Bookshop on Beach Road (eBook)

Chapter Four

1994

After Lucas helped Della up from her fall, they walked across the road to the tiny diner. The Ocean Tide Café was a white cement block affair, one story with red shutters and window boxes containing a profusion of red geraniums. It had been run as a café for more years than Lucas could recall. As they walked in, Lucas seemed to know everybody and hailed them with a friendly wave or a few words of greeting. He directed Della to a table in front of the window. Biscuit walked right through the diner to a room in the back like he owned the place.

“Hey, Lucas, honey. What’re you up to?”

The petite woman with salt and pepper hair and a broad smile was Luke’s grandmother.

“Hey, Nana. This is Della Gates. Biscuit just knocked her off her feet in the realty office across the road. I was looking to see whose houses are renting these days and Biscuit got away from me. Della kind of found him.”

“Well, hey, Della. So you’ve met the Biscuit, huh. Looks like your jeans got the worst of the deal. I’m Eunice Howard and Lucas here is my grandson.”

“Hello, Mrs. Howard,” Della said, half rising from her seat.

“Now you sit right down, Della. I’m gonna bring you a piece of pie and a cup of coffee that’ll change your life. What’ll it be – apple, blueberry, pecan, egg custard, coconut custard…”

“Whoa – that’s a lot to choose from. I’ll just have a cup of coffee for now.”

Lucas spoke up and ordered coffee and a piece of apple pie with a wink for his grandmother. Della didn’t realize it was a secret signal until Eunice brought out two slabs of the most gorgeous Dutch apple crumb pies you’ve ever seen. She set them down on the table and handed each a paper napkin-wrapped fork, knife and spoon and smiled.

“Now just enjoy that, honey. It’ll pull you right out of yourself.”

Lucas cocked his head to the side and shook it a little bit as though to say ‘there’s nothing you can do about it so you may as well dig in.’ So she did. Of course Eunice was right. That was a pie that would change your life. It was all Della could do to keep from licking the plate. In between finishing the pie and having her coffee cup refilled by Eunice, Lucas and Della started talking.

Have you ever met somebody that you just automatically feel comfortable with? Della thought to herself. Well, that was Lucas, who said again to call him Luke.

“OK, Luke, what’s your story?” Della said.

Luke was the youngest of three sons of Eunice’s son Sam and his wife May. Luke was the last to live at home with his parents. His dad, Sam Howard, ran the local single screen Raleigh Theater in Nags Head.

Luke was a fireman with the Outer Banks Fire and Rescue Squad and helped his dad when he wasn’t at the firehouse. His brother Matt was married with a child and lived in a nearby town. Gideon was single but dating. Luke had graduated from North Carolina State University and was a big supporter of the Wolfpack. When Luke and Della had exhausted Luke’s life history, they moved on to Della’s.

Luke looked at Della with her windblown hair and muddy jeans and said, “So tell me about yourself, Della Gates.” So she did.

“I’m an only child. My dad Roy Gates and my mother Maxine Gates didn’t marry until they were in their late twenties and I was a little surprise. Actually a big surprise – I weighed 9 lbs. at birth. They live here on the Outer Banks– moved here last year. “

Della told Luke (reluctantly) that she’d lost her job and had come home to her Mama and Daddy’s house to regain her confidence. Her parents had moved to Kitty Hawk the year before after closing their small grocery store in Pennsylvania. Della admitted to feeling humiliated - a twenty-seven year old woman having to run home to her parents. On top of that, she’d caught her fiancé Dylan having a very cozy dinner with another woman instead of what he’d told her he’d be doing - early birthday shopping for a present for Della. Anyhow, she’d been home for about a month when her daddy said, “Honey, you’ve got to stop moping around and find something to do besides eating.” (She’d put on four pounds since she’d been home and her Daddy was beginning to be annoyed that his stash of chocolate chip cookies was always low.)

So one week before meeting Biscuit and Luke, her Aunt Louise had offered the free use of her shed apartment and told Della of the job at the grocery store. Della moved her few belongings into Louise’s apartment and began to feel a little better about herself, though she still hoped to find a place of her own. She had applied for and gotten a temporary job at the Robbins & Richards grocery store (known locally as the R&R) checking groceries, but really hated it. It was nothing like the efficient, modern grocery store her parents had owned. Nevertheless, having a job and income gave her some measure of confidence again.

Aunt Louise Gates’ one-room apartment was in the shed addition attached to the west side of Louise’s oceanfront cottage. It had a bed, chair (with a saggy cushion), small table, sink, two-burner stove, tiny icebox, shower, and toilet. There was one salt-crusted window which looked out on the parking pad outside. Aunt Louise let her stay there rent-free. And it was one block away from the grocery store so she didn’t have to use her car, a positive because she couldn’t afford the gas on the poor paycheck she brought home.

“You cannot believe the navy blue polyester vest I have to wear,” she’d told her mother Maxine after the first day on the job. “And I am so slow on the cash register, a fact which doesn’t make my supervisor very happy.”

Louis Murdock, Della’s supervisor at the grocery, was a bantam rooster of a man, always strutting about, looking self – important. His glasses continually slipped down his nose as he pushed back the limp brown forelock that never seemed to stay in place. Working for him did not present a very promising scenario for a bright future. All the people she went to college with had started exciting careers in big cities. Several of her very best girlfriends had even begun having babies. Sharing this news with Aunt Louise and her parents did nothing to help her self-esteem.

Nevertheless, Luke seemed not to care, or maybe he was just embarrassed that Biscuit had knocked her down. Anyhow, they finished their pie and coffee, said goodbye to Eunice and walked out onto the sandy street. An unexpected breeze blew sand into Della’s eyes which made her next move fairly clumsy (and a little bit laughable.).

She turned to take another look at the diner and lost her footing on a piece of broken curb. Down she went again on the pavement. She’d hit the sidewalk so hard that she was sure she could hear concrete crack beneath her. She got up quickly, wiping her seat off as much as she could. Luke looked concerned and asked several times if she was ok, but Della could tell he was holding back a grin.

She decided there was nothing to do but laugh it off, so she did and told him she had to go back to her apartment to get ready for work. Being the Southern gentleman that he obviously was, Luke offered to walk the three blocks back to her apartment with her. And having apparently no shame about the way she looked and the clumsiness of her recent behavior, Della accepted.

They walked the three blocks back to Della’s apartment and climbed the wooden stairs. The apartment was in the single story shed addition on the back side of Louise’s cedar-shingled cottage. It had been added on, so Louise told her, for the grown son of the builder and his wife back in the 1880s and had been also used as a maid’s room. The apartment was only one room and had no ocean view. And since it was on the road side, she heard road noise whenever she was in there. But it had a broad porch, a continuation of the porch which wrapped around Louise’s cottage on the east, south and west elevations. Set upon wood pilings, Louise’s cottage was a four-bedroom house with interior walls of heart pine. It was composed of a mix of gables and rectangles and had weathered to a lovely silvery-gray color. Sitting atop the roof of Louise’s cottage was an old brass weathervane containing large and small brass balls, the letters N, S, E and W speared onto the four directionals and a rod which ended in an arrowhead. Louise loved to check the weathervane each morning to see what the day would bring.

Like many of the other old cottages on the beach, it had originally been located on the opposite side of the road facing the Roanoke Sound. Vacationers in the 1880s approached the ocean waters by means of a wooden boardwalk laid atop the dunes. But when it became fashionable to live on the ocean side, the cottage had been placed on rollers and moved across the island to its current oceanfront location. The east face of Louise’s cottage looked out upon the ocean. Entry to the house from the porch was through a screen door which bore a large, old wooden spool in place of a door knob. Four comfortable rocking chairs faced the railings which were painted a glossy white. The porch’s railings contained lean-out benches, one on either side of the steps. At one end of the porch a hammock invited afternoon naps. The south side of the house had an outdoor shower and storage room underneath the back porch. Each of the many windows in the house and shed addition was framed with green painted shutters, hinged on the sides. The second story windows on the ocean side were...