Great Big Beautiful Life(7)

I draw back, surprised and confused. “What isn’t?”

“You, trying to throw me off my game,” he growls.

“And what ‘game’ exactly are we talking about here?” I say, glancing around the now totally empty Fish Bowl. “Wait, Sheri?” I spin back to face him, our knees colliding again.

“Who is Sheri,” he says, with some distaste.

“Our server!” I drop my voice, in case she pops out of the kitchen. “If you’re trying to make a move, all you had to do was say so, and I would’ve gone right back to my fishbowl—”

“Not the server,” he interrupts. “The book.”

“The book?” I repeat. Then it dawns on me. He means the book. Margaret’s book.

Hayden goes on: “I don’t know what this”—he waves one large hand between us—“is supposed to accomplish exactly, but this is Margaret Ives we’re talking about. I want this job and I’m not going to back off, so you can stop.”

At first, it stings, being talked to like this by a stranger. That someone whose work I admired has just accused me of trying to somehow professionally thwart him when I actually was just trying to get to know him.

But underneath the sting, there’s another feeling growing, getting traction all through my limbs.

Hope.

In life, I’ve learned there’s almost always a silver lining. Here’s one now.

Hayden’s brow furrows, his arms sliding off the table. “Why are you doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Smiling,” he says dryly.

I snort out a laugh and slide out of the booth to stand, practically floating back to the bar, because his reaction has told me one important thing—I mean, aside from the fact that he’s a mistrustful cynic. “Because,” I call to him, “now I know I still have a chance.”

He rolls his eyes, and I plop back down on my stool, buzzing with excitement, just as Sheri bumps the kitchen door open with one hip and marches out with my basket of fried fish tacos. “I see that Captain’s Bowl got you grinning,” she says.

“It’s great,” I tell her with another big, appreciative slurp. Probably one of the last few I’ll be able to handle, honestly, unless I plan on being hospitalized or arrested later.

“Glad to hear it,” she says. “You’re not driving, are you?”

“No, I’m over at the Grande Lucia, so I’m on foot tonight,” I tell her.

“Aw, my husband, Robbie, and I honeymooned there,” she tells me.

Sheri doesn’t look quite old enough to be married, but I guess that’s going by Los Angeles standards. Most of the girls I went to high school with are married now, and my mom and dad were married by the time they were twenty-three, though they didn’t have my sister or me until much later.

“Get you anything else?” she asks, one hand on her hip.

“Actually,” I say, “I’d like to send a drink to someone, if you don’t mind.” A little something to brighten his mood the way he just brightened mine.

Sheri’s eyes wander over my shoulder and back to the corner, locking onto the only other patron in this fine establishment. “What are we thinking here? Whiskey? Beer?”

“Do you have anything bigger or bluer than this?” I ask, pointing down toward my bowl.

“Aside from the freshly cleaned toilets, no,” she says, “but I can throw in some candied hibiscus to spice things up if that helps.”

“That,” I say, “would be perfect.”





3




I wake with a splitting headache. There’s no way I’m hungover—I might be a lightweight, but my five sips of liquor last night couldn’t have made quite this impression.

No, this is a kind of headache I am all too familiar with: caffeine withdrawal.

Before I collapsed into my freshly laundered hotel bedding last night, I’d turned off my alarm, cranked my volume up all the way—in case Margaret decided to call—and shut the blackout curtains.

The clock on the bedside table reads 9:32 a.m. A full hour later than my usual first cup of espresso. I stumble out of bed and throw open the drapes to find brilliant sunlight, a clear blue sky, and turquoise waves crashing against the shore below.

It’s interesting that Margaret’s property is on the far side of the island, backing up toward the marshy waterway that separates Little Crescent from mainland Georgia, rather than out here, where—judging by the string of resorts near the main drag and the mansions farther to the east and west—all the tourists and the millionaires seem to favor.

Maybe that’s because she wants to avoid people, or maybe there’s more to it than that. Either way, I make a note in my phone to add it to the list of questions I’ll ask if and when she agrees to the book.

The last note I made, sometime late last night, reads play with structure??? After several seconds of casting my mind backward, I remember what I was talking about.

The idea came from Our Friend Len, Hayden’s book.

Len Stirling had decided to authorize the biography shortly after his dementia diagnosis. He’d hoped it could help slow the progress of the disease, but more than that, he thought it would be a comfort to his family and friends after he’d gone. Not died, necessarily, but lost his memory of them.