Huffington Magazine Issue 50 | Page 50

C

EXCERPT

BEST
SUMMER
EVER
HUFFINGTON
05.26.13

CULTURE
BOOKS

mer was over), my shadow walked
with me on the water. If the tide
was in, it would waver on the surface, seeming to do a slow hula.
Although I can’t be completely
sure, I think the boy and the
woman and their dog were there
from the first time I took that
walk. The shore between the
town and the cheerful, blinking gimcrackery of Joyland was
lined with summer homes, many
of them expensive, most of them
clapped shut after Labor Day.
But not the biggest of them,
the one that looked like a green
woo den castle. A boardwalk led
from its wide back patio down
to where the seagrass gave way
to fine white sand. At the end of
the boardwalk was a picnic table
shaded by a bright green beach
umbrella. In its shade, the boy
sat in his wheelchair, wearing a
baseball cap and covered from
the waist down by a blanket even
in the late afternoons, when the
temperature lingered in the seventies. I thought he was five or
so, surely no older than seven.
The dog, a Jack Russell terrier,
either lay beside him or sat at
his feet. The woman sat on one
of the picnic table benches,

sometimes reading a book, mostly just staring out at the water.
She was very beautiful.
Going or coming, I always
waved to them, and the boy waved
back. She didn’t, not at first. 1973
was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon an-

My shadow walked
with me on the water.
If the tide was in, it would
waver on the surface,
seeming to do a slow hula.”
nounced he was not a crook, the
year Edward G. Robinson and Noel
Coward died. It was Devin Jones’s
lost year. I was a twenty-one yearold virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of
bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey
shorts, a clunker Ford (with a
good radio), occasional suicidal
ideations, and a broken heart.
Sweet, huh?
Excerpted from JOYLAND, out June
4, by Stephen King, published by
Hard Case Crime. Copyright
© 2013 by Stephen King.