The Return

“What are you thinking about?” she inquired, her drawl sounding melodic to his ears. “You had a faraway look there for a moment.”

“I was thinking about our conversation.”

“I probably talked too much.”

“Not at all.” Reprising their morning routine, they walked the beach side by side, the pace even more leisurely now. “I enjoyed learning about your life.”

“I don’t know why. It’s not all that exciting.”

Because you interest me, he thought, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he zeroed in on what she hadn’t mentioned all night. “What’s your boyfriend like?”

By her expression, he knew she was thrown by the question. “How did you know I had a boyfriend?”

“You mentioned that he gave you Scottie as a gift.”

“Oh…that’s right. I did say that, didn’t I?” She pursed her lips for a second. “What do you want to know?”

“Anything you want to tell.”

She felt her sandals sinking into the sand. “His name is Josh, and he’s an orthopedic surgeon. He’s smart and successful and…he’s a nice guy.”

“How long have you been dating?”

“Six years.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, though to his ears, it sounded almost like she was trying to convince herself.

“I assume he’s coming to the wedding?”

She walked a few paces before answering. “Actually, he isn’t. He was supposed to, but he decided to go to Las Vegas with some friends instead.” She offered a half smile, one that betrayed her unhappiness. “Right now, we’re kind of on the outs, but we’ll figure it out, I’m sure.”

Which explained why she’d said nothing about him at dinner. Still…“I’m sorry to hear that. And for bringing it up.”

As she nodded, Tru noticed something skittering in the sand directly in front of him. “What was that?” he asked.

“That’s a ghost crab,” she said, sounding relieved by the distraction. “They come out at night from their burrows in the sand. But they’re harmless.”

“Are there a lot of them?”

“Between here and the house, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a hundred of them.”

“Good to know.” Ahead of them lay the pier, looking forlorn and deserted in the darkness. Offshore, Tru noticed lights from a distant fishing trawler, a deep span of black water separating it from the beach.

“Can I ask you a personal question now?”

“Of course,” he answered.

“Why do you want to ask your father about your mother? Does it have anything to do with the reason you became a guide?”

He smiled at her perceptiveness. “As a matter of fact, it does.” He tucked a hand in his pocket, wondering where to start before deciding to just come out with it. “I want to ask my father about my mother because I realize I’ve never known who she really was. What she enjoyed, what made her happy or sad, what she dreamed about. I was only eleven years old when she died.”

“That’s terrible,” she murmured. “You were so young.”

“So was she,” he countered. “She was still a teenager when she had me. Had her pregnancy occurred a couple of years later, it probably would have been more of a scandal. But it wasn’t long after the war, and she wasn’t the only young lady to have fallen for a former soldier after the war ended. More than that, we were kind of cut off from the rest of civilization because of where we lived, so supposedly, no one aside from the workers at the farm even knew about me for a long while. My grandfather preferred to keep it quiet. People eventually found out, but by then it was old news. Besides, my mother was still young and beautiful, and as the daughter of a wealthy man she was considered quite desirable. But as I said, I don’t feel as though I knew her. Her name was Evelyn, but I never heard them talk about her, or even speak her name after she died.”

“Them?”

“My grandfather. And Rodney, my stepfather.”

“Why not?”

Tru watched another ghost crab scurry past. “Well…I’ll have to provide some context and history to answer that question properly.” He sighed as she looked at him expectantly. “Back when I was still a young boy, there was another farm that bordered ours, with lots of good, fertile land and ready access to water. At that time, tobacco was quickly becoming the most profitable crop to farm, and my grandfather was intent on controlling as much of the production as he could. He was ruthless when it came to business. The neighbor discovered just how ruthless when he turned down my grandfather’s offer to buy his farm, and my grandfather diverted a lot of the water from the neighbor’s land to his own.”

“That sounds illegal.”

“It probably was, but my grandfather knew the right people in the government, so he got away with it. And while that made things immeasurably more difficult for the neighbor, the neighbor’s property manager was something of a genius. It was also common knowledge that he was interested in my mother. So my grandfather eventually made the property manager an offer he couldn’t refuse—an ownership stake in our farm and daily proximity to my mother—and he came to work for us. His name was Rodney.”

“The man who became your stepfather.”

Tru nodded. “After he came on, our tobacco yield doubled almost immediately. At the same time, when the neighbor’s farm began to fail, my grandfather offered the neighbor a loan when no one else would. It only postponed the inevitable, and in the end, my grandfather foreclosed, which meant he got all the property for next to nothing. He then diverted the water back to its original flow pattern, making him even richer than he already was. All of that took a few years, and in the meantime, my mother fell for Rodney’s charms. They got married and had twins—Allen and Alex, my half brothers. Everything had worked out just the way my grandfather and Rodney had planned…but not long after that, our family compound went up in flames. I jumped out of a second-story window, and Rodney rescued the twins, but my mother never made it out.”

He heard her inhale. “Your mom died in a fire?”

“The investigators suspected arson.”

“The neighbor,” she said.

“Those were the rumors. I didn’t hear them until a few years later, but I think my grandfather and Rodney knew, and they felt guilty about what happened. After all, they may well have been indirectly responsible for my mother’s death. After that, it was like a hush fell over her memory, and neither Rodney nor my grandfather seemed to want anything to do with me, so I started to go my own way.”

“I can’t imagine how hard that was. It must have been an incredibly sad and lonely time for you.”

“It was.”

“And the neighbor got away with it?”

Tru stopped to pick up a seashell, a partially broken conch he examined before tossing it aside.

“The neighbor died in a house fire a year after my mother died. At the time, he was living in a shack in Harare, completely destitute. But I didn’t find out about that until years later. My grandfather mentioned it in passing one night when he’d been drinking. He said the man got what he deserved. By then, I was already guiding.”