THE SANDPIPER
We built a restaurant—the Sandpiper—where you could get fish and chips wrapped in paper and eat them at picnic tables facing the water.
We built a bait shop, worms and minnows,
And they could get milk and bread from Goods & Things.
There are t-shirts and sea worms five-and-dime with just enough groceries to keep you from leaving once you arrived. Every small port of call had a dock, and every dock had a view of the Atlantic that could make you forget, for a few hours at least, that anything else existed.
The weekenders came year after year. Their children grew tall on our beaches, their skin turning from ashen city pale to warm gold by August. They learned to swim in the currents, to fish off the docks, to dance under string lights at the little outdoor theater.
Rubyway grew, but it never grew large.
My father kept it that way on purpose.
“Small towns last longer,” he used to tell me. “Less to lose, more to hold onto.”
I believed him then. I think I still do.
But I have also begun to notice things my father never spoke out loud.
Like how the storms always seem to come when the town is unsettled. Not every time—just enough that you start to notice and if you’re paying attention. A hurricane remnant after a bad fight between neighbors. A sudden squall after someone announces they’re leaving for good. A hard, tearing storm the year a man was arrested for killing his wife just offshore.
People said that was coincidence.
People say a lot of things in small towns, and most of them are meant to keep the peace
Many do.
Many don’t.
Below me now, the harbor is waking into another bright day. Boats rock gently in their slips—runabouts and schooners and a few tall-masted sailboats belonging to the wealthier who like to pretend they’ve discovered something no one else has. The gulls wheel overhead, crying out in thin, sharp voices, and somewhere down near the bait shop I can hear the clatter of someone dropping a crate.
It should feel like any other morning in Rubyway.
And yet.
There is a stillness under it today. A weight in the air that presses lightly against my chest, the way the sky feels just before a storm you can’t yet see.
I take a sip of my coffee and let my eyes travel out to the horizon.
“Don’t start imagining things,” I say out loud, hearing my father’s voice in my head as clearly as if he were standing behind me.
But I’ve lived here my entire life. I know the way the wind usually smells at this hour, the way the water usually moves against the pilings. I know the difference between an ordinary day and one that is just slightly… off.
And today is off.
Behind me, the screen door creaks open. Crealie’s voice floats out, soft and sleepy.
“You’ve been out here long?”
“Since sunrise,” I say, turning slightly in my chair. “Couldn’t sleep.”
She steps onto the porch, barefoot, her hair still loose around her shoulders. She follows my gaze out to the water, and I see the moment she feels it too—the faint tightening in her expression, the way her shoulders draw in just a fraction.
“It’s quiet,” she says.
“Too quiet,” I answer.
We stand there together for a moment, looking out over the harbor we both love, the place that has given us so much.
The breeze shifts, just slightly, carrying with it a low, distant sound.
Not thunder.
Outside My Window 