Starter House(78)
Seaside Empire, hers at last.
She pulled into the gravel lot. Instead of herself and Eric, Merritt and the little unknown in the silver Odyssey, it was just Lacey and Merritt kicking inside her. “Knock it off, kiddo,” she said, and the baby did something sharp and awful. She gasped and clutched the car door. What was going on? Had he shoved a foot into her liver?
Eventually, he curled into a twitching ball. Lacey walked in, and Seaside Empire was all she had dreamed, and more. The clothes, shoes, towels, and Boogie Boards she ignored; but the shells! Tubs of loose shells, shell nightlights, shell jewelry, shell-encrusted pens, shell sculptures of everything from mice to the White House.
Even shelligami did not disappoint. It was origami folded out of thin aluminum and then encrusted with tiny cowries and snails. The mermaid was deliciously gruesome, a stuffed manatee shaved to the waist and wearing a black Halloween wig. The live sharks were baby dogfish; there were also dead sharks, eight inches long, formaldehyded in glass bottles. She fondled the mineral samples and the fossils. There were shark-tooth earrings; did she need shark-tooth earrings? Well, who didn’t? Seaside Empire with seventeen hundred dollars in her pocket: childhood’s wildest dream come true. Shark teeth. Giant fossil shark teeth! Lacey found the largest intact specimen.
“Megalodon,” she said to herself. The fair-haired child beside her glanced up, startled at her voice, and she stumbled back. “No, no, no,” she said, “it’s not fair, no!”
“Ma’am? Are you okay?”
Lacey’s heart settled. If she was going to have a panic attack every time she saw a blond child, she might as well go home now. This boy was older than Drew, taller, fatter, and he wore glasses with plastic tortoiseshell frames. He was looking at her with an open, adult-friendly expression, and he had chosen a baby hammerhead shark in formaldehyde from the shelf. Pure nerd. Teachers weren’t supposed to say it, but for some children, no other name would do.
Lacey loved her nerds almost as much as she loved her noisy boys, and she yearned to bring them together, for the benefit of both. Last year, she’d experimented with selecting the leaders of both camps and giving them the joint responsibility of caring for the classroom’s most interesting pet. Alpha nerd and noisy boy bonded over feeding crickets to Darth Venomous, the emperor scorpion. Alone of the fourth-grade classrooms, hers had no bullying.
“Ma’am?” the boy said.
“Sorry, it’s nothing.” She hefted the fossil tooth in her hand and smiled. “Megalodon. It’s my favorite extinct animal.”
“Mine’s Andrewsarchus.”
Lacey felt a chill at the name, but she controlled herself. Andrewsarchus was a real animal. She, like this sweet boy, had watched the Ancient Killers series last year on National Geographic. “That’s the carnivorous sheep thing, am I right?” she said.
He smiled. “The biggest mammal land predator of all time!” he said. “Giant killer sheep! Do you think my mom will let me buy this shark?”
“Probably not.” Lacey wasn’t surprised that he asked her this. Children had always been drawn to her, confided in her. That was why she’d gone into teaching in the first place. “But maybe she’d get you this.” She gave him the megalodon tooth. “It’s the best one.”
He turned the tooth, rubbing his thumb along the striations. She missed this so much, the conversations with children in all their variety. Eric had thought he was giving her a wonderful gift, letting her stay home while he worked, till the baby starts school, he said, which she interpreted to mean preschool at age two although she knew he meant kindergarten. Five years out of the classroom. If they had another child or two, it could be six, seven, ten years. If she’d had a job, two dozen children to handle every day, she would never have accepted Drew: he had used her solitude against her; he had peeled her like an orange.
She reached the sea at sunset. Spinet Cove was a one-road beach town, essentially a row of two-story motels with a scrabble of low square houses inland. La Hacienda was one of the beach-side motels and consequently had new bedspreads and an electronic marquee, advertising Continental Breakfast, Cable in Every Room, and Wi-Fi, all FREE. On the other side of the street, where the guests had to walk across two lanes of traffic to get to the beach, the motels weren’t nearly so spiffy. A couple of them were closed, and the motel directly opposite La Hacienda had no roof. Its old-style movable-letter sign read PARDON OUR MESS WHILE WE REMODEL, which would have been more convincing had the building not been overgrown with kudzu.
La Hacienda was all Spanish arches, pink stucco, red tiled roof, geraniums in terra-cotta pots. Ella Dane’s car was parked at the last unit. Lacey wanted to walk on the beach before dark, but Ella Dane came out, rubbing her hands, and gave a shrugging half wave. Lacey walked over to her. “Mom, I need to say something,” she said. She had to apologize now, before it was too late.