Summer By The Sea

He almost burst out laughing. He would just bet this “young houseguest” was single, a sweet young thing, and Cassandra was attempting to fix him up. He was thirty-two and unattached, and his fellow teachers tended to do that to him, too. Cassandra he couldn’t get mad at because she was Lucy’s friend. Plus, he could see the irony in her request.

Cassandra noted his amused expression and tsk-tsked him. “You know how important meditation is, Sam. Sarah asked me to find her a class, and I thought of you. I never saw anyone teach neophytes at work like that until you came along. The other lifeguard supervisors scream at the recruits and blow their whistles. Run, swim, practice mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

“Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is quite important,” he teased.

“Staying calm and responding appropriately to stressful situations is more important.” She nodded at him.

He agreed with her, but that wasn’t the point. “How old is your houseguest?” he asked.

Cassandra didn’t bat an eye. “Sarah is in her thirties, like you, and she’s quite pretty. She returns to California after Labor Day.”

So here was this summer’s anonymous yet intimate fling—was that what she was implying?

“No, Cassandra. Sorry.” Honestly, the morning’s uncomfortable realizations about him and Lucy not having an emotional connection were making him not want to have his yearly fling. It seemed pathetic now. Maybe he’d only thought he’d been connecting with these women, just as he’d thought he’d been connecting with Lucy during their twice-monthly Saturday outings. Lucy had made him see that it hadn’t been true, at all.

“Please, Dad, help her!” Lucy’s voice was a shriek. He nearly jumped, it surprised him so much.

“Luce, I’m going to be busy with you. You and I can hang out and do stuff together. We can go to the library and read books together all day, if that’s what you want.” He would miss his job, and money would be tight, but at least the time spent together would bring them closer.

“But, Dad, you don’t understand...” Lucy got up and shrugged out of her backpack. She riffled through a stack of books and papers and pulled out a magazine.

Business Roundup. He stared at her, confused. This was an adult publication, and not something he or her mother read, that was for sure. He couldn’t quite picture bohemian Cassandra reading it, either.

Lucy flipped the pages open to an article she’d marked with a yellow sticky note and showed the pages to him. One featured a huge, glossy picture of a severe, unsmiling woman.

He blinked and looked up at his daughter.

“This is Sarah Buckley,” Lucy said. “Haven’t you heard of her?”

Should he have? He shrugged and held up his hands.

“She’s one of the most important women in Silicon Valley,” his eleven-year-old informed him.

He studied the picture again. Sarah Buckley wore a black suit jacket with a white shirt and had dark chin-length hair. Her fighting gaze made her look like she battled and scrapped for what was hers and never gave up trying.

“I didn’t know you were interested in business,” he said to Lucy.

“She’s a woman of substance. That’s what it says. Read the article.”

He took the magazine from her and flipped through the piece. It was five pages long. When he heard his daughter loved the library, frankly, he’d thought she meant the young adult section. Cassandra had all kinds of artsy friends who wrote literature for kids and teens, but seriously...business magazines?

“Sarah Buckley talks about setting life goals and making daily progress and moving above the limitations of your background.” Lucy set her chin as she spoke, and in that moment, there was no question, she absolutely reminded Sam of the driven woman profiled in the piece.

He moved away from the magazine with the photograph of the intense Silicon Valley executive that Lucy so admired. He strode over to a couch across the room and sank deeply into the cushions. The whole day so far had been staggering to him. What other parts of herself had Lucy kept hidden from him? He had such a gap to bridge with her that it felt overwhelming.

Lucy settled back in the chair, rereading the article about the woman she obviously idolized. Cassandra wore a thoughtful expression that Sam couldn’t place.

“She’s my niece,” Cassandra said quietly. “My deceased sister’s only daughter. She’s in trouble with her job and she’s coming here to destress for the summer.”

“Sarah Buckley is your niece?” He stood up and glanced over Lucy’s shoulder at the photograph again. He saw no family resemblance to Cassandra.

A movement out the window caught his attention. On the beach, a crew on a town dump truck was delivering freshly painted lifeguard stands to each of the assigned stations.

A pang went through him. As much as he wanted to improve his relationship with Lucy this summer, the reminders of what he was giving up for that made Sam think again of all the good things he loved about his job that he would miss once he tendered his resignation. He would miss the early morning swims with the lifeguard teams, being calmed by and at peace in the vast, powerful ocean, his refuge since he’d been able to walk. Being one with the ocean was a feeling he couldn’t easily describe, a home to him. It was his peace and his anchor. He’d hoped Lucy would feel this way too, but she didn’t.

Not everybody loved the ocean, he reminded himself. Lots of people couldn’t swim or didn’t know how to manage the powerful rip currents that could drown even strong swimmers in seconds if they didn’t know how to read and navigate the tide’s unique signals. Sam loved the rescue teams, the camaraderie of the other lifeguards, his older bosses and the younger men and women, still in college, that he trained and mentored. He loved helping lost kids find their families and he loved diffusing tensions between beachgoers who’d sat too long in hot summer traffic.

He was good at it. He would do it year-round if the wages were good enough and he lived in a region of the country that supported it. Because of Lucy, he had stayed in Wallis Point, a town close to her home. It had now become his permanent home, too.

“Dad, you shouldn’t quit your lifeguard job,” Lucy pleaded again. “Please let me stay with Cassandra.”

She must have been watching him stare wistfully at the beach. The magazine was slack in her lap, and her serious brown eyes seemed sorry for him.

“She’ll be in good hands here,” Cassandra added softly.

“What about your work?” he asked Cassandra.

She resumed washing her brushes. “Don’t worry about me. I always take care of myself.” She glanced up at Sam with an expression he couldn’t quite read. “I’ve never told anyone this, but I do have regrets from Sarah’s childhood.”

Both he and Lucy had given her their full attention. They waited for her next words with rapt curiosity.

“Her parents both died when Sarah was twelve.” Cassandra paused to scrub at an especially tough stain on one of her brushes.

“I know this story.” Lucy jumped in eagerly. “Sarah talks about it in the article. She said that facing tragedy and then a difficult home life in her younger years helped hone her focus and showed her the importance of hard work in creating her own destiny.” She read from the magazine. “‘Because only in creating one’s own destiny can one ever be free.’” She put the magazine down. “She won a full scholarship to study engineering at university, where she started developing her own patents and inventions. She started her own company, and now I think she’s really rich. Nobody can push her around anymore.”

Sam stared at his daughter, confused on all kinds of levels. Money was what was important to Lucy? He hadn’t had an inkling that she placed so high a value on wealth. He certainly hadn’t passed that onto her. Business and power had never been important drivers to him. He was more of a helper, and he liked to live simply. Humbly. Sarah Buckley’s world just wasn’t his kind of place.

Cassandra shuffled over, bringing the platter of blueberry cake with her. She plunked it down before him. “Some refreshment, Sam?” she asked drily.

“That is just like what Hannah the witch gave to Nathaniel, too!” Lucy exclaimed. “Dad, you can be Nat!”

Cassandra raised an eyebrow at him.

“Let me guess,” he said, realizing he would have to get used to living with Lucy on her terms and not just spending two afternoons per month on a fun, distracting outing he’d dreamed up. “I’m living in The Witch of Blackbird Pond?”

“Nathaniel was Kit’s love interest. They both needed blueberry cake and kittens to find their happily ever after,” Cassandra explained.

“They get married in the end,” Lucy piped up. “Neither of them see it coming. But it’s true love and a happy ending.”

“Mm-hmm. Right.”

“Cynical about love, are you?” Cassandra asked him with a smile.

He laughed. “I’m not cynical about anything.” Actually, he was amazed that Lucy was talking so much, and about things she never talked about with him. With Sam she was always so serious and polite. This afternoon’s conversation was a revelation, even if much of it was disturbing to him. A reminder of how much he’d let himself off the hook as a parent.

He shook his head. It was bewildering, sometimes, that he was even a father to a daughter.

With a sigh, Cassandra sat beside him on the couch, patting his knee with her hand as she did so.