Chapter 3 - The Gathering at Daphne
Thanksgiving morning in Baldwin County was unseasonably warm, thick with that oily, Gulf-coast humidity that makes the Spanish moss hang limp from the live oaks like wet laundry.
I drove my nine-year-old Subaru up the long, curving driveway of Ryan’s house in Daphne. The house was an enormous, sprawling thing of pale stucco and multi-tiered balconies, designed in that Mediterranean-revival style that had infected the Southern coastline over the last fifteen years. It looked like an upscale bank that had wandered off into the woods and decided to breed with a hotel.
In the driveway, the automotive hierarchy was already established.
Ryan’s black Lincoln Navigator, massive and gleaming with tire shine, sat squarely in the center of the three-car turnaround. Beside it sat Dad’s new Lexus sedan, flanked by my sister-in-law Sarah’s white German SUV. My little gray hatchback, coated in a fine patina of highway grit and pine pollen from the drive across the state line, looked like a stray dog that had slipped through the electric gate while nobody was watching.
I sat in the car for a moment, the engine ticking as it cooled.
In my leather overnight bag on the passenger seat was my clean service dress blue uniform, pressed and encased in a garment bag. I was due at Air Station Mobile at 0600 on Friday morning for the start of a forty-eight-hour alert cycle as the senior operations duty officer. The weather off the coast was deteriorating; an unseasonal, rapidly intensifying subtropical low was creeping north out of the Bay of Campeche, pushing a front of heavy squalls and erratic pressure drops toward the Florida Panhandle.
I had my flight suit tucked into the bottom of the bag, too, just in case the alert crews needed a relief pilot.
I pulled my hair back into its usual severe knot at the nape of my neck, checked my face in the rearview mirror—forty-two years old, faint lines etching the corners of my eyes from squinting through salt-scratched Lexan windscreens—and stepped out into the heat.
Inside, the house smelled of sage, browned butter, and expensive scented candles that smelled like cedar and vanilla. The television in the great room was already roaring with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, though no one was watching it.
Fourteen people were scattered across the open-concept living area, their voices rising in that familiar, competitive crescendo that characterizes large families with too much money and insufficient friction.
"Claire!"
Mom was the first to reach me. She smelled of white diamonds and warm sherry. She kissed my cheek, her hands fluttering over my shoulders, adjusting the collar of my cardigan as if I were still twelve years old and had forgotten to button my blouse before church.
"You look thin, darling. Are you eating down there in Mobile? You look so pale. Look at your brother—he’s brown as a berry."
Ryan stood near the ten-foot kitchen island, holding a long-stemmed glass of pale beer. He wore a crisp linen shirt with the sleeves rolled precisely twice, showing off his forearms and a new gold chronograph that was even thicker than the one he’d had in Orange Beach.
"Hey, Commander!" Ryan bellowed, grinning as he crossed the floor. He used the title not out of respect, but as a nickname, like calling a tall man "Tiny." "Look who made it out of the cubicle! Did they let you off the leash, or did you have to file a three-part requisition for the holiday?"
"Just two parts, Ryan," I said, smiling back. "The third was for the turkey."
The room chuckled. It was our script. We had rehearsed it for twenty years.
Dad looked up from the leather sectional where he sat with Uncle Terry and cousin Brad. "Sit down, Claire. Ryan was just telling us about the new slip expansion at the marina. Two point four million. Fully bonded."
"Private equity," Ryan said, waving a hand dismissively as if the money were merely lint he’d pulled from his trouser pockets. "The banks are crawling all over us. Everybody wants a piece of the coast right now. If you’re not building forty-foot slips, you’re just leaving money on the dock."
I looked across the expanse of polished travertine tile. In the corner, near the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out toward the gray sheen of the bay, sat Walter.
He had his own chair—a wingback armchair that Sarah had clearly moved into the periphery to prevent it from clashing with the white linen sectionals. He looked frail. His hands, resting on the carved wooden arms, were spotted with purple senile purpura, the skin thin as parchment. A light wool blanket was tucked around his knees, despite the seventy-degree temperature in the house.
I walked past Ryan, past the platters of deviled eggs and pecans, and knelt beside the old man’s knee.
"Grandpa," I said softly.
His eyes, which had been fixed on the gray line of the horizon beyond the glass, shifted down to me. The cloudiness that had begun to settle over his irises seemed to clear for a fraction of a second, like the sun burning through coastal fog.
"Claire," he said. His voice was thick, slightly slurred by the mini-stroke he’d suffered back in August, but the architecture of it was still there. "Water’s dirty out there today."
"Yes, sir," I said, leaning my cheek against his cold knuckles. "Barometer’s dropping. Twenty-nine eighty-two and falling."
"Southeast wind?"
"Southeast, twenty gusting twenty-eight. Going around to the southwest by midnight."
Walter nodded slowly. His hand didn't move, but his index finger tapped twice against the wool blanket.
*There.*
"Don't get him started on the weather, Claire," Sarah called out from the kitchen, where she was supervising two women in black aprons who were carving the turkeys. "He’s been staring out that window since eight o'clock. Walter, honey, do you want some cider? You need to drink your fluids."
Grandpa Walter didn't look at her. He didn't look back at the room. He just kept his eyes on me, his breathing shallow and rhythmic.
"They don't hear it," he whispered.
May you like
"No," I said. "They don't."
***
