Beachglass Excerpt:
Opening Scene (page 1)

I knew something was the matter the moment I pulled up in front of our house and saw my husband standing on the porch. It’s not that he isn’t sometimes waiting for me when I get home; it’s that he doesn’t usually look like the poster boy for the phrase Are you sitting down? But he did that night: it was in his eyes, in his stance, even in the way he held the phone. By the time I got out of the car and was walking toward him, I could hardly breathe.

I stopped on the top step. “Simon? What is it?”

“Timothy just called.”

“What did he say?”

“To call him back. Tonight.”

“How did he sound?”

“Oh, you know Timothy—simply fabulous. I put Clara on the phone, and she sang the teapot song to him. He didn’t say why he was calling.”

He didn’t have to. “Is she asleep?”

“She went down about a half hour ago.”

He held the cordless phone out by one end and pointed it at me like the baton in a relay race. I took the other end, and we stood like that for a long moment, our eyes locked. He finally let go of the phone, leaving it in my hand.

“This might take a while,” I said.

“I know.”

“Wait up for me?”

“Of course.”

I wrapped my arms around him in an embrace longer than the usual hi-honey-I’m-home hug. I was recharging my battery, taking a nice tall drink from the Fountain of Life.

After he went inside, I sat down on the porch swing and looked at the phone in my hand. I pictured Timothy, twelve hundred miles south, holding his phone too, waiting for my call.

We had always known this would happen someday, but I hadn’t imagined what my life would be like when it did; who I would be. My new life was like the egg in the egg-drop project that high school science teachers assign—the one where the students have to use household materials to construct a contraption in which they can nestle an egg, drop it from a second story window, and have the egg not break. I was the kid who padded her egg effectively, using anything she could find, holding her breath and letting go, watching as her invention bounced and survived, egg intact, seemingly unbreakable—until moments like this came and I wondered if my well-crafted cushioning could withstand one more fall, especially one from this high up.

I had to call him. I had to hear what I already feared was true, and I had to prepare to take the action I had committed to taking years ago. So I hit the on button and let go.