Main Man

Bobby boosted her up into the van. Since the knee replacement climbing was easier, but it was still a long way up into the passenger seat.  They pulled out onto Water Street and took the lefthand bend by the Victorian-era Surf Hotel.  A ladder leaned against the porch roof. A painter on break, no doubt. Some of the white paint on the shingles had been scraped off. Pity that the family had sold up. At moments she got maudlin and mourned the passing of the old ways. Then she gave herself a scolding.  It was nice to see the place no longer boarded up, being painted and primped. The hydrangeas, she was happy to see, were thriving. They should bloom nicely.

      “Remind me how long the Surf was closed?” she asked Bobby.

       “Three seasons,” he said.

       Bobby himself was no old timer. Like many others, he had drifted to the Isle of Misfits in his twenties with a surfboard and a six-pack. Meredith had been the first islander who could see beneath the stereotype to welcome him. That was years ago. His long hair and beard were streaked with gray now, and his boards had lengthened too, but he could always supply her with the details of the present that sometimes eluded her. And hoist 40-pound bags of mulch.

       Meredith never tired of the drive up the Neck, the dunes on the right, covered with the magenta and white blooms of rosa rugosa, the beach grass combed by the wind, the sand and the Atlantic stretching forever into heavenly blue sky. It was enough to make you believe in God. Almost. And at this season there weren’t many cyclists to dodge either, another indication of divine providence.

        As the van turned off to bump along her dirt road, she braced herself for her ongoing argument with Bobby over the fare.

        Once she had simply thrown the ten dollar bill out the window when he had refused it. “If you won’t take it then let some silly daytripper find it,” she snorted.

        Bobby had never even slowed down.  He had just looked at her out of the corner of one blue eye and twisted his lip. “Like, almost,” he seemed to be saying, though he was never talkative.

     Now, of course, it was more like a twenty-dollar bill for the short ride.  Never mind the offloading. At her age, she had long since accepted that courtesy.

       She opened her red patent leather purse. “How much do I owe you?”

       “Nothing, Merry. And more than you can possibly pay.”