sprays sideways from the lake, the surf a solid four-or five-feet high. If it were summerâtourist seasonâthe beach would be closed down, dangerous swimming conditions and rip currents to blame.
But itâs not summer. For now, the tourists are gone.
The town is quiet, some of the shops closed until spring. The sky is dark. Sunrise comes late and sunset early these days. I peer upward. There are no stars; there is no moon. Theyâre hidden beneath a mass of gray clouds.
The seagulls are loud. They circle overhead, visible only in the swiveling glow from the lighthouseâs lantern room. The wind whips through the air, upsetting the lake, making it hard for the gulls to fly. Not in a straight line, anyway. They float sideways. They flap their wings tenaciously and yet hover in place, going absolutely nowhere like me.
I pull my hood up over my head to keep the sand out of my hair and eyes.
As I crisscross the park, heading away from the lake, I pass the old antique carousel. I stare into the inanimate eyes of a horse, a giraffe, a zebra. A sea serpent chariot where a half dozen years ago I had my first kiss. Leigh Forney, now a freshman at the University of Michigan, studying biophysics or molecular something-or-other, or so I heard. Leigh isnât the only one who is gone. Nick Bauer and Adam Gott are gone, too, Nick to Cal Tech and Adam to Wayne State, playing point guard for the basketball team. And then thereâs Percival Allard, aka Percy, off to some Ivy League school in New Hampshire.
Everyone is gone. Everyone but me.
âYouâre late,â Priddy says, the sound of a bell overhead tattling on my overdue arrival. She stands at the register, counting dollar bills into the drawer. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen... She doesnât look up as I come in. Her hair is down, tight curls of silver rolling over the shoulders of a starched no-nonsense blouse. Sheâs the only one in the room whoâs allowed to have hair that is let down. The waitresses who beetle around in their black-and-white uniforms, filling salt and pepper shakers, bowls of creamer, all have theirs tied back in ponytails or cornrows or braids. But not Mrs. Priddy.
I tried to call her Bronwyn once. That is, after all, her name. It says so right there on her nametag. Bronwyn Priddy. It didnât go so well.
âTraffic,â I say, and she sniggers. On her ring finger is a wedding band, given to her by her late husband, Mr. Priddy. Thereâs speculation that her incessant nagging was the cause of his death. Whether or not itâs true, I can only assume. She has a mole on her face, right there in the sallow folds of skin between the mouth and the nose, a raised mole, dark brown and perfectly round, which always sports a single gray hair. Itâs the mole that makes the rest of us certain Priddy is a witch. That and her maliciousness. Thereâs rumors that she keeps her broom in a locked storage closet off the kitchen of the café. Her broom and her cauldron, and whatever other Wiccan things she needs: a bat, a cat, a crow. Itâs all there, tucked away behind a locked metal door, though the rest of us are sure we hear them from time to time: a catâs meow, the crowâs caw. The flapping wings of the bat.
âAt this time of day?â Priddy asks about the traffic. But on her face, thereâs a smile there somewhere, under the peach fuzz that seriously needs to be waxed. She compensates for it somehow, for the peach fuzz, by drawing eyebrows onâdark brown on hair that is meant to be grayâto take the attention off her âstache. Priddy pauses a moment in her counting to raise her eyes up off the dollar bills, as I stand there in the entryway stripping off my sandy jacket, and she says to me, âThose dishes arenât going to wash themselves, you know, Alex. Get to work.â
I think she secretly likes me.
* * *
The morning comes and goes as they always do. Every day is