On a Monday in January, three weeks into the new century, Charlie Deravin drove down to retrieve his surfboards. He was intending a quick in-and-out, but stopped when he saw the For Sale sign in the parched front lawn where Bass Street intersected with Tidepool. He found himself idling in the middle of the road with a strange ache in his chest.
It was true. No longer an abstract notion. The sign was hand-painted, as if his old man hoped no one would take it seriously, but the offer was there for all to see. Everything tilted for Charlie. Lost or changed definition. He had never noticed the rusted gutters; the rotting window frames and florets of roof lichen. Not a house, no longer a home, barely a beach shack. His mother’s potted geraniums absent from the veranda. And his father, watching motionless in a deckchair, also altered.
Charlie pulled his Subaru into the driveway. Got out, stretched the kinks in his spine. He could hear the sea down there where Tidepool dead ended at the path that wound through the tea-trees and onto the sand. Smell the sea. Gulls calling. Complicated emotions calling…
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