Claire

Parleys’ served the greater Nanticoke peninsula with bait-and-tackle and a wide range of convenience items, and it was one of the area’s last remaining commercial establishments. Sure, Road Runners hunkered down in its parking lot closer to Salisbury, and the old department store kind of clung on to life there by the old oyster dock—but Parley’s was the only place with any real life in it.###Bip Parley and that little mongrel Tiffany manned the store most days, being the last remaining Parleys out here since Bobby went up to Jessup. Tiffany spent most days coloring on the walls outside the bathrooms, watching the customers warily—no one really knew whose she was, but she was a Parley for certain. She had that suspicious look.###Bip kept a little of everything in the store, which is how she came to sell Pete Margitt that thermos. (He called it a cooler, said he was taking it down the boys at the ocean.) Pete was tickled by the Marlboro logo on the front, being the brand he smoked, and so he spent the last few dollars he’d filched from his wife’s penny-saver jar and walked out with some bait, some tackle, and a brand new red drink cooler to show Ed and Tommy, Jr. before the trio went out on that last marlin trip. Some folks would say the marlin fishing at Ocean City was for pussies from Washington, DC and Baltimore, but Ed and Tommy, Jr. and Pete’d been deep ocean fishers since they could walk. Probably that’s why they didn’t see it coming—the dark clouds didn’t scare them, not on a clear silver day just off the Inlet. Six, seven beers in, taking the ice cubes out of the thermos or cooler or whatever Pete’d bought, even the first raindrops went unnoticed.###By the time the storm struck up it was too late. The Marlboro cooler floated better than the rest of the wreckage, and years later Pete would wake up in a cold sweat, the sight of Ed’s arm reaching up a third and final time to gain purchase on that damn Thermos, watching it roll away.###The currents that year were strange and rough, the weather unpredictable. Little children found pieces of the accident from the Inlet up to Cape May, incorporating the bits of fiberglass and wood into their sandcastles, for better than three years. When the cooler finally came aground in Atlantic City, its Marlboro logo a little faded but none the worse for wear, it was 12 year old DeShaun Williams who picked it up. ###Until he’d found the cooler, DeShaun was by turns bored, mystified, and unsettled by this family vacation. Dad wanted to hit the casinos in AC, claimed he’d gotten a great deal, and didn’t everyone love the ocean? Mom was much quieter than usual. Every morning she’d pack the beach bag and march DeShaun and his baby sister Kiki (who was such a moron, DeShaun thought, that she couldn’t even pronounce her own name, Katherine) down to the weirdly deserted beach. ###DeShaun brought the cooler to his mom, who regarded it with a triumphant glare; later that night she’d present it to her husband Gary with quiet menace. “Isn’t it nice the children can find trash to play with on the beach?” she asked him, before turning her back in the large hotel bed. ###In the chaos of packing up to leave, the Marlboro cooler travelled back to Philly with them, and found a home in the back of the cabinet. Through DeShaun’s death, the divorce, the remarriage, it simply disappeared until the day Kiki had to clean out Mom’s things. ###Pulling the big red Marlboro thermos from the big over-fridge cabinet, she was bewildered—she didn’t remember Atlantic City, and as far as she knew she hated beach vacations and so did everyone else. The cooler went on the pile for the AmVets, who took it to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Distribution Center to be sorted and either destroyed or sent to the thrift stores. ###Tiffy Parley, art student, wandered the aisles of her favorite Baltimore thrift, touching each object and imagining she could feel their past owners. The Marlboro cooler stood on a shelf in the kitchenwares area, beside a snowglobe with a tiny village inside and a Big-Mouth Billy Bass, the kind that sings and moves its mouth. Beat up and kind of uninteresting, it was overpriced at $5, but Tiffy picked it up anyway, thinking she could use it on a trip to the shore. ###For some reason the cooler reminded her of Nanticoke—of home. Reminded her of Aunt Bip, the crazy old lesbian, and the days in the little boat on the river, halfway hoping nothing would bite. She took the cooler home that afternoon and left it on the kitchen counter, where it would squat, unnoticed, until they all moved out. ###