The Shore (7 page)

The door rumbles open, and they nod to the nurse at the desk as they go by. The family has been in and out since Grandpa was admitted. Mama and Daddy come when work lets them, and bring Lilly, because the tubes and machines scare her and she won't come with anyone but Mama. The cousins come in shifts and batches, solemn and respectful, and Grandpa likes seeing them though they don't know quite how to talk to him, since they didn't grow up around him. Pierce tries not to come, but his girlfriend Becky does, because Grandpa likes holding her baby and he's one of the few people in the family that doesn't scare her silent. Sally and Mitch drop by almost every afternoon; they've been in and out so many times and the staff seems so apathetic that they doubt anyone would stop them if they walked in buck naked and had a picnic in the lobby.

Their grandfather is awake when they come in, sitting up in the hard railed bed, pale blue blanket tucked up to his armpits, sketching glacially on a thick pad of paper propped against his knees, the hose bringing oxygen to his nose buried under his thick white mustache. Sally avoids touching the IV tube as she wraps her arms around his shoulders and kisses his hard cheekbone: he's shriveled since they brought him here, the rubbery Jell-O, tough meat, watery salads failing to stick to the bones that seem ready to poke through his papery skin. The sound of daytime TV from the other side of the privacy curtain cannot completely drown out the whirs and beeps from the heart monitor. He pats her arm and puts his pencil down; the sketch is of a very confused-looking rooster, mobbed by a clutch of chicks.

“Think your mother will like it?” he asks.

“Grandpa, I've never looked at a wall and thought, ‘That
wall needs more rooster.' It's a good drawing, though.” It is, nearly photorealistic despite his feathery, rough style.

“Your mama has.” His voice is slow. “She thinks everything needs more rooster. Sometimes I wonder if the fairies didn't leave her.” Their mother is the oldest of his three daughters, and they suspect his favorite, for all that he doesn't quite understand her.

He hands the pad to Sally, and she puts it down on his bedside table, next to a plastic pitcher of ice water, a dozen or so cheap “Get well” cards, and the tin of Werther's in powdered sugar that has always sat on the dashboard of his red truck. He's not happy about the cards, says it's silly to send pictures of teddy bears saying, “Get well soon!” when they should say, “Hope you have a pleasant death!” but the nurses refuse to throw them away.

“Hasn't rained since May,” Mitch says. Someone broaches the topic every visit, but not usually this early. He's pulled the chrome-and-plastic visitor's chair out of the corner behind the door and turned it back to front so he can straddle it like a horse.

“And what do you expect me to do about that?” Grandpa whips back. Sally has settled on the edge of his bed, and is shuffling a pack of cards on her leg. Mitch doesn't answer right away.

“Mama's garden is still putting out zucchini too fast for us to eat,” she offers.

“That is the nature of zucchini,” Grandpa says, and accepts the cards that Sally hands him.

“Tomatoes and eggplant too,” Mitch adds.

“Your mama doesn't know what she's capable of.”

“Are you sure you can't teach Pierce?” Sally asks. “It's not like he has any other place to go.”

“Your brother doesn't know his behind from his own head,” Grandpa snaps.

Sally hands Mitch his cards, and gives him a pointed look. This is the general opinion of Pierce, though as far as they can gather Grandpa was the first to hold it. Their older brother teased them, broke their toys, egged them on for years to fight each other or do stupid things like lick frozen metal or touch the electric fence, but he is still their older brother. When he turned eighteen he wandered off with Dad's old white Chevy and the wad of just-in-case money Mom kept in the blue willow teapot in the china hutch and bummed around Virginia for a year or two, always meaning to strike out west but never getting farther than the Blue Ridge Mountains. When he ran out of money and luck he wandered back with his tail between his legs, nothing to show for his fortune-seeking but Kermit the Frog tattooed upside down on his thigh, at least two warrants for his arrest, and a sheepish and silent girlfriend who, a few weeks after their arrival, gave birth to what they have to assume is his baby. Even if he hadn't run off, stolen, dealt drugs and been what Grandpa called “an all-round little pissant,” he wouldn't have been any good. As children, when Mitch and Sally had gone to bed with crying headaches from the weight of the rain in the sky or walked restless up and down the front porch waiting for a storm so far out at sea that no one could see it, he'd run around like nothing was happening. If anything, growing up had further deadened whatever connection he had to the natural world.

“What about Lilly?” Mitch asks.

“You're joking, aren't you?” Grandpa scoffs. “She's eleven years old, and she's yet to show any sign of talent or gift. Enough of this. Start the game before I die of impatience.”

They roll the tray table over so that it hovers above Grandpa's midsection and lay out the deck and discard pile on it, Sally sitting carefully on the bed near his feet, Mitch kneeling on the chair nearer to his head, all guarding their cards. The first round of rummy is played silently, except for the beeps of the machines and the hum of the TV on the other side of the curtain. None of them like the room—it's small and Grandpa says it smells like old people—but they can't take him out in the heat the way they did in the first weeks of his residence at the home: he has too many wires and tubes to drag along. They ignore the heart monitor, the dialysis machine expectant in the corner, the painkiller drip and bundle of tubes and valves taped to his forearm. They ignore the scratch of the blankets, the thick, plastic feel of the mattress and the creak it makes when Grandpa shifts to lay down three aces, the wheezing breath of the man on the other side of the curtain, the click of nurses' heels in the hallway. They are back at home, at the kitchen table in the yellow house where they've grown up and their mother grew up, playing cards to pass the time while the rain pours down the windows, their parents at a church meeting or harvesting potatoes or across the water in Salisbury getting saw blades.

“You're saying it's up to us, aren't you?” Mitch asks as he lays down a run and three sevens, then gathers up the cards to shuffle again.

“No, I'm not saying it,” Grandpa says. “You're smart enough between the two of you to have figured it out for yourselves by now.” Sally blows a raspberry to indicate what she thinks of that.

“Your daddy and I were talking about setting up a little distillery—state of Virginia's selling licenses for that sort of
thing now. They used to make it out here on the sly during Prohibition, used anything that would ferment. We thought a little romance like that could go a long way, make people want to try it. Those white sweet potatoes you two like, they'd probably make vodka that tastes like sugar cookies. A body could make a lot of pocket money out of something like that.”

“Are you trying to bribe us to stay on the Shore?” Mitch asks as he deals.

“Not ‘us,' just one of you,” Grandpa says. “Y'all have always lived on the farm, and y'all always will be allowed to, but I have to deed the place to someone, and I want to deed it to someone that I know is going to be staying.”

They stay until visiting hours end, then reluctantly go down to Sally's car. Mitch has failed the driving test twice, but Sally passed as soon as she was old enough; their father rebuilt an old white Toyota for her to use, but only because she'd gotten all A's in the first three years of high school, and only because he'd promised, and if she ever gets into trouble with it they'll both be right back to walking.

While waiting at the stoplight to cross Route 13, she leans back in the driver's seat and tentatively reaches her mind up into the sky. The air is thick with humidity; she can feel it aching to come down, but instead it continues to build and roll away, to drop over the ocean and the coastal cities, leaving their broad stretch of farmland dry. She can tell that Mitch is doing the same thing.

“Remember that story Grandpa told about the time he went to the mainland?” Mitch asks as the light turns green.

“Did it have a tattooed lady and a bottle of Jameson in it?”

“Nope, after his grandpa died, the one about how he met his wife.”

“He probably told me one time or another. Remember it to me anyway.”

“Well, when he was about as old as we are now—” in his stories Grandpa always seemed to be about as old as they were now—“he found that he'd got pretty sick of dirt farming and dirt farmers and dirt farmers' daughters, so he decided to make out for the mainland and see if things weren't better there,” Mitch begins, in fair imitation of their grandfather's story voice. “His daddy and grandpa had died by then, but he left his ma and brothers and sister behind, figuring between the lot of them things would get tended to. He put the things he couldn't do without in an old mending bag, got in his beat-up pickup truck with the rust hole in the bed, and started heading south. When he got to the southern point he paid a fisherman to take him across the bay in a Carolina skiff.”

“Less detail, more pith, we're almost home,” Sally cuts in as she turns onto the gravel road by Matthew's Market. Miss Ellie is walking along the shoulder of the road swinging bags of groceries, her daughters following after, and Sally veers wide to avoid hitting them. Miss Ellie is thin but broad-shouldered, her kinky hair hanging past her waist, and she raises her hand in greeting as they go by; she and her husband still rent the little house on the edge of the marsh. The younger daughter, Renee, small for her age but maybe five or six, walks in step behind her, both hands clinging to her back pockets. The older daughter, Chloe, almost ten now, jogs along behind them, a grocery bag banging against her leg. Sally never did get to hold them
when they were babies; now that she can cuddle Pierce's kid all she wants she finds that she doesn't crave the warm weight of a baby in the way she did when all she had were dolls.

“He spent two weeks in North Hampton and Virginia Beach, getting drunk with Navy men and getting to know a lot of lonely women, and when he sobered up he heard that a hurricane had nearly wiped the Shore off the face of the map. So he took the loneliest of the lonely women, got her to marry him, and came back in a hurry, and that was the last time he left the Shore.”

Leaves go whipping by, and Sally sits up straighter so she can see the scrubbed white tombstones in the middle of the masses of thick green soybeans. “And the moral of the story is we're stuck here?”

“Either that, or if you get drunk in North Hampton you'll meet your one true love and lose your crop to hurricane,” Mitch says.

“But there was only one of him,” says Sally. “There's two of us. Together we can make things work—”

“Can you see me bringing Brian to live here? It would be a disaster.”

They park by the house, behind a truck with its engine in pieces, and sit for a moment in silence. “Think he was serious about the farm?” she asks.

“And the vodka. Completely. I saw the paperwork on Dad's desk.”

“Sounds like he's trying to bribe us.”

“Sounds like whoever stays behind is going to be set for life.” Mitch hops out and slams the door. “Just not exactly in the way they would choose.”