Every time the Atlantic turned her shoulder,
He grinned like a boy who’d been dared to run.
“We could ride that,” he’d say, salt already in his voice,
while WTVZ mapped the arc of disaster on our screen.
I was the ballast, the calculator, the one who filled the bathtub.
He and my son packed surfboards and licorice like sacrament.

The Toyota’s frame rattled with wild hymn and steel, Jimmy Buffett preaching through busted speakers, as we aimed for Carolina’s bones—storm-braced, but soft in her dune-covered belly. We passed plywood windows and empty crab shacks, a jellyfish corpse baking where we’d plant our flag.

I didn’t surf. I watched, a lighthouse mother rooted in gingham and sunscreen and dread. I read half a page and tracked his silhouette, as he hurled himself at godwaves,
each crash a Morse code I ached to decipher— son, stepfather, sea—boys daring sky.

The beach patrol came like prophets waving bullhorns instead of scripture. “You should go,” they said. They didn’t shout. Even the wind bent to listen.

Gary, full of charm and bone-luck, talked them down while Paul beamed, wet as rebirth, surfboard beneath one arm.

That night we returned to storm-shifted earth: patio chairs in the pool, oaks weeping limbs across the drive, bricks loose from the flue. Dennis had danced through Hampton Roads while we chased the sea like fools or saints.

I was hungry but didn’t eat. He turned the wheel, whistling, unaware of the small war beginning in his cells.

What we fled saved us.
What we didn’t see would not.