That Old Cape Magic

categories, back when you guys were looking? Can’t Afford It and Wouldn’t Have It As a Gift? Tell me that isn’t Griff all over. This is the man you married when you could’ve married me, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky.”
    Griffin couldn’t help but smile at this imagined conversation,how he didn’t come off very well even when he himself held the reins of invention. But it was true that back then he’d adopted his parents’ mantra. Tommy and Joy had made relentless fun of him, even after he explained that he’d just been riffing on how his parents had classified at a glance every single property in the fat Cape real-estate guide, that
his
use of these same categories was meant to be ironic. But Tommy hadn’t bought any of that. “Explain irony to me,” he said. “I went to school, but that’s a concept I never really understood. Ironic guys like you confuse me especially.”
    When the trees fell away on both sides of the road, Griffin heard surf pounding nearby, though he knew how deceptive the sound could be. One summer (before the Brownings or after?) his parents had rented a place with a second-story deck, from which you could see the ocean beyond the dunes, a good quarter-mile away. Each night he fell asleep in profound stillness, only to awaken to crashing waves right outside his window, as if during the night the turning tide had breached the dunes. But when he rose and joined his father on the deck, the ocean was right where it had been the day before. His father had explained it, how the wind had changed during the night, now pulling the sound toward them instead of pushing it away, and this made sense, the way science always does, because you know it’s supposed to. But the next morning, when Griffin again awoke to the same thunder, the explanation felt inadequate to the experience. The sound was just too close, too loud, and again he expected to find the lower rooms of their rental cottage flooded. Only repetition—the same thing happening night after night—had diminished and finally banished the magic.
    But the beach
was
near. He could smell the salt, and this close to the shore, the fog had begun to dissipate. Squinting, he was able to make out a line of rolling dunes and beyond it a pale yellow orb, like a lamp with a forty-watt bulb covered by a sheet, near where he imagined the horizon to be. For a while the road he was on paralleledthe shore, then abruptly ended in a large dirt parking lot. A lone pickup truck was parked there, probably some intrepid fisherman trying to get a jump on the blues.
    A weathered boardwalk ran between the dunes, at the end of which Griffin slipped off his sandals. Looming ahead was some sort of structure—a building on the beach, maybe, or a ship at anchor?—but he couldn’t tell which until he got closer and the ghostly shape resolved itself into a restaurant with a large wraparound deck and a ship’s mast growing up through the roof. A rear door stood wide open, and he could hear someone moving around inside. The owner, probably, someone swamping the place out before the other employees arrived. Possibly even a thief. If whoever it was saw him and demanded to know what he was up to, what would he do? Raise his father’s urn by way of explanation? He hurried along before any such embarrassment could come to pass.
    Almost immediately he could tell his plan was deeply flawed. From the boardwalk the waves looked to be breaking about knee-high, but now he saw it was more like waist-high. The restaurant had become just a gray silhouette in the mist behind him, and he was reluctant to go much farther up the beach. After all, the building marked the entrance to the parking lot, and if he allowed it to disappear completely, how would he find his car again? What he’d been hoping for, he realized, was a stone jetty or a pier, something that jutted into the water, something he could walk out on and, at the far end of, release the ashes into the churning sea. But there was nothing of the sort, which meant he’d have to wade out into the surf, submerge the urn and open it into the undertow. That would require dexterity, timing and, he feared, a good measure of luck. The lid was secured by two flimsy-looking metal clasps that would probably fly open if he got hit by a big wave before he was ready. It’d be more sensible to dig a hole at the water’s edge, pour the ashes in and cover them over. Later, when the tide came in, the push and pull of the waves would mingle