The Complete Eagle Cove

Chapter 2 -3

Jessica could have spent the entire day simply standing with her feet planted in the sand of the main beach, except she’d forgotten how cold the coast could be on a summer day.

Freshwater runoff from last night’s rain was slipping to sea just below the surface of the sand, rapidly turning her feet into ice cubes. A thin fog was sneaking over the water and toward the beach. The inland Willamette Valley on the other side of the Coast Range must be heating up to drag the fog in off the water even at midday. And then the first wave of the rising tide reached her ankles and she yelped. The Pacific Ocean was damned cold.

She scooted up the beach to get clear of the next wave. Her mother was wisely back at the car, well clear of the rising tide. She’d also pulled on a light jacket the color of their eyes. Jessica might have to steal that one. It was irritating, useful but irritating, that her mom had better taste in clothes than she did. And she’d have to steal it soon, the fog wasn’t put off by her Second City Improv Annual Revue t-shirt.

Even fifty feet from the beach the air was warmer, but not enough. As they got in the car, her mother spoke the old mandate, “Sand stays…”

“…outside the car. I haven’t forgotten.” Jessica did her best to dust off her feet but they were wet and sandy to the ankles and most of what she brushed off stuck to her hands. Soon it was like one of those oozing metallic encapsulations in science fiction movies, where the heroine barely has time to scream before becoming completely covered.

Her mother sighed when Jessica gave it up as a bad cause and pulled her feet aboard.

“Just like always, we’re going to have to hose you down when we get to Gina’s.”

Jessica no longer felt twelve. The shift had occurred when…she was sparring with Greg Slater. Handsome men did have their uses, even when they were from Eagle Cove.

Her mother drove them up the winding lane toward the last house in town. A pair of massive Victorians dominated the south end of the beach before it was completely bookended by the rocky prominence of Orca Head. There was the Judge’s place and then Aunt Gina’s massive Lamont B&B.

“What’s his story, anyway?”

“Whose, dear?”

When an eye roll didn’t elicit any better response because of her mother’s depressing habit of looking where she was driving, Jessica finally spoke his name.

“What about Greg?”

“Now you’re being obtuse on purpose, Mom.”

“Me?” She offered in a sweet tone that was so innocent that Jessica almost believed it. It was a tone from her childhood that Jessica had never been able to cultivate despite a fair amount of practice.

“Mo-om!” She said in her complaining teenage voice and they both had a laugh over it. “Did Greg even make it out of high school? Can’t he do anything more than wait tables for his dad? How lame is that.”

“Greg is—” Her cell phone rang. Her mother slipped it into the no-hands rig even though they were on a country lane moving about ten miles an hour.

“Hi, honey,” Dad’s voice boomed enthusiastically out of the speaker. “Is our little girl here yet?”

“Hi, Daddy,” Jessica called out.

“Hey, Squirt!”

If she’d been twelve before, now she was feeling five and waiting at the dock for her father’s boat to come back in.

“We’re just on our way to Gina’s now.” Classic Mom didn’t accelerate on the straightaway past the Slater spread.

Jessica stared at it as they slid by. The main house was almost as much of a monster as her family’s home. When she was a little girl Judge Slater had added a mother-in-law unit that mirrored the grand house in miniature: a complete match down to small turrets and impossibly steep conical roofs. It had always struck her as so cute and cozy, even though she’d only been in it a few times during Grandma Slater’s last years.

“I caught a monster halibut,” her father’s big voice filled the car. “Sold half to a customer who got skunked. Just got close enough to shore for the cell to work and called Greg. Must say that he sounded pretty damned relieved when I reached him. Any idea what that’s about?”

“No idea at all,” but her mother eyed Jessica as if she was somehow the cause.

“He took the other half,” her dad announced.

“Wonderful. I’ll get word out.”

“Can’t wait to be married to you again, honeybunch.”

“Last time, I promise, Ralph.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” her father’s oversized personality shifted to a soft caress over the airwaves, making it a private joke. One so intimate that Jessica could feel herself blushing for overhearing.

“Still a couple hours to dock,” his normal boom was back. “I promised the tourists I’d swing them by the puffin nesting grounds out at Chickadee Rock.”

May through August they were thick with a hundred or more foot-high birds with brilliant orange beaks. Right now the pufflings were fledging and the parents were scrambling about the sky and diving hundreds of feet into the ocean to keep them fed. It really was a grand sight.

“I’ll come and fetch you both as soon as I’m ashore and cleaned up. Bye, my honeys,” and he was gone.

“What does Greg Slater have to do with Dad catching a halibut?”

“He—” Then her mother actually looked away from the road even though the last curve was close ahead. She looked straight at Jessica for a long moment.

“What?”

Then her mother offered one of her radiant smiles. “You want to know what Greg does? Fine. Keep your questions until tonight and they’ll all be answered.”

“I don’t want to know that badly.”

“Oh, Jessica. Of course you do.”