Heat Wave: Wildwood

Chapter 1

Heat Wave: Wildwood

By J.T. Marie

When Tara Harrison received her cousin Amanda’s wedding invitation, she deleted the email without reading it. Who sent an evite to a wedding, anyway? It struck Tara as vulgar and rude, and the message went into her trash folder with the rest of the spam, right where it belonged.

But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered if maybe she shouldn’t go. It wasn’t as if she and Amanda were close—they weren’t, not by a long shot. Amanda had to be a good eight years younger than Tara, barely out of her twenties, and if her i********: pictures were any indication, she still spent most of her weekends getting wasted in bars all up and down the Jersey shore. Tara, on the other hand, had gotten all that out of her system back in college. Now that she was turning forty soon, her idea of a night with “the girls” was a glass of wine and a marathon of Orange Is the New Black on Netflix.

And weddings…don’t get her started. Everyone Tara knew seemed to be on a marriage kick. Ten years earlier, there’d been a few months where she had back to back weddings booked every weekend as all her straight friends got hitched. When they started having kids and doing “mommy” things, Tara found she wasn’t able to maintain the same level of interest in their lives as before, so they drifted apart. No big deal. Then came the push to legalize same-s*x marriage, and Virginia jumped on the bandwagon. Suddenly all Tara’s lesbian friends talked about marriage, too, and once again, she found herself making the rounds as everyone around her paired up and said, “I do.”

How could they all be lucky in love when she wasn’t?

Now Amanda was tying the knot. Amanda, of all people. In Tara’s mind, the name still conjured up a precocious little girl with blonde ponytails, a child’s potbelly, and skinned knees. She knew that couldn’t be right; she’d reconnected with her cousin online a few years ago, so she saw the selfies—the perpetual tan, the bleached hair now worn long and straight, the heavy makeup, the bar drinks. With the passing years, Amanda had grown into the spitting image of the aunt Tara remembered when she used to visit Wildwood over the summer while growing up.

Though they were “friends” online, Tara harbored no illusions about what she meant to Amanda. Yes, they were cousins. But Amanda’s memories of her must have been even sketchier than hers were of the few times they had spent together. Tara’s family used to vacation for a week or two every year in New Jersey, but that had petered out once Tara entered high school; Amanda would’ve been seven or eight at the time.

The last visit Tara made had been her freshman year of college, when her uncle—Amanda’s father, Tara’s mother’s brother—died suddenly of a heart attack. Then Amanda had been a sullen teen, face buried beneath a veil of hair, the whole trip a wash of tears and sadness. It was in November, so the island paradise of Wildwood, New Jersey, had also dimmed. The flashing lights and calliope music of the boardwalk were gone, the beaches empty. Even the sea had been dark and roiling. Nothing about the visit had been pleasant, and when Tara left, she never wanted to return. It hurt too much to see the whole place shuttered and dark with the coming winter.

Now, twenty years later, Tara found herself working long hours as an office manager for a construction company, and the carefree summers of her childhood were a wash of nostalgia that made her long for simpler times. Long days spent on the beach, without worrying about bills or bosses or deadlines. Evenings strolling the boardwalk, the sea breeze blowing the hair off her sweaty forehead, cotton candy and Italian ices and soft pretzels, Skee-ball in the arcades and the Sightseers Tramcar calling out as it paroled the boardwalk, “Watch the Tramcar please. Watch the Tramcar please.”

And she couldn’t forget the rides. The boardwalk ran parallel to the sea, with piers jutting out toward the water, and each pier overflowed with amusement park rides she always thought were the best in the world. Hunt’s Pier was the first one she’d come upon, when she started walking from the end of the boardwalk closest to her uncle’s house, and it was home to her favorite ride of all, the Flyer—a wooden roller coaster she would ride all night if her parents let her. She loved the other rides on Hunt’s, as well, like the Golden Nugget, Keystone Kops, Whacky Shack, Jungleland, Log Flume. There were piers further down the boardwalk, Morey’s and Mariner’s Landing, which housed the large Ferris wheel visible from anywhere on the island, but Hunt’s Pier was the best, bar none.