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Susan appeared at her bedroom door. “Jo, you know I can’t sleep in. Never could. But I’ll have some real breakfast for you, so don’t be too long. Office should be open by eight-thirty as you know.”
“I know, I know,” Jo called out from down the steps. Yogurt did not qualify as breakfast to Susan. “I’ll be back in plenty of time. Gotta run now.”
When Jo got to the motel, Dare was already waiting at the top of the small barrier dune, much smaller now since Eva, his silhouette recognizable with the sun coming up behind him.
“God, Dare, I have so much to tell you,” Jo panted, setting her bike under the building.
“I think I broke a record getting here. Gran wants me to be sure to have the office open at eight-thirty if not sooner.”
“And I have a story for you,” said Dare. “So, who’s first?”
They started walking down to the water’s edge and turned right, the rising sun to their backs just a bit, and a nice breeze from the southeast. The water was a beautiful sea greenish blue color and perfectly clear.
“You go,” said Jo. “Because I’ll need lots of help with what I’m going to tell you. And hey, again, I am sooooo sorry for last night. Really. Thanks for forgiving me.”
“It’s OK,” said Dare. “I know you’re at your wits end. You missed a great little mini-concert with Jamie and the Hanks. But you absolutely would not believe what happened while that was going on.”
Jo looked at him expectantly. “Well?” she said.
“They had just finished playing one set so it was kind of quiet. Well, I mean, it wasn’t as noisy as it was when they were playing. So, me and a couple of the guys were just hanging around waiting for them to start up again. I see this guy out the corner of my eye coming from the lot, big guy with sandy-colored hair. Looks like he came from a burgundy work van because I hadn’t seen that in the lot before.”
It sounded like he was talking about Chris, but she had no idea why.
Dare looked out at the ocean and then back at Jo. She waited for him to go on.
“He stops and kind of surveys the crowd and then spies Rob Wingate leaning up against the crab pots on the dock. He walks right up to him and says something like ‘Long time no see Rob.’ Rob starts backin’ up. He looked scared. I thought he was going to fall into the water.”
Jo gasped with the realization she might know what happened next.
“I think I heard him say something like ‘Chris, what brings you back here?’ And this guy, Chris I guess, says, ‘Think back a bit, Rob. You know damn well why I am here.’ And then he, Chris, says something about a message and ruining his life and the next thing we all know, he winds up and punches Rob and Rob falls into the water just like that. He’s sputtering and saying, ‘It wasn’t a big deal’.” Dare shook his head in amazement.
“And that guy Chris just looks at him and says, ‘Fuck you, Rob. It was a really big deal, you asshole.’ He gets back into his van and drives away. It was crazy. Never seen someone take on ol’ Rob like that. ‘Bout time, though. But what do you make of that? Just a bit of comic relief, I ‘spose, after the storm.”
Jo stopped walking and looked straight at Dare. “You aren’t going to believe this, but that man, that guy Chris, is probably my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather?” Dare looked at her incredulously. I thought your dad’s dad lived somewhere far away. Why is he here? And how did he know Rob?
“No, Dare,” Jo said. “Not my dad’s dad. My mom’s. The grandfather I never knew I had. The missing piece. The man messed up my mom and then me in a way all these years. He was a part of us when he wasn’t a part of us at all. He influenced us, you know? I don’t know what to think and I sure don’t know what to do.”
Jo was sobbing and Dare was totally perplexed. “What am I missing, Jo? There’s something here I’m not getting. How do you know he’s your grandfather and how did you meet this man? What’s going on?”
Jo sank into his arms, still sobbing. “It all happened last night after you left Marcie’s. There was one empty seat at the bar, where you were, and he sat there. We started talking and he said his same was Jonathan and he mentioned roofing and I told him we needed repairs at the motel and he said he’d been there before and I said the motel was in my family and somehow, I mentioned Gran’s name and he got all weird and then he said he’d known her but she wouldn’t want him working on the roof and then I found out his name was really Chris and then I fainted.”
“You fainted?” gasped Dare. “Why?”
“Because Gran told me the night of the storm that Chris was the guy, the only guy, she was with that summer when she got pregnant. And when I came to and confronted him about abandoning her, he told me his dad had a heart attack and he had to leave in the middle of the night. He left a message with Rob….”
“And Rob never gave it to her,” nodded Dare slowly. “So, that explains him coming to the dock, recognizing him, and punching him out.”
“And all these years, my gran thought he’d left her and he thought she’d just cast him aside. He never knew about my mom, never knew about anything,” Jo said.
“But why didn’t he come back, try to contact her?” Dare asked. “It seems if he cared about her, he would have.”
“Humph. If only life was so simple. I’ve thought about that. His mom was apparently in pieces after his dad got sick and then his dad died about a week later. He had to take over the family roofing business and take care of her. He kept waiting for Gran to call. But then she had her own issues by then, didn’t she? And she had been told he’d left her for another girl. And she had no way to contact him, did she? Chris Smith from somewhere up north? Turns out, since he was living with his family, he wouldn’t have had a phone of his own back then. Kids didn’t have phones like we do now. Heck, Gran told me once the phones were connected to the walls! It would have been under his father’s name anyway. Chris’s first name isn’t even Chris, it’s Jonathan. And, by the way, he never married either.”
Dare thought for a moment and then said, “Life hit them both really hard. It’s like that hurricane hit them both and did damage neither of them really understood. It’s hard to believe, but I guess given their circumstances back then, there wasn’t much either of them could do.”
“Yeah,” said Jo. “And time passed and while they didn’t forget about one another they both assumed they’d been forgotten by the other. Oh Dare – how do I handle this? Clearly with Chris finding Rob last night and practically knocking him out, he had to have had some reason. You just don’t go doing that. And you said he walked right toward him – he knew who Rob was.”
