The Final Page

My son called me from an airport at 9:14 on a Sunday morning.

I know the exact time because I was standing at my kitchen counter in Wilmington, waiting for the toaster, and I looked at the clock on the stove when the phone rang. I remember thinking, Cullen never calls this early.

“Mom! Big news.”

There was noise behind him. Rolling suitcases. A woman’s voice on a loudspeaker saying something about Gate 14.

“Blythe and I got married yesterday.”

The toast popped up.

I didn’t touch it.

“You… what?”

“We got married! At the Carolina Yacht Club. It was beautiful, Mom. Honestly, the best day of my life.”

I set my coffee cup down on the counter very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands stop feeling like your own.

“Yesterday,” I said.

“Yesterday.”

“How many people were there?”

He hesitated. Just for a second. But I’m his mother. I heard it.

“Forty-six. Just close friends, Mom. People with status. Blythe’s parents’ people, mostly, and some of my clients. You’d have hated it, honestly. All that small talk. Nobody you’d know.”

People with status.

I stood there in the kitchen where I’d packed his school lunches for twelve years, holding a coffee cup that said WORLD’S OKAYEST MOM, which he’d given me as a joke when he was nineteen.

Forty-six guests.

I wasn’t one of them.

“Mom? You there?”

“I’m here.”

“Okay, so listen, our flight to Maui is boarding in a few minutes. But I wanted to tell you, when we land back on the 26th, we’re going straight to the point.”

The point.

My beach house.

“We already moved some stuff out there,” he went on, fast, the way he talks when he’s selling something. “Blythe gave up her apartment, and my lease was up anyway, so it just made sense. We’ll get it all set up when we’re back. You don’t have to do anything.”

I looked out my kitchen window at the crepe myrtle Nile planted the year Cullen was born.

“Mom?”

I smiled into the phone. I don’t know why. Maybe because if I hadn’t smiled, I would have screamed.

“Congratulations, sweetheart,” I said. “Have a safe flight.”

“Thanks, Mom! Love you! Gotta run!”

He hung up.

I stood there for a long time. The toast went cold. The coffee went cold.

Then I picked up my car keys.

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My name is Delia Vance. I’m seventy-one years old.

I was a school secretary for thirty-one years at Bradley Creek Elementary. My husband, Nile, was a carpenter. He built houses for other people his whole life, and then one summer he built one for us.

Cullen is our only child. He’s forty-one now. He sells commercial real estate in Charlotte and Wilmington, and he’s very good at it. He has a voice that makes people want to sign things.

He got that from neither of us. Nile used to say Cullen was born talking to the customer.

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I want to tell you about the house. Because you can’t understand any of this unless you understand the house.

In September of 1996, Hurricane Fran came across the North Carolina coast like a fist. It tore roofs off, pushed boats into living rooms, and left half the houses on Bell Island looking like someone had stepped on them.

The next spring, Nile came home from a job and put a newspaper on the kitchen table.

FOR SALE BY OWNER. Bell Island. Storm damage. As-is. Sandpiper Point.

“Del,” he said. “Let’s go look.”

The house sat at the very end of the point, where the sound meets the ocean. Gray shingles, half of them gone. A wraparound porch with a hole you could fall through. The front door was hanging by one hinge, and there was a dead crab in the kitchen sink.

The owners were an older couple from Raleigh who’d already taken their insurance money and never wanted to see it again. They wanted $142,000.

That was a fortune to us. Nile made about forty thousand a year. I made twenty-two.

We stood on the broken porch at sunset. The water went pink, then orange, then gray. A pelican came down out of the sky and hit the water like a dropped rock.

“Nile,” I said. “We can’t afford this.”

“We can’t afford a house,” he said. “We can afford a wreck. And I know how to fix a wreck.”

We took out a second mortgage on our little house in Wilmington. We emptied the savings account we’d been building for Cullen’s college. We signed the papers at a title office in Hampstead on April 3rd, 1997, and Nile carried me across the porch, stepping very carefully around the hole.

Then we spent six summers rebuilding it.

Every weekend from May to September. Every vacation day Nile had. Cullen was twelve when we started. He hated it. He wanted to be at the pool in Wilmington with his friends, not pulling nails out of old boards.

But Nile made him do it anyway.

“Someday this is going to be yours, buddy,” he’d say, handing Cullen a hammer. “You should know what’s holding it up.”

The last thing Nile did, the summer of 2002, was paint the front door.

He chose the color himself at the hardware store in Surf City. A bright, clear blue. He called it “Del’s eyes.” I told him that was the corniest thing I’d ever heard. He painted it anyway, standing on the porch with his radio playing beach music, a streak of blue on his cheek.

That door is still blue. I’ve repainted it three times since he died, always in the same color.

Nile died fourteen years ago. A stroke, in the workshop behind the beach house, on a Saturday in March. He was sixty-one. He’d gone out to sharpen a chisel.

His life insurance policy paid out $250,000. I used most of it to pay off what was left on both mortgages, because Nile always said he wanted the point to be “free and clear” before he died. He didn’t quite make it. So I finished it for him.

I put his picture on the mantel at the beach house the week after the funeral. Nile on the porch in his paint-splattered T-shirt, squinting at the camera, holding up a level like it was a trophy.

It stayed there for fourteen years.

Every time I walked in the door, he was the first person I saw.