"Hi," he said warily. "I was just coming to get an extra copy of the accident report, you know, for insurance and stuff."
He nodded shortly and kept walking past me, toward the door to the station. "Y need to come back during regular office hours with your dad and a
ou check for two dollars made out to the DMV." He disappeared into the building.
I stood there stunned for a few seconds. Then I galloped after him and swung through the glass door before he could escape deep into the office where I couldn't catch him. He was unlatching and lifting a section of the front counter to let himself through.
"Why?" I called to his back. "I'm a licensed driver in the state of Florida. I'm the driver, it's my wreck, it's my accident report, and my two dollars spends like my dad's."
"Hey there, Zoey," a deep voice boomed behind me. The police chief closed the glass door behind him, carrying a paper sack from the Grilled Mermaid.
"Hey, Chief," I said with a grin, hoping he'd caught only the tail end of me yelling at his deputy. My mom had introduced me to the chief around town when I was growing up. During parades and festivals along the beach strip, he always rode above the crowd on a horse. He and my mom worked together--or against each other, since my mom defended the people he arrested. But I'd never been in the police station before, and I hadn't thought of him when I stalked in here demanding my life back.
"Fox," he snapped. "Get Miss Commander whatever she needs."
Officer Fox disappeared into the back.
The chief turned to me and smiled sympathetically. "Heard about your car wreck."
That was more than I could say. "Y sir, it was scary."
es,
"Heard your mom made a big jailbreak yesterday."
This was why I'd hoped no one would ever find out about my mom. I grinned again and pretended I could laugh at it like he could. I needed his help. I needed that report.
"I've been over to the hospital a couple of times in the past few weeks," he said. "They're still not allowing her to have visitors?"
I opened my mouth to speak. For fear of sobbing, all I could do was shake my head no. He'd been to see my mom? I'd thought I was alone.
"Y let me know if there's anything I can do for you or for her." He patted me twice on the shoulder and maneuvered through the counter like Officer Fox
ou had. "Fox!" he hollered.
The chief and Officer Fox passed each other in the corridor, and Officer Fox slid the precious document onto the counter. "Two dollars," he grumbled.
I fished in my purse, tossed two bills on the counter, and slapped my hand down on the paper before he could take it away.
Just as quickly, he covered my hand with his. "Don't go to Doug's house."
He might as well have said, Don't open the box, Pandora. "Right." I snatched the report and ran.
"I mean it, Zoey," he called after me.
"Why can't I go over there?" I asked as I backed out the door.
"Because it's Thursday."
Whatever. Outside in the orange light of the setting sun, I scanned Officer Fox's diagram of the wreck, his quaint depiction of a stick-deer, and his clumsy legalese until I found what I was looking for.
Doug wasn't the passenger in Mike's car. He was the passenger in mine.
direction of the docks, then turned left toward the bluff.
But I began to wonder, as the Benz crept through a thicket that threatened to close in over the road. Palmettos scraped the paint and moths fluttered across the windshield. Satellites could be wrong.
I really wondered when the thicket opened to the starry sky and the full moon over the rolling ocean, with the docks almost directly underneath me. I drove across a causeway built up between islands so someone could live out here. Someone rich. Someone not Doug. But I couldn't turn around until I reached the other side. I inched the Benz forward, off the narrow causeway and underneath the canopy of an enormous live oak.
In front of me was Doug's house. I knew this because I saw his Jeep pulled to one side of the clearing and abandoned, the open interior strewn with leaves. The house itself was a 1970s split-level with blue paint peeling from the trim work.
And in front of the house, ten men sat in a circle around a campfire. I was close enough to see them shuck oysters and tilt up bottles of beer. In fact, I caught Doug, who did not drink while he was in training, in midswig. What had I driven into? Instinct warned me to back out the way I'd come, but I could never make it in reverse without backing off the narrow causeway and into the sea.
Doug limped toward me on his crutches. I'd thought maybe his dad let him have one beer on special occasions--but no, I could tell from the way Doug examined the ground before every step that he was buzzed. I parked the car and hurried to meet him before he fell down.
"Zoeyyyy," he called. "Just the person I wanted to see me at my lowest. Come have a raw oyster." When he reached me he set his chin on my shoulder and whispered, "My dad thinks we're together. Not because I lied to him, but because Friday night I thought we were together, and I was all happy about it until I went over to your house Saturday morning and talked to you and found out we weren't. But that's way too complicated to explain to a salty dog. So just smile and nod, if you don't mind." He hobbled away from me and made an enormous vertical circle with one crutch, gesturing for me to follow him.
Not buzzed. Plastered.
I caught up with him and whispered, "Is this your crew meeting?"
"Ha. Is that what I called it? Every Thursday all the deckhands from my dad's boat hike up here for oysters and beer. Also my dad's roughneck friends come, and their cousins who heard the words free beer , and anything else that might have wandered up from the wharf." The familiar snarky sense of humor let me know Doug was in there somewhere, but his delivery was low and rapid fire as if his playback control was set too fast, lubed by alcohol. "All of them get free beer, and raw oysters, and the chance to take potshots at Fox the Y ounger."
"What kind of potshots?" I asked, beginning to worry.
"Insults for not drinking beer," he said huskily. "Because you know that means you're g*y. Teetotalling and homosexuality are the twin and intertwined forces of evil."
"But you're drinking."
He stopped not far behind the circle of guffawing men and looked down at me. "Because, as my dad keeps telling me, I don't have no chance on that fag swim team now that my leg's broke. And if you faced a night of ten salty dogs riffing on your cast, you'd drink too. Abstinence is for pussies."