunching crack, and the shell launched into the air. Lance lost interest then and wandered, picking up bits of sea glass, then tossing them back down, or skipping them out into the bay. He seemed agitated, or nervous, and it made Brigid feel the same. He didn’t even have a towel to sit on, and Brigid wondered how long he’d actually planned on staying. They had food to last them the afternoon, and beer for a lot longer than that, but Brigid feared that maybe she’d misunderstood his intentions for the day. Back at the Lodge, she was the sharp-talker, fearless and crude, the only one who could deal with Lance Squire. But out here she felt like Peg—tentative and vulnerable, and pathetic—and it made her loathe herself a bit. She got up and went for a beer.
She downed half the can as she returned to her towel, then nestled it into the sand where it wouldn’t spill. She lay back, face to the sun, to let on like she couldn’t have cared less what Lance was doing, because that’s what made her feel she had power: not caring. And not thirty seconds later, there he was beside her, plunking himself down, the heels of his boots digging into the sand, arms draped casually over his knees, as if he had all the time in the world to just stare out at that horizon.
All across the beach, mixed among the shells and pebbles and seaweed, there were spent shotgun shells—red or green, big as a man’s thumb, with rusted metal rims—and Lance plucked one up, shook the sand from inside, and then put it to his lips like a reed. “You can whistle ’em,” he said, “like a bottle,” and he blew into it: a hollow, deep, mournful call, like the island ferry’s.
She sat up, reached over, and took the cap from his hand. It was all about proprietorship, she reminded herself. About deciding what was yours and claiming it for yourself. She blew into the gun cap; it left a salty taste on her lips, and she reached for her drink. Such a gorgeous day, she was off from work, there was more than enough beer, and they could stay as long as she liked. And if she decided she wanted to return to the Lodge, then they’d return. It was precisely why the rest of them were such namby-pambies. They didn’t know what they wanted—and if they did, then they’d have to scour up the courage