Gail: A loveless marriage, a dead-end job, and an on-going affair with the friend of a friend— It’s a good thing she’s got her wine to tide her over.Jude: He needs a little time; Time to get over the war (if he can), time to get over losing Penny (if he can).

Sandy Jo: She’s got her friends, her house, her job, her husband, and her lover—life is great. Of course, things would probably be different if she knew what Gail was up to.

It is, and always has been, a beach; a place at the mercy of the tide, where things sometimes wash up, out of the water, and then are sometimes swept back out, flotsam set to wandering toward the colossal gyre of human detritus that meanders around the blank center of the sea. Things have been built there for centuries, longer than centuries, and at last they have all fallen back into the sandy marsh upon which they were built, the brunt of hurricanes or of the whimsy of men’s fancy or of their propensity to squat upon a place unbidden and then to scurry for cover at the onset of a storm.

The sea that still beats on her shores––open, deep, so blue a man can feel its color pressing on the walls of his heart––laps up under a sun that does not reach the cold, sleeping west of the continent for hours yet, or the rolling old hills and green woods of anywhere in the four-seasoned north. It is a wide, warm, and soft strand along the water that keeps the people of Fort Lauderdale in their place, hemmed in between the waves and the soughing grasses of the Everglades. It brings down the tide of people running from the cold of winter each year, and it sends them all back home again when she overheats underneath them.

This place calls Gail and Sandy Jo and Jude to it, like a bright light calls wayward ships home across a vast, tossing sea. Will they find harbor or will they wreck on the shoreline?

I live in Florida with my wife, whom I love with all my heart. I think and write about relationships, the things that connect people to one another, and how everything–work and love and the place in which a person lives and the music a person listens to and even the car they drive–affects them and exerts an influence on those connections. Frank Sinatra described himself in song as having been “a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king.” Well, I’ve been a son, a brother, a friend, a U.S. Marine, a lover, a father, and an enemy; definitely a puppet, a pauper, and a pawn; possibly a poet of sorts. I’m no king, and that’s something I’m not all that sure I’d want to be even if I could. In any case, I’ll keep working. I hope you enjoy my stories.