Read Online Rules for Becoming a Legend by Timothy S. Lane - Free Book Online

let’s go, let’s go!” his daughter said.
    Todd kissed his wife on the cheek, tucked the sheets in around her. She smiled back, already sailing. “Wash the damn cow skull,” she whispered.
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    Beach was winter white. Bleached driftwood and white-capped waves. Blown-out sand sculptures formed around things washedup and forgotten. The littlest piece of trash, or stick, or turned-over cup grew in the drifts of sand until it seemed big enough to hide a creature. Some malformed thing waiting to scuttle forth and eat when the time was right. Passing rain squalls dumped parts of their burden on their journey inland, patterns in many-cratered pointillism.
    Todd watched Suzie run in the sand, so small she seemed unreal, collecting the things she found in the basket she made with the front of her T-shirt. She had her blue jacket unzipped and it flapped in the gusts. When she turned a certain way, the wind flipped it completely up, and it looked like his daughter was hanging by the armholes as her jacket tugged her into the heavens.
    â€œYou stay close,” Todd called out on that last day.
    â€œOK, Daddy,” she yelled back, not even looking.
    He chuckled to himself. Little, pretty, Suzanna. A startling thing he called Suzie Q. Baby girl born so cute nobody was safe. Even the most checked-out teenage boys stopped to coo at little Suzie.
    It was the last day Todd was fully happy. Oh there would be other days of pleasantness, surges of positive feeling, but this was the final time he was filled all the way up. He lay back in the sand and crossed his ankles, a practice Genny Mori said would give him varicose veins. She was always saying things like this. It was how she told him she loved him. He crossed them anyway and sighed. What a luxury. The people of Columbia City had finally started seeing him for who he had become rather than what he could have. They asked him questions about little Suzie instead of rehab on his knee. There were no illusions of a basketball comeback. No pipe dreams of an NBA star hailing from their town. Not anymore.
    The beach was empty and surprisingly warm in that Oregon way—that is, only when the wind slacked for a moment. Todd thought he felt his spine aligning into a straighter form as he sankinto the sand and the wind built banks of it at his side, working hard at covering him up. His little girl was safe, in his sight, scampering to driftwood logs, stealing the treasures caught in the little wet caves of their sides. His wife was home, pregnant with their second, probably studying at the kitchen table, going to be a nurse. Another child had been Todd’s idea. “Suzie’s lonely,” he’d said. Life was in order so he let his blinks linger a little longer. A little longer still. Small curtains of sand ran over his nose. In a day or two, hell, he’d become just another mysterious shape hidden by the beach. It was hard work at Van Eyck Beverages. Loading case after case. And soon he was asleep.
    Some time later—how much he didn’t know then, but would spend many years trying to calculate—he jolted awake. He stood. Blood stuck in his legs made way for his head. His whole body was tingling, asleep or dead. He looked out and saw an empty beach.
    â€œSuzie?” he yelled. And then yelled again. Nothing. He scanned the beach. Empty. He had the sudden thought that she’d been kidnapped so he rushed up the sandy dunes in the direction of the parking lot. His old gray minivan was there and nothing else. He felt his weak knee, watery with pain. He turned and was back on the ridge of the dune, looking down at the ocean and the sky and the harried little waves that came in. Gray, white, white. He looked far to the left and then to the right and it was the same. Gray, white, white. Gray, white, white. Then. Blue.
    Her blue coat.
    She had needed a new one growing as fast as she was, so they took her to