Read Everything I Found on the Beach for Free Online Page B

used to be, while Danny was still with her; none of the soft edgemanship they both harmlessly enjoyed, like dogs chasing the same ball in a park. None of what was just gentle rhythmic chemistry, a safe peacefulness to it when Danny was alive and could watch it, and valued it in some way as this great reassurance of his choice in her that his friend could have this intentless thing with her.
    He looked down at the sore welling on his thumb. It was one of those small things. He picked at it.
    â€œDo you have a needle?” he asked.
    Cara took his hand and looked at it. “It’s not ready yet. You’ll just dig into yourself. Leave it. It will lift.”
    Hold nodded at her.
    â€œYou should let me take him out soon,” he said.
    And she nearly called him Danny but then she said, “Holden, he’s too young. And it’s a school night.”
    They sipped their tea awhile.
    â€œYou’ve got the nets out?”
    â€œI’ve just set them.”

    He had gone from the quay and driven over to the beach and taken the net over his shoulder out along the shore in the tough old spoil bag. It made sense if he was coming for rabbits on the cliff that night to have some point to aim for and work down to, but more than this physical excuse it was that something went from him on the beach.
    Danny’s death had become a great thing, and a point of time from which all things seemed to be measured. Hold felt very strongly the responsibility to create some new point for things to come from, some positive beginning point like the birth of a child to a couple. He had a vision of them all sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside the finished house. He felt as if he needed some sign to have that purpose. He felt greatly that a renewed energy was needed, and that perhaps from this positive thing, in this good momentum, it would not be the betrayal to go with her as it would be from hurt, in this space of damage. If it grew out of something good and new they had built for themselves and wasn’t simply them falling into the space that Danny’s death had created.
    The bass hunt side to side, zigzagging for things disturbed along the breaking lip of the inward tide, so thegill net is laid across the beach, right-angled to the sea over the uncovered pools to catch them as they follow the water in. Once they choose a course, if the net is there, they hit it.
    In the rushing water, the nylon would be invisible to the fish and Hold could imagine them striking the net, that first moment of bloody confusion and the increased power to swim on, driving them further into the mesh, the scales shed in the water, the line fitting fatally behind their gills. He pushed the thought away.
    As he had left the beach the sun was starting to bleed out into the evening. The warmth hadn’t come into things yet and he knew it would be a cool night. Again, the peregrine had come off the cliffs and for a while circled over him as he lay the net, in witness, the hunter come to watch the hunter. There was a real definition to the thing against the thinning evening light.

    â€œYou should come out again. You and Jake.”
    And he remembered then, in full detail, her shoulders, bare, the thin open shirt licking out in the wind, the surprise freckles on her shoulders seeming to flush then merge under the sun, like drops of something onto clean cloth; and Danny drove the boat head on to the waves and got her jumping, with the childishness over her face at the enjoyment of it; and Danny, so proud.And it seemed like Hold had only understood that word proud then for the first time. That pride in his friend. And Hold knew that he would have a care for this girl that was like that close care for a friend’s child, and that she was partly his to look after.
    And she remembered him. This friend of Danny’s with his strange-meaning name. How he was more methodical and quiet than Danny, and less flashy. And how he brought up the