The Shore by Sara Taylor Page A

just-in-case money Mom kept in the blue willow teapot in the china hutch and bummed around Virginia for a year or two, always meaning to strike out west but never getting farther than the Blue Ridge Mountains. When he ran out of money and luck he wandered back with his tail between his legs, nothing to show for his fortune-seeking but Kermit the Frog tattooed upside down on his thigh, at least two warrants for his arrest, and a sheepish and silent girlfriend who, a few weeks after their arrival, gave birth to what they have to assume is his baby. Even if he hadn’t run off, stolen, dealt drugs and been what Grandpa called “an all-round little pissant,” he wouldn’t have been any good. As children, when Mitch and Sally had gone to bed with crying headaches from the weight of the rain in the sky or walked restless up and down the front porch waiting for a storm so far out at sea that no one could see it, he’d run around like nothing was happening. If anything, growing up had further deadened whatever connection he had to the natural world.
    “What about Lilly?” Mitch asks.
    “You’re joking, aren’t you?” Grandpa scoffs. “She’s eleven years old, and she’s yet to show any sign of talent or gift. Enough of this. Start the game before I die of impatience.”
    They roll the tray table over so that it hovers above Grandpa’s midsection and lay out the deck and discard pile on it, Sally sitting carefully on the bed near his feet, Mitch kneeling on the chair nearer to his head, all guarding their cards. The first round of rummy is played silently, except for the beeps of the machines and the hum of the TV on the other side of the curtain. None of them like the room—it’s small and Grandpa says it smells like old people—but they can’t take him out in the heat the way they did in the first weeks of his residence at the home: he has too many wires and tubes to drag along. They ignore the heart monitor, the dialysis machine expectant in the corner, the painkiller drip and bundle of tubes and valves taped to his forearm. They ignore the scratch of the blankets, the thick, plastic feel of the mattress and the creak it makes when Grandpa shifts to lay down three aces, the wheezing breath of the man on the other side of the curtain, the click of nurses’ heels in the hallway. They are back at home, at the kitchen table in the yellow house where they’ve grown up and their mother grew up, playing cards to pass the time while the rain pours down the windows, their parents at a church meeting or harvesting potatoes or across the water in Salisbury getting saw blades.
    “You’re saying it’s up to us, aren’t you?” Mitch asks as he lays down a run and three sevens, then gathers up the cards to shuffle again.
    “No, I’m not saying it,” Grandpa says. “You’re smart enough between the two of you to have figured it out for yourselves by now.” Sally blows a raspberry to indicate what she thinks of that.
    “Your daddy and I were talking about setting up a little distillery—state of Virginia’s selling licenses for that sort ofthing now. They used to make it out here on the sly during Prohibition, used anything that would ferment. We thought a little romance like that could go a long way, make people want to try it. Those white sweet potatoes you two like, they’d probably make vodka that tastes like sugar cookies. A body could make a lot of pocket money out of something like that.”
    “Are you trying to bribe us to stay on the Shore?” Mitch asks as he deals.
    “Not ‘us,’ just one of you,” Grandpa says. “Y’all have always lived on the farm, and y’all always will be allowed to, but I have to deed the place to someone, and I want to deed it to someone that I know is going to be staying.”
    They stay until visiting hours end, then reluctantly go down to Sally’s car. Mitch has failed the driving test twice, but Sally passed as soon as she was old enough; their father rebuilt an old