SWNOVELS No Judgments: Chapter 2
A hurricane is a rotating storm system that begins over the ocean and can span hundreds of miles across, at the center of which is a region of low pressure called an eye, from which rain bands spiral outward.
It wasn’t until I was jamming my phone back into the pocket of my jeans that I realized how quiet it had gotten all of a sudden. I couldn’t hear anything except that Drew Hartwell’s conversation had ceased . . . and that his gaze was no longer on the harbor in front of us, but on me.
It was difficult to tell given the slant of the sun—it was shining full on into his face, and I’d left my sunglasses inside—but he appeared to be smiling, that sardonic smile for which Drew Hartwell was well known, and about which Angela had also warned me. I couldn’t tell how much of my conversation he’d overheard.
Oh God, I thought, my heart thumping. Don’t let it have been too much.
“First hurricane?” he asked.
I bristled. “What? No.”
The last thing you wanted was for one of these native islanders to accuse you of being “Fresh Water”—new to the place. They took great joy in informing tourists that “conch”—a shellfish and local delicacy, served fried at the Mermaid in sandwiches, on salads, and on their own, hush-puppy style—was pronounced “konk” and not “konch,” and that there were man-eating sharks along the reef, where tourists loved to snorkel (though the truth was that the sharks ate only other fish and were extremely shy, and there’d been only one reported shark attack in the past fifty years, and that had been when a tourist, showing off, had attacked the shark first).
Getting a sunburn or mosquito bite was a sure sign that you were “Fresh Water.” All native-born Little Bridge Islanders woke up and applied SPF 100 and several layers of mosquito repellant first thing after showering. This was how they managed to avoid both melanoma and the various mosquito-borne illnesses that had been running rampant in South Florida for centuries. Whenever a beet-red, mosquito-stung tourist limped into the café, even my self-absorbed teenage coworker Nevaeh would shake her head and murmur, “Oh, poor thing.”
Which was why I lied to Drew Hartwell.
“I went through Wilhelmina when I, uh, first moved here.”
“Oh, Wilhelmina,” he said, and nodded at the memory of the fierce Category 3 storm that a decade earlier had done so much damage.
I didn’t mention that at the time I’d been sixteen and living in my parents’ vacation rental, and that at the first hint of wind my mother had insisted on evacuating us to an exclusive resort and spa outside of Miami, where we’d ridden through the outer rain bands of the storm in a three-bedroom suite with full power, room service, and our own butler.
Technically, I’d still gone through Hurricane Wilhelmina . . . just not the way Drew Hartwell thought I had.
“So. You going to evacuate?” he asked.
“I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “Though people in my family seem to think I should.” I gestured toward my pocket to indicate my phone.
He nodded again.
“Family,” he muttered, squinting at the horizon. He said it as if it were a dirty word.
It wasn’t a total mystery to me why. Angela’s warning about Drew Hartwell had been echoed by Nevaeh as well, just not for the same reasons. “He’s crazy,” Nevaeh had said.
And Nevaeh (Heaven spelled backward) would know, since Drew Hartwell was her uncle. It had been weeks before I’d learned that the only reason Nevaeh considered her uncle crazy was not because he’d done anything particularly outlandish, but because he’d once had a thriving carpentry career up north, which had included a partnership in a fledgling historic restoration company in “NoDo” (Nevaeh’s grasp of Manhattan real estate was slim).
And yet he’d given it all up in order to move back to the island.
“Who would do something so nuts?” Nevaeh had asked me one morning as we were wrapping forks, knives, and spoons into paper napkins. “Who would leave an amazing life in New York City to come back here?”
I’d known what she was doing—fishing around for my reason for having done exactly that—but I didn’t fall for it. Nevaeh was one of the biggest gossips in the café, which was forgivable, since she was fifteen and only working in the diner for the summer because its owners, Lucy and Ed Hartwell, were her great-aunt and uncle. For reasons that had never been fully explained to me, Nevaeh was living with her aunt and uncle instead of her parents, Drew Hartwell’s sister and a man who was, according to Nevaeh, a famous baseball player who was someday going to come back and take her away from “all of this.”
I’d said only, “Well, I’m sure your uncle Drew had his reasons for leaving the city,” and left it at that.
But I’d been unable to keep from wondering myself, especially since the woman with whom Drew had moved back to Little Bridge from New York had apparently had trouble with the adjustment. Nevaeh had kept a sharp eye on her, envying while at the same time scorning her “big city” ways (“I heard she buys this special pink salt that comes all the way from Europe and costs twenty dollars a bottle. Who needs twenty-dollar European pink salt?” Nevaeh had shaken her head in wonder. “What makes it so much better than plain old white American salt?”).
Drew was building his own house on beachside property left to him by his parents (who’d died under circumstances nearly as mysterious as Nevaeh’s living arrangements . . . or at least, mysterious to me).
It wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate that all was not well between him and Leighanne (the big-city girlfriend) out there on Sandy Point Beach.
“I heard she can’t take the heat,” Nevaeh informed me one morning as we were refilling ketchup bottles. “I mean, literally. Uncle Drew hasn’t got the air-conditioning system installed yet. He says he might not install one at all. He doesn’t like air-conditioning.”
I was appalled. “It was eighty-five degrees last night. I wouldn’t be able to sleep without AC.”
Nevaeh nodded. “It’s more than just that, though. I hear she’s got island fever.”
“Island fever?”
“It’s like claustrophobia. It happens to people who can’t stand living so far from the mainland. They have to get out. Just watch. Leighanne’s gonna dump him and move back to New York. I already warned him, but does he listen to me? Nope.”
A few weeks later, that’s exactly what Leighanne did do—in a dramatic fashion we all got to witness, since she chose to do it at the café, storming in during the height of the breakfast rush and hurling a small object at Drew’s chest as he sat at his usual place at the counter, sipping his coffee and reading the sports page of the local paper.
“Here,” Leighanne had shouted. “You can have your damn keys back. I won’t be needing them anymore.”
Drew had looked confused . . . even more so when the next thing she’d hurled at him was, of all things, a saltshaker. I knew this because I’d been standing beside him holding two orders of huevos rancheros when the object struck him in the chest, then landed at my feet, miraculously unbroken. The shaker was empty, except for a slight tinge of pink at the bottom.
“And you can have that back, too,” Leighanne had shouted. “I don’t want anything of yours. And you’ll never have to worry about putting up with anything of mine again.”
Then she’d turned and stormed from the restaurant, the glossy brown curls beneath her straw cowboy hat bobbing, while Drew only sat there, looking mildly astonished. At least until Nevaeh, now worried that she was losing her glamorous potential aunt-to-be forever, had cried, “Well, don’t just sit there, Uncle Drew. Go after her!”
But Drew had chosen not to—which had probably been for the best, since even if he’d tried, it would have been too late, given the possible case of island fever. As Leighanne sped off, all of us could see that the back of her Mini Cooper was piled high with her belongings, most likely not only including the infamous salt, but also the heart that she’d reclaimed from him.
So I could understand why “Uncle Drew” might feel a little down on family at the moment, especially since Nevaeh had spent the better part of the following week bitterly informing anyone who would listen, “I told him she was going to dump him if he wasn’t more careful. I told him!”
That didn’t give Drew the right, however, to swing his unnervingly blue gaze on me and say what he did next, which was, “Although in your case, your family is right. You should evacuate, Fresh Water.”
I was so stunned, I couldn’t even summon up a suitably stinging retort before he turned and headed coolly back indoors to his breakfast.
Where did he get off, I wondered as I stood there, open-mouthed in the early morning heat, suggesting I couldn’t handle myself in a hurricane? He barely even knew me. After three months of serving breakfast to him nearly every day—Spanish omelet, café con leche, no sugar—this was the longest conversation we’d ever had.
True, he’d always been a generous tipper—30 percent, and cash, even when he’d paid for the meal by credit card.
But still.
Maybe, I told myself as I grasped the handle to the café’s side door, it wasn’t that Drew thought I couldn’t handle a hurricane, but that I’d been there to witness his humiliating breakup. Some men could be sensitive about things like that.
Although I had to admit, he’d never seemed too upset about it. I’d seen at least half a dozen attractive young women walk up to him in the café since and inform him that they had plenty of “salt” for his “shaker” anytime he needed some . . . not that he appeared to have taken any of them up on it, so far as I could tell.
It was tough to keep a secret in a place as small as Little Bridge. Though I’d managed to keep mine.
Back inside, the air felt pleasantly cool and scented with the smell of freshly cooked bacon, as it did every morning.
Something was wrong, however. I sensed it as soon as I walked in. The usual early morning sounds to which I’d grown so accustomed—the scrape of forks against plates, and the low murmur of conversation as folks discussed the headlines in the local paper—were gone.
For a second, I was worried I really had been fired—Ed was as well known for his fiery temper as he was for his ability to bake a truly outstanding key lime pie—but a glance at Angela’s and Nevaeh’s faces showed me this wasn’t the case. Instead of looking at me, everyone’s attention was glued to both of the television sets that hung from the ceiling, one at each end of the breakfast counter. Ed kept one tuned to Fox News, and the other to CNN, both with the sound off and closed captioning on. This seemed to keep all customers happy.
But today, out of deference to the storm, both televisions were tuned to the Weather Channel, with the sound up.
That’s how I was able to hear the meteorologists announce that Hurricane Marilyn was making a turn, and now appeared to be heading straight for Little Bridge Island.