Page 73 of The Drifter

I looked around the table. My father. Wyatt. Grant. Brock. Tommy. Slow nods, one after another, going around that dark wood like a thing being passed hand to hand.

I nodded, too.

21

SASHA

Izzy left a little after noon.

She stood in my doorway with her sunglasses back in her hair and held both my hands and made me promise to call her. Then, she went. The door closed, and the condo was mine again and very quiet.

I didn’t go to the window.

I stood in the middle of my living room instead and took stock, the way I take stock of a lobby before a shift. What I found was a woman with a whole afternoon in front of her and a nervous system that did not know what to do with an afternoon. My hands wanted a task. My whole body wanted a task, wanted the desk, wanted a group checking in and a delivery running late and somebody to be steady for.

There wasn't one. There was just me, and the harbor doing its coin-toss out a window I wasn't allowed to stand at, and the fact that a man had walked out that door hours ago and I had not heard one word since.

Do something, I thought. Anything. Before you climb the walls.

So, I got the letter.

It was where it had been for days now—in the tote by the door, under the cardigan, under the paperback I still hadn't finished. I took it to the sofa and I sat down and I read it again, slower this time, all the way through, the way you read a thing when you have finally decided to stop being afraid of it.

The firm in Mount Pleasant. The heavy paper. Dear Ms. Benning. The word opportunity, twice.

And the number beside my name, which was still less than what sat in my savings, which was still the elegant cruelty of the whole thing.

I read it, and this time, I didn’t put it in the drawer.

Because something had shifted in me, and it had not shifted back.

You have spent your whole life handing other people the thing they wanted and standing back behind the counter. Izzy had said that. And you don't owe the world your loneliness. And somewhere in between the two of them, a wall I'd built one brick at a time had come down far enough that I could see over it. What was on the other side was fourteen acres of marsh and hummock and a bent-over live oak my mother was married under.

I picked up my phone and I called Verlie.

She answered on the fourth ring, the way she always does.

"There she is," she said. "Miss Charleston."

"Aunt Verlie."

Something in my voice made her stop. She's my mother's sister and she has my mother's ear. She heard whatever was in those two words the way my mother would have.

"What's wrong, baby?”

"Nothing's wrong. Something's—" I stopped. Started over. "I got a letter. From a law firm. About the land."

The line went quiet.

"You got one, too," I said. "I know you did. Same paper."

"I got one," she said.

"And you didn't call me?”

"And you didn't call me." A pause, and then a sound came down the line that was half a laugh and half something older and sadder. "We're two of a kind, ain't we? Sittin' on the same letter, not sayin' a word, each one waitin' on the other to bring it up first."

"Somebody's always looking," I said. It came out before I decided to say it.