Free Life's a Beach by Claire Cook Page B

in?” I asked.

    My mother handed me a half-full garbage bag. “Just dump them in here.”

    I couldn’t believe it. “Mom,” I said.

    “Honey, we can’t take it all with us. There’s nothing worse than a couple of old people with a whole big house full of clutter crammed into a little townhouse.”

    “You’re not old,” I said. “But, okay, I’ll just split these bottles with Geri when she gets here.”

    WHEN I FINALLY GOT HOME from my parents’ house, it was dark and Boyfriend was meowing at the door like he hadn’t seen me in a month. I squatted down and scooped him up in my arms. “Sorry,” I whispered in his ear.

    He started grooming my cheek with his sandpapery tongue. “Yeah, I know, I’m a mess,” I said. I was carrying a bag containing my half of the sand-filled bottles, along with a few empty ones my mother and I had found on the same shelf. I placed the bag on the kitchen counter and reached around with one hand until I found an empty bottle. You never knew when you might pass a beach.

    Boyfriend and I headed down the stairs, and I yanked up one of the heavy garage doors. I dragged out Boyfriend’s pet carrier on wheels, and stood back to take a look at it under the outdoor lights.

    I’d ordered it online about a year ago and didn’t remember the description having the word
stroller
in it anywhere. “Riley’s way off base. I don’t think this looks anything like a stroller, do you?” Boyfriend didn’t seem to disagree, so I unzipped the top and plopped him inside. He knew the drill and, avoiding the canvas-covered back half of the carrier, immediately circled around and got comfortable up front, where only an open weave of green netting stood between my cat and the world.

    I put the bottle inside in case he got bored and needed something to play with, and pushed him down to the end of the driveway at a brisk pace. We bumped our way up to the sidewalk. “Maybe a little bit like a shopping cart,” I suggested, “or even a chariot.” I realized I was talking out loud to my cat in public. I was far too young to be a crazy cat lady, so I reined it in.

    Possibly winged chariot was even closer, since Boyfriend and I practically seemed to fly along the sidewalks of Marshbury. It was dark already and the stars were twinkling away up in the sky. After a day of packing and cleaning, it felt good to move, and I was a little less stiff with every couple of steps. If I didn’t have Boyfriend, I’d probably be asleep already. I took a deep breath of the late spring air. “Thanks for getting me out tonight,” I whispered.

    Even though Noah had been gone since this morning, I couldn’t quite shake him. All day long I kept starting to turn to tell him something, and then I’d remember he wasn’t there. So instead I’d tweak it around in my head a few times until I’d get it just the way I would have said it if he’d still happened to be around.

    I always missed Noah right after he left. I knew I’d be okay after a night or two alone. I had some DVDs I’d rented and hadn’t even watched yet, plus I had orders from two local shops and was way behind on my earrings. I just had to let it all fade. He’d be back in a few days or a few weeks, and the longer he was gone, the less it would feel like it mattered.

    Of course, the flip side was that why couldn’t a grown woman, even one pushing a cat along the sidewalk in the dark, shake off her inertia and stop by to visit her pseudo boyfriend if she felt like it? I mean, after all, hadn’t Noah just shown up at
my
door last night? Maybe I’d show him the empty bottle and tell him about my parents’ sand collection. It would be such a romantic story that we’d just naturally start planning a beachy adventure of our own.

    Boyfriend and I came to an intersection. I thought for a minute, then took a left. Half a block later we were crunching our way along Noah’s crushed mussel shell driveway. Noah’s little beach house, one of the