Starter House(77)
Ella Dane. Ella Dane had been working, she must have built up a little bit of money, and she had paid Lacey’s bill. Lacey tucked the roll back into her purse. “Thanks,” she said. “I guess I forgot.”
The clerk rolled his eyes, visibly thinking it must be nice to be some people, who couldn’t remember spending three hundred dollars. Lacey returned to her car and discovered she had lost all appetite for beef jerky.
Chapter Thirty-four
DR. VLK GAVE LACEY PERMISSION to drive, walk, even swim, anything. The baby was strong and the placenta looked good. “So I can go for a vacation?” Lacey said.
Dr. Vlk gave her that straight blue stare, the look that needed no x-ray or ultrasound wand. “Absolutely,” she said, and she didn’t ask if Lacey’s husband would join her on the trip. Instead, she looked in her iPhone and pulled out an obstetrician in Spinet Cove, “in case anything comes up,” she said. “There’s a good hospital, and the little one’s viable. He’s laying down fat. Getting big and strong.”
“Merritt,” Lacey said. Now that the baby was officially viable, she could say the name she had been keeping secret even from herself, ever since Dr. Vlk told her it was a boy. “That’s his name. Merritt, after my grandpa.”
“Family names are a good thing,” Dr. Vlk agreed, and she didn’t ask if Lacey would be traveling with her mother. So Lacey, with a clean bill of health and a bag of salty snacks, headed south, stopping only at the mall to pick up maternity jeans, a couple of smocks, underwear, and bras. On the way through the food court, she ate a Philly cheesesteak, which was suddenly the one thing in the world she absolutely had to have, it smelled so good as she walked by.
The weather had cooled, and for the first time since May, she didn’t have to use the air conditioner. It felt wonderful to drive with the windows open, her skin softening in the cool, humid breeze. The landscape changed from the Upstate’s pine and hickory woods and wide green fields, towns thickening together as the highway neared Columbia. She got through Columbia quickly, reaching the major confluence of highways at three in the afternoon, well before the afternoon rush. Twenty minutes south of the city, she saw the first palmetto tree.
As the land flattened, cornfields and vegetable fields gave way to cotton, gray with white puffs, and the golden tapestries of safflower fields. The soil had changed from red to brown, and soon, a full seventy miles from the ocean, gray sand spilled along the highway’s shoulders. The trees were shorter, their branches airily spread instead of knotted and dense, and the palmetto palms looked like a child’s drawing of trees, straight trunks and bushy bunches of fronds at the top. When she pulled into a rest stop south of Florence, the birds fighting over the trashcans were herring gulls, not crows.
And there it was, the magic castle of her childhood, the one place Ella Dane would never stop, no matter how much money Lacey had saved from babysitting. “Nothing but trash,” Ella Dane proclaimed, “and no one but trash buys anything there,” which was kind of snooty for a woman who was never more than one bad week away from homelessness.
SEASIDE EMPIRE, said the signs, LARGEST GIFT SHOP IN THE SOUTH! Lacey believed it. The front was all wheelchair ramps and wind chimes, and the Empire scrawled back from the road in a maze of poorly aligned rectangles, as if someone had bought three different houses standing close together, built covered walkways to connect them, and then surrounded the whole mess with deep porches and billboards. “See the Mermaid. Live Sharks. Souvenirs for All. Shelligami.” What was shelligami? Lacey longed to know, but Ella Dane would never take her to Seaside Empire, and neither did Eric.
She’d never told him. They’d been to the beach five times in the years they’d been together, which meant they’d driven past Seaside Empire ten times, and Lacey hadn’t said, “Let’s stop there, it looks like fun.” She wanted to but was ashamed. It was, as Ella Dane said, trashy, like sugar sandwiches. But Lacey could make long-term plans, as much as Eric could. For a moment, she set it all aside—Drew and Bibbits and Ella Dane and the terrible things she and Eric had said to each other—and she let herself believe everything would be fine. Someday, when Merritt was five or six, they would go to the beach—she could see them, herself having lost all the baby weight, Eric driving with sunglasses on, and maybe there was a second baby (a girl) in the back next to Merritt, in the silver Odyssey they would have—and she would say, “Eric, I forgot to pack Merritt’s beach shoes. Let’s stop here.”