Page 63 of Rhodes

"You're what? How?"

"I flew in after my class. Can you meet me?"

"Tilly. Goddammit. Come to the house."

"No, I'm already heading out to Wadmalaw. Are you meeting me or not?"

"I'll be there." He exhales loudly, and I can tell he isn't happy about my surprise visit. Good. It's high time I'm not the only one who finds out things at the last minute and has to adjust.

By the time the driver turns down the oyster shell drive at Oak Moss, my father's truck is already at the end of it, parked nose out, the way he parks when he pulls in hastily.

The house sits there proudly, under the oaks with the shutters latched and the porch swept by nobody since October. It's magnificent set against the Spanish moss framing its three-hundred-degree view of the water.

Both Dad and Grandbank are at the tailgate of Dad's truck looking at large white papers that are surely the plans of this "tasteful" development, as they like to tout. Behind the two of them, past the last of the palmettos, two excavators sit down on their tracks with the buckets in the wet grass. Somebody has run orange flagging tape tree to tree in a line that goes straight through the spot I used to sit.

"Well," Grandbank says. "There she is."

I get out of the Kia Sorento with a small overnight bag and pull the folder from the side pocket before I throw the bag on the wrought iron table beside the tree.

"You should have called sooner," Daddy says. "I'd have come to the airport and gotten you."

"I'm perfectly able to secure my own transportation."

"Tilly."

"I'm not being ugly. I'm telling you I didn't want a ride." I look past him at the tape. "Can we walk it?"

He looks at Grandbank. Then Grandbank looks at me.

"Let's walk it," Grandbank says.

We arrive at the point, and it requires much more time than it used to, as Grandbank moves slower now but refuses to admit he needs the golf cart to go the distance. All three of us go at his pace with our hands in our pockets, pretending it's the pace we wanted.

At the bank I crouch and put my hand flat down in the pluff mud, which is something I have done at this exact spot my whole life. The two of them watch me do it without saying anything.

Then I stand up, and open the file I've prepared.

I don't lead with Mama. I don't lead with the fiddler crabs or the birds working the flats or being nine years old out here in my life jacket. Those are the cards they're braced for, and every single one of them proves I'm the sentimental one, the one who feels too much and doesn't consider the "important" business aspect.

I lead with the numbers.

I show them my stakes from October and where the bank sits against them now. I show them the fetch, the whole open run of the Stono, where the wind comes down, and what that does to an unarmored bank in a northeaster.

I show them a photograph of the first line Jo and I laid in Barataria back in the fall and a photograph of that same seam of marsh taken six days ago, holding.

Erosion is not a death sentence, I keep stressing. I feel like I’m a broken record, but they fucking need to listen. I tell them hardening that shoreline to put houses behind it forecloses the fix permanently and speeds up what's already happening to the ground next door, which happens to be ground they still work.

Neither of them interrupts me one time, which has never happened to me before in my life. When I'm done, my father rubs the back of his neck and looks out at the water for a while.

"Baby," he says. "The permits are approved, and we are ready to start prep work next week."

"I know."

"There's a man with a crew and equipment out there sitting on his hands, costing me money by the day."

"I know that too."

"Then what is it you're asking me for?"