Read Online The Beach House by Georgia Bockoven - Free Book Online

the flowers weren’t from a florist at the same time Chris had stated the obvious—someone had picked them from the profusion of blooms that had been planted around the house.
    Every summer since, unfailingly, there had been flowers to greet them, always accompanied by a note of welcome. This year, there were only flowers. She missed the note.
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    Chris made the turn at the outcropping and headed back down the beach. He ran a zigzag pattern, veering to step on kelp pods and broken sand dollars to hear them pop and crunch beneath his feet, stopping to watch a novice surfer take a header, and searching the faces of those he passed for one of the locals he’d come to know over the years.
    He glanced up as he passed the house again, looking to see if his mother had come out on the deck. He worried about her—what she would do when he went off to college next year, if she’d ever find someone she liked, if the Volvo would last until she could afford a new car. She hated it when he told her she should get out more, that she was never going to find someone unless she put some effort into it.
    He had to give her credit for leaving him alone about when he went out and who it was with. She never said anything, but it was obvious she knew about him and Tracy.
    Him and Tracy? What a joke. There was no more “him and Tracy” than there was him and Stanford or Yale or USC. All his life he’d figured both were a given eventually. For as long as he could remember, his dad had talked about the savings account he’d started the day his son was born to pay for Chris’s college.
    Although community property, at his mother’s insistence, the account was not divided in the divorce but left intact for Chris’s use later. Her only mistake was in trusting his dad to take care of the money. When his father remarried—a woman with three children of her own—the funds slowly began to disappear. Believing his father an honorable man, neither Chris nor his mother thought to check the account. Not until Chris went to make a deposit of the tips he’d saved from working at the restaurant did he learn the money was almost gone.
    When he’d confronted his father at his office later that day, Kevin had asked Chris to try to understand how hard it was to deny his new family basic necessities. Besides, it wasn’t as if there had been any formal agreement about the savings account.
    Sure, Kevin had agreed the money should go to Chris for college, but at the time there’d been no way for him to foresee the financial circumstances he’d be faced with in the future.
    Chris left through the company garage and did something he had never done before or since. He took the key to his mother’s old, beaten-up Volvo, dug it into the front fender of his father’s new red BMW, and walked the full length, trailing the key behind him.
    It took Chris months to realize it wasn’t the money he cared about, it was being burdened with a dream his father had instilled and then abandoned.
    Now, with only a year to go before graduation, he still had no idea where he wanted to go to college or what he wanted to study. At seventeen how was he supposed to know what he wanted to do for the rest of his life? He wasn’t even sure what he wanted to do tomorrow.
    Lost in what had become depressingly familiar thoughts, Chris almost missed seeing a volleyball headed his way. More on reflex than intent, he lunged and hit it back. A guy with shoulder-length black hair, wraparound sunglasses, and a baseball cap with the bill facing backward received the ball and made a perfect spike over the net. The ball came back, to the server this time. He passed it to Chris, and without anyone saying a word, Chris was in the game.
    The rally lasted until the other team miscalculated an out-of-bounds ball. The guy with long hair rotated to server, holding his hand up for a high five from Chris as he moved into