The Shore by Sara Taylor Read Free Book Online

felt the breeze between her fingers like long strands of dried grass, only this time she felt it in her mind too, as if her head was an empty room with all the windows open and the breeze was wandering through it. She’d grabbed hold and twisted, and the breeze twirled in on itself, picking up the cut grass on the road, spinning a confused chicken around a few times, then straightening back out.
    “Very good! I am impressed,” Grandpa Tom had said, and she hadn’t been able to stop grinning. She reached out again, and the breeze felt firmer, more substantial this time. She gave it a wrench.
    Wind whipped the raspberry bushes, plucked the chickens, tore their buckets from their hands, threw her against her grandfather’s legs like a wave at the beach. There was a silent pop in her jaw as Grandpa Tom yanked the breeze straight again, and just as suddenly everything was calm. She looked up at him. Raspberry juice splattered his face, and his shirt, and dripped down his mustache into his beard. “Always gentle, little bit. Messes are hard to clean up,” he’d told her, and scrubbed her face with his blue paisley pocket-handkerchief.
    She was seven.
    —
    There has been no rain in weeks. The creeks are sandy paths, the cornstalks wither in the sun, the air itself sizzles. The long black road down to Parksley looks wet in the afternoon light, reflecting back ghost images of the woods and houses; thedouble yellow line up its middle is blinding. Sally drives slowly, avoiding the drooping chickens milling about the shoulder of the road. People don’t like it if you kill their chickens, even if they’re pecking at roadkill on the double yellow when you do it.
    She passes the Perdue plant, slows down at the speed-limit sign and holds her breath as Parksley slides by—the Foster processing plant usually reeks—turns off Route 13 above Onancock, then pulls into the long driveway of the Tasley Assisted Living Facility and Rest Home. It winds artificially through a long stretch of bright green turf, a man-made lake peppered with mangy ducks twinkling from between the trunks of manicured oaks. The home itself spreads out in front of the lake like a bunker, a dark, squat three stories of cement and reflective windows, with a scatter of private cottages for the more mobile residents behind it. It’s on the bay side, so that the residents can get a view of the glinting water of the port, and the boats sailing in and out. She and Grandpa Tom both like the sea side of the island better, with its peanut-butter smear of barrier islands at the horizon, but rich people like the bay, so the home is on the bay. The cousins have pitched in to get Grandpa Tom into the home; he’s rich on paper, but all of his money is in the land, and he wouldn’t sell a square foot of it, even if it meant being able to afford a room of his own.
    Their family is large, if loosely connected now, the descendants of Grandpa Tom’s grandmother Medora and her two husbands. Grandpa Tom’s three cousins have already passed on; Helen and Kathy in their own homes, but Mark, the youngest of the three, and his wife Letty had both died in the rest home some years earlier, rather than in their red-floored house inBelle Haven. It was supposedly a more modern, civilized way, but Sally wasn’t so sure she agreed.
    Mark and Letty had had one daughter together, and desperately wanted more. Rachel had been a sweet little girl but when she got older she’d fallen in with a bad crowd, then run off and gotten married, then come back to Accomack Island for a while before running off again and abandoning her husband and two daughters. The daughters had never been allowed to meet their grandparents. Cousin Letty had a son from her first marriage that the family had also never met; when she’d sued for divorce her husband had accused her of abandoning their child and been granted custody. He’d kept her from seeing her son when he was young, and so thoroughly poisoned the