Footsteps(11)

Right now, he was having trouble remembering why he’d left it.





“Hey, Junior! Grab another tray of burger meat from the cooler.”





Roused from his reverie by his father’s gruff voice, Carlo said, “Yeah, Pop,” and headed over to one of the several giant coolers in which the prepped meat was stored. Carlo had been right that as soon as their father had been parked in front of the grill on the beach, his mood would improve. Until dark today, he would do nothing but stand at the grill, drinking beer and flipping meat. And he would be happy all the day long. He’d talk and bicker in good nature with whomever came by to do so.





At the moment, he was on his own. Carlo brought the meat over and set it on the folding table set up near the grill. His father nodded and took a drink of his beer. “Thanks, son.”





“You bet. Need anything else?”





His father gave him a look, and Carlo girded himself. “You see all this? What I built here—this is important. This sustains our family. This wasn’t a mistake. It’s not a shame. It’s an honor, to take this on.”





“I know, Pop. You know I’m not ashamed of this. I love you, and this, and the business. But I don’t love the work. I love the work I do. I love the design, not the build. It’s just the other side of the same coin.”





“You love the office, not the job site.”





Well, that wasn’t true, either. He loved the job site, and, until he and Peter had gone out on their own, he’d loathed the office. He’d worked for his father from the age of fourteen until he passed his licensing exam—ten years. And he’d loved almost all of it. But that job was about building someone else’s vision. He wanted to be the one who saw the reality before it was reality.





“Pop. Come on. Cook the burgers. Chronicle my failures as the family scion tonight.”





Carlo Sr. chuckled. “I’m gonna die, you know. And then what?”





His father was a couple of years past sixty and strong as a bull. Built like one, too, with the weathered, barrel-shaped body of a man who’d lived his life working outside, using that body as a tool. “Today? You planning on kicking today, over the grill?”





“Smartass.”





“Good. I’m gonna go intervene before Trey actually inters Elsa in the sand. I think she’d lie there and let him do it, too.” With an affectionate slap on his father’s back, Carlo turned and headed down the beach.





Once he’d freed the dog—and, after some lingering consideration, his brother—from their sand graves, he took Trey and Elsa into Carmen’s cottage for a nap. Elsa was nearly as good a nanny as Natalie was. He could leave them alone in the house and, as long as he stayed within sight and earshot of the cottage, he knew Trey would be safe. So he hosed his kid off in Carmen’s shower and then tucked him in on the daybed in the little spare room. Elsa, still dusty with sand, lay down on the floor, her big body against the daybed.





Carlo ruffled Trey’s damp hair and then Elsa’s sandy ears. “One hour, pal. No less.” He pointed to the old-fashioned Big Ben clock on the side table. “You stay put until the big hand is on the one and the little hand is on the three. Got it?”





“Yes Daddy but I didn’t see a shark yet.” The only punctuation that sentence got was a yawn at the end.





“You’ve got your whole life to see a shark, pal. One hour won’t blow your chance.” He kissed his son’s forehead and, once Trey’s eyes drooped shut, he left the cottage.





Carmen was ambling up from the water as Carlo stepped off her little porch. He hadn’t seen her since they’d first arrived. Even more people-averse than Carlo, she tended to make herself a little scarce on this day—at least until things quieted down around dusk. The crowd had bled over from the public beach onto her private space, and usually she hated that, but on this day, the whole beach was part of the party.





She was wearing a wetsuit and carrying her board. The surf wasn’t good at this point in the day, but Carlo knew she’d just been out a ways, finding some quiet, sitting on her board and watching the party from a peaceful distance. They met at the fire pit, and she laid her board over one of the Adirondack chairs that circled it.





As she worked the suit off, revealing a small, turquoise bikini, she asked, “Did I see you take Trey in?”





“Yeah. If I didn’t get him sleeping now, he’d crash before the bonfire, and I’d never hear the end of that.”