THE BEACH HOUSE

She was hoping he would leave her the beach house, counting on this actually, though he had told her he wasn’t going to.

- JOY WILLIAMS

He’d said he would be leaving it to an organization that offered sanctuary to abandoned German shepherds, but that had to be a joke, right? The German shepherds wouldn’t be quartered in the beach house; rather, the shabby but invaluable property would be sold, the proceeds going to an organization that had to be fraudulent, unlicensed, a figment of her father’s imagination. Her father said that he loved her—he just wasn’t going to leave her the beach house, which to him had become not the beach house at all but, in truth, something else entirely. He believed he was going to pass soon, and he had been thinking about mighty matters. There was much to learn. He was exploring many teachings, and one avenue of thought had somehow led him to disinherit his only child—Amber, her name was, a name she quite reasonably detested.

“I grew up there,” she said. “I have memories.”

“You collected conchs, put them in boiling water, gouged them out with a fork and spoon, then displayed their empty homes on a shelf in your room,” her father said.

“Not all the time,” she protested. “You always mention that. It’s mean.”

Her father was sipping something green from a scratched plastic glass, which must have negated much of the good the beverage might have to offer. It had been prescribed for his blood. There was something not right about his blood. Or was it that something that had to move through his blood wasn’t the right shape?

“We’ve never even known a German shepherd,” Amber said.

“I had one as a young man. I brought him into marriage with your mother. You were around, but I guess you can’t remember him. Titus.”

“I was around?”

“Well, you were. It pains me that you don’t recall him.”