Chapter 1

I think I could barely make a living as a writer, maybe, if I took advantage of every government assistance program, including housing and food assistance. I don’t have to, though. I’m at the tail end of an inheritance, not rich, but between that and some sci-fi writing and some technical writing and some random ghost-writing I’m really quite comfortable.

Right down to the house where I live.

It’s twelve feet off the sand. Sand? Yep. Beach house on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, one of several in a community. Fairly new, too, since a hurricane several years ago erased the older ones. One of Dad’s things, the beach house was a luxury he and Mom worked hard to achieve. I wish they’d lived longer to enjoy it more, but between me and my sister, she got their retirement house in town sixty miles north and I chose the beach house. She sold the town house. I kept this one.

At high tide the edge of the water was three hundred yards from my doorstep. Step? Actually a set of stairs with a landing halfway up, one Dad’s concessions to his waning health. Another concession was a powered chain hoist that would raise a big basket from ground level to the porch twelve feet up.

That elevated porch was a favorite place for me. It offered shade from the summer sun, open to the inevitable breeze off the Gulf and the screened sides barricaded me against the mosquitoes that came out of the marshes behind the little beach community.

Community. It was vacation homes for most of the owners. The place reached a hundred percent occupation on weekends starting after Easter and lasting until Halloween, with occasional units being occupied during the week as well in the vacation season.

I was one full-time resident. Two lots down was another, the Carvers, a retired couple and also the reason that the school bus made a stop here.

The Carvers, Hank and Becky, were my Mom and Dad’s generation, more or less. They had a single daughter and from her, a single grand-daughter, Barbara. They’re in their early seventies. Barb was thirteen when I moved in here.

I met Barb the first day as I was supervising a mover bringing in furniture and somewhat meager belongings. She walked up, paused like she was waiting to be acknowledged.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Curiosity.” Just over five feet. Rather severely short and very red hair. Blue eyes. Thin, as much as I could tell underneath the floppy shorts and T-shirt.

“Okay, Curiosity. I’m Paul Richard.” I pronounced that last name in the Cajun fashion, “REE-shard”.

“Oh, I’m Barb. Uh, Barbara Puckett. I, uh, live with my grandparents over there in that green one.” She pointed over her shoulder behind her.

“You live there, or are you on a visit?”

“I live with them ... They live there.”

“Oh. Well, I’m gonna live here. I guess that makes us neighbors.”

“I guess. You need to come meet my grandparents when you can.” She paused. “Wife and kids?”

“Nope and nope.”

“I was hoping to have somebody to play with, but I guess if you had kids they’d be kinda young.”

“Unless I started in high school. Uh, how old are you?”

“Thirteen. Seventh grade.”

“I remember seventh grade,” I said.

“It’s not as fun as it could be,” she posed.

“Yeah. That, too. I was a nerd.”

“I got that and then some. You still a nerd?”

I looked at her. The face was open and honest, so I answered. “Yeah, I guess. I do some writing. Was an engineer until ... Well, now I own this house and I write for money.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. I...”

“Anything I’d know about?”

“D’you read science fiction?”

“Nah...”

“Well, that’s a lot of what I write that people might read. And I do technical writing sometimes. And some ghost writing.”

“Ghost writing?”

“Yeah, people pay me to write so they can put their names on it.”

“Sounds kinda rotten.”

“Money comes in. That’s the important part.” I paused. “I need to go tell these guys where to put the furniture. You can come up if you want.”

“Uh ... I just met you. You need to meet Gramma and Grampa first.”

“Very prudent,” I replied. “You gonna be down here when I come back down?”

“Might. Kinda boring today.”

“I’ll be back.” I climbed the steps and went inside, directing placement of the sofa, recliner, entertainment center, and beds, two, one in the guest room, the other in the master bedroom.

Typical of these ‘camps’, the bedrooms were small, off to the side of a huge (relatively – maybe 12-1300 square feet total under the roof) great room with a kitchen area off to one side, a single bathroom between the two bedrooms, with screened windows generously added all the way around.

The general idea of these things was ‘vacation’ where a lot of the activities would be outdoors. Indeed, the ‘ground floor’ under the house proper was arranged to that end as well – part of it enclosed in the requisite mosquito-proof screens. The other part of the ground floor was where I parked my side-by-side ATV and a utility trailer with a two-holer kayak on it.

A nearby sluggish, shallow bayou meandered out of the marshes into the gulf, providing me with a quiet place to kayak and fish as long as I was mindful of the insects who thought a nice, tender human was a smorgasbord from heaven.

By the time I got the furniture in place and moved some groceries in, I told myself I’d created an idyllic retreat for a writer.

Wasn’t too hot, so I moved myself and my laptop down into the screened area on the ground floor, adjusted my chair, opened up a document I was hoping to morph into a little novel. I closed my eyes to let the thoughts form.

“Mister Paul?” Barbara’s voice.

“Barbara?”

“Barb,” she asserted.

“If you’re Barb then I’m Paul.”

“But you’re OLDER.”

Don’t I know it?!? “Makes life easier. What’s up today?”

“You’re the big story,” she said. “ONLY story, actually.”

“I’m sure there are lots of stories at school today. What kept you here?”

“I was having an episode this morning. Stuff at school. Sometimes I have trouble dealing with it. Gramma understands.”

“And now I do,” I said.

“Nobody here during the week during school. Just you and us. Grampa asks if you’d wanna come over for coffee.”

I looked at the mug rapidly reaching ambient temperature on my little desk. “Sure! Why not?”

“You really do need to meet ‘em. That way they’ll know you and Gramma won’t be as nervous about me running around with some unknown male lurking.”

“I don’t lurk. I live here.”

Her eyes flashed a twinkle. “Single men in isolated communities lurk. It’s a literary imperative.”

‘Literary imperative.’ The lid on Pandora’s Box was just opened for me. Little did I realize that a small thermonuclear device would be clad in a pair of pink cotton shorts and a blue T-shirt with a kitten printed on the front.

“C’mon,” I told her. I reached into my pocket and pulled my keyring out. “We’ll take the four-wheeler.”

“We could walk. It’s not far and the exercise...”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll get sufficient exercise. The four-wheeler needs to run every now and then, too.”

“Okay.”

Buzz a couple of doors down, park, find my adult neighbors sitting in circumstances similar to what I left, sipping coffee, with a carafe and a spare mug on the table.

“Come in, Mister Richard,” the man said. “I’m Henry Carver. Hank. And my wife Becky.”

“We’ve met before,” I said, shaking hands. “Mom and Dad’s, a couple of years ago. I inherited their place.”

“We were sorry to hear about their passing,” Becky soothed. “They were good neighbors.”

“They kept tight rein on me and my sister so we’d be good neighbors, too,” I stated, hoping to lighten things up.

It worked. We talked about the dearth of denizens in the middle of a school week, then how we might have shared ancestry. That conversation turned up no connections. We talked about fishing and crabbing and shrimping on a recreational level. I made note that the little bayou up the road might become a source of some fresh and tasty seafood. That led to another train of conversation, and finally I begged off, citing a need to get some words together for an agent.

The take-away from the meeting – visit, actually – with Barb’s grandparents is that they and I assessed each other. Barb’s gain from this is that now I was considered ‘safe’ for her to visit.

The next day after school I was sitting inside the screened downstairs pecking away at a sci-fi draft when I heard, “Hi, Mister Paul.”

“Hey there, Curious. What’s up?”

A titter then “Barb, please.”

“Paul, please.”

“But you’re OLDER.”

“A mere few years in a universe five billion years old. The difference between us is nothing.”

“Can I come in?”

“Or you can stand there and we can talk through the screen. Of course you can come in.”

And I consider that the day we started a friendship.

Barbara’s turn:

So I keep a diary. Gramma says that it’s an archaic practice, but then SHE’s the one that actually bought me a diary. I asked about keeping it on a computer, but she talked about the impermanence of electronic media, and added that hand writing my thoughts was good practice, that improvement to my handwriting was a side benefit.

Gramma’s a retired teacher, “English teacher when I started out. Became language arts later,” she says.

So, yes. Diary. I duly recorded Paul’s big entry into our lives. I noted he was in his twenties and he’s the first writer I ever met. I recorded that he made an effort to come and meet Gramma and Grampa soon after he moved in, and that they regarded his visit as pleasant and entertaining.

“So do you consider him safe enough to let me visit him on my own?”

Grampa nodded to Gramma. “Beck? You wanna field this one?”

Gramma and Grampa have been married fifty years. I think that they can communicate telepathically sometimes.

“Darlin’,” Gramma spoke softly, “you know what we talked about, what factors come into effect between men and women.”

At thirteen, a few months from fourteen, I had just had my first period and Gramma had tenderly led me through it. She emphasized it meant that my body was now ready to procreate, and that many men and boys would be eager to go through the motions with me.

So this conversation was a reminder of that.

My side of the conversation was not adversarial. I reminded them of the isolation here. “Nobody during the week at all. It’s an hour round trip if I start participating in school activities. Mister Paul is just somebody who might be a person to talk with. He’s a writer, so I think he’ll have some interesting things to say.”

“You’re a very smart young lady,” Grampa said.

What he didn’t say was that the side issue that came with ‘smart’ was being ‘on the spectrum’, the spectrum being the range of symptoms of autism. At least that’s what the doctors say. It shows up because I don’t play well with others my age, and if I get pressed too hard in a situation sometimes I just kind of lock up.

I don’t know how much of that is autism and how much is, according to some more doctors, a precocious intellect two or three standard deviations above normal. And yes, I had to look up ‘standard deviation’ to see what it meant. I learned. I also learned that in a classroom with twenty or thirty ‘normal’ students I was like a watermelon in a bag of marbles, intellectually.