Water Dogs

By Kalan Chapman Lloyd

On Florida's iconic 30A, mother and social worker Vinny Lillenhammer has a secret.

About the Betancourts next door.

Unrequited artist and newly widowed Lila Beckham has a secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebelle Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088155820

Book preview

Praise for

Kalan Chapman Lloyd’s Loser’s Road

Heartwarming [and] hard to put down… will make you believe redemption is possible no matter how bad life seems. - Romance Times

A winning contemporary romance… a gently affecting tale of personal redemption, second chances, and the power of faith. – Kirkus Book Review

Thoroughly engrossing story of how a down-and-out loser finds that only when he loses everything does he really win. – Midwest Book Review

"Loser’s Road is an engaging work of fiction about growth, second chances, and one man’s ability to grow and change for the better." - Clarion Foreword Reviews

Defies genres… a story to get lost in. Perfectly encapsulates what a good comeback story should be. – Hollywood Book Review

Sometimes you have to lose it all to win… a well-written read.  - Manhattan Book Review

An entertaining story of redemption and growth… well-developed [and] ahead of the game. - San Francisco Book Review

Refreshing [and] believable. - Tulsa Book Review

Author Kalan Chapman Lloyd has impressively created an appealingly mature romance, demonstrating the importance of mutual respect and of loving and being loved by community. – IndieReader

Praise for Kalan Chapman Lloyd’s

The MisAdventures of Miss Lilly

"[F]rothy, saucy chick-lit for fans of all things country, and Lilly Atkins is Erin Brockovich in boots, ensuring plenty of sass and Southern charm." – Foreword Reviews on So Many Boots, So Little Time

Charming and heartfelt, this complicated love story delivers a well-developed journey of self-discovery and romance. – Kirkus Reviews on So Many Boots, So Little Time

…full of sassy, gun-carrying, badass women. Lloyd checks off all the appropriate boxes — suspense, drama and humor — to keep readers turning the pages. – Romance Times on So Many Boots, So Little Time

Prior fans will be delighted at the new twists and turns, while newcomers who have entered the roller coaster of her life will [find] themselves hanging on for the rollicking ride. -Midwest Book Review on So Many Boots, So Little Time

[E]very ingredient has been perfectly measured, and it works… With sparkling wit, Southern charm, and a steady pace, Miss Lilly has hit her stride. – Kirkus Review on These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin’

Lilly Atkins is the Stephanie Plum of the South. – Amazon Readers

[P]art-charming chick lit romp, part cold-blooded murder mystery, and all parts girl power. – Manhattan Book Review on These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin’

"Delightfully fresh and original in its approach… returns surprises again and again - truly a standout." – Midwest Book Review on These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin’

Featuring a heroine worth accompanying home, [this punchy] debut begs for a sequel. – Kirkus Review on Home Is Where Your Boots Are

Other books by

Kalan Chapman Lloyd

The MisAdventures of Miss Lilly

Volume One: Home Is Where Your Boots Are

Volume Two: These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin’

Volume Three: So Many Boots, So Little Time

Volume Four: When God-Fearing Women Put on Boots

Volume Five: Double, Double Boots in Trouble

Loser’s Road

Mo(u)rning Joy: a memoir

Water Dogs

Kalan Chapman Lloyd

Water Dogs is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, alive or dead, businesses, events or a locale is entirely coincidental.

2023 Rebelle Press Ebook Edition

Copyright © 2023 by Kalan Chapman Lloyd.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Rebelle Press.

ISBN: 978-1-312-74937-5

Printed in the United States of America

Rebelle Press Lulu Ebook edition: 2023

for the original Water Dogs

Part One

They are glorious specimens, these Lillenhammers. Long and lithe, they are tanned a tawny gold, like hungry lions in a constant state of prowling. Their hair is bleached until it snarls into spun gold frizz and their toes grow white against the brown of their feet. But like all families, underneath the glory lays the dirt, the dysfunction, and the secrets. Because the first rule of dysfunctional families is that we don’t talk about the dysfunction.

Water dogs are what they call themselves.

Water dogs! A battle cry with fists to the sun as they race toward emerald waters with white-capped waves.

Water dogs! They whisper as they dive into chlorine-stinking racing pools.

Water dogs! They wink as they clunk their paddleboards together and push their oars from the dock.

Water dogs! They cheer as they jump in perfect harmony into the blue blue pool of their own backyard.

A bunch of water dogs, their grandpa had named them proudly.

Y’all are a bunch of water dogs, their mama says as she hauls them, waterlogged, out of pools, and lakes and that brilliant, brilliant water of Dune Allen Beach, that Emerald Coast, 30A, where money and manners and old Southern gentility abound, even when the money is mostly dried up, even when the manners are for show, even when the gentleness has been gone for many generations.

The oldest is confused, torn between expectations and the mantle of purpose he feels placed on his life. It has come easy to him, life, until he now finds himself butted up against his reality and his fantasy.

The girl is fine, whirling through life like the manor-born royal she instinctually feels she is. Subjects bow down and she is their benevolent dictator. She has a plan, which she hides, and her hiding only causes angst.

The youngest is their pet, and they treat him as such. Lovingly, they rough him up and lovingly, they protect him. He brought them all together, he is integral glue that holds them aloft, he is their little sun they rotate and dance and twirl around. One would never know he had not started out as one of them.

Gabe

These are the things he knows about himself: He is thirteen years old. He is an ace tennis player; probably good enough to go pro even in a few years (even though for some reason this seems to send his mother into a panic. Although most things seem to send his mother into a panic). He loves banana pudding but hates bananas. He has green eyes, is left-handed, and his name used to be Cosmo.

The guilt threatens to drown him, and then after the guilt, the angry mental punching comes, followed swiftly by the annoyed justification. He stares again at the website, stares at the face that beckons him. It would tear his mother apart, break her heart, crush her soul. A large part of him would never do that, wouldn’t dream. A smaller, more insistent, more truthful part of him yearns to do just that, to crush the foundation upon which his life has been spun, to send the glass of the house tinkling to the ground.

He opens a drawer, looks in and fingers an expensive pen, a broken button, two vibration dampeners from the clear container on the counter at the club, a small half eaten box of Godiva chocolate. His left hand squeezes and flexes and squeezes again, looking for something to grip, looking for something to hit, smash, slice. He closes the drawer.

He looks at the picture again, looking for a hint of himself, looking for a sign to put him on the right path. Finding neither, he punches a few buttons, hides his crimes and slides the laptop back in the sleeve. He gets up, looks in the mirror, fixes a smile on his face and goes down to dinner.

Vinny

Baked Feta with yellow tomatoes, garlic and very expensive EVOO from the Mountain Brook Farmer’s Market, soft crusty sourdough, Pimento cheese with jalapeno lime crackers, Cupcake Riesling, lemon curd cupcakes from Continental Bakery, cherry limeade, salt and pepper potato chips, parmesan risotto. These are the things she does not eat.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket as she sits in her office and she wills herself to ignore it. She won’t be able to, of course, but she feels like it is the right thing to do; to at least put up a pretense. It buzzes again, a series of texts. She stares at the face on her computer screen and tries to find, for not the first time, some magic for the face, some feeling other than fear, some forgiveness for herself she doesn’t deserve. She knows she won’t be able to, of course, but she feels like it is the right thing to do, to at least put up a pretense. More buzzing. She pulls it out and glances at what she had been anticipating since that Monday.

Her breath becomes shorter, her chest as though a steel zipper has been pulled tight right in the middle. There is a constant burning there in the center, like a fountain of lava and sulfur bubbling acid. There is a band that sits around her head and it squeezes. She is tired. So tired.

English is not his native language, even though he’s been in this country since he was two, and the mixed foundation sometimes leads him to communicating in short bursts, with frequent switching to Spanish mid-thought. She is used to it.

It is why, now, there are five texts when it could be one. She skips to the last one and sighs, glancing back at the face on her screen and then decidedly punches buttons to get rid of them. It doesn’t stop.

Did you see?

Are you going?

He’s there.

La seguridad.

Gracias.

Lo siento.

Vinny turns off her phone, knowing it won’t change what she has done, won’t make it go away; there is nothing she can do to change what she has done. There is guilt, and then swift justification, and then fear at discovery. Thus is the continuous rollercoaster she has been on for the last eleven years.

Lila

Not getting out of bed when her baby cried; buying store bought cannoli for the bake sales; not volunteering to help with Girl Scouts; feeding her child cereal instead of baked chicken and mashed potatoes; dropping out of the art program at Ringling to marry Merritt Beckman; wasting her talent on coloring books; not sitting with her daughter to color. …these are her sins.

The storm rolls like a scythe across the Gulf. Storms can be deceptive, especially to vacationers. The violent, violet clouds will send newbies scurrying to the glass and stucco confines of their overpriced week-at-a-time condos. But Lila knows the swath of clouds will likely come off the Gulf, swing west like Sherman taking Atlanta, and then circle the beach towns of 30A before disappearing inland or dumping buckets on select areas of the Emerald Coast. The clouds were never an indication of neither rain, nor the thunder or lightning, although that was when Lila left the beach, when the lightning cracked open the sky.

She stands on the weather beaten deck of her slice of the good life and looks upon her private beach as the whitecaps roll in. Even the clouds can’t make the turquoise waters ugly. The sand is sugar, the salt water clear as glass and with that special shade of vitreous blue green that Tiffany keeps trying to perfect. She has tried other beaches, St. Maarten, the Bahamas, Barcelona, Morocco, Alabama, but these waters are medicinal, and year after year they call her name. Now more than ever, now that she is at her lowest, and perhaps, her highest, they call to her.

Are you coming?

She is going to hell. She cannot seem to find her way around, or out of the concept. It has always been her worst fear, drilled into her from the age of reason, through catechism, through confirmation, before baptism even, Lila thinks, and has been a guiding factor through most of her life, the fear. And yet, the fear, as it was, is not enough now to deter her from the path she has found herself on. She wonders if she has always been on this path, unconsciously, and it has just taken her longer than others, perhaps lesser Catholics or maybe evangelical Christians, to reach this place of purgatory. She has discovered, in her later life, that the path to Hell is filled with gnawing, debilitating guilt, but also sweet, delicious indulgence.

She sighs, brings the glass of crisp Riesling to her lips; lips burned by the salt and sand and sun and forbidden touch. She stares toward the emerald turquoise of the Gulf of Mexico. She has always found healing in the waters of Santa Rosa Beach, respite. It is what brings her back, again and again, year after year. She is fairly certain the soothing clear water will not save her soul from burning in eternal fire, not this time.

"Vuelve a la cama, mi amor."

She turns and sees him, golden brown against the creamy tan of the very expensive sheets she purchased with Merritt Beckman in Spain in 1992. The sheets have lasted thirty years. She briefly wonders if burning them would be enough of a sacrifice to atone for the sins committed upon them. Doubtful.

"Mi amor." His lips curl into a sad smile and his eyes are knowing, he understands.

You know I don’t speak that Spanish, she tells him crankily.

"Eres una hermosa menitrosa," he says with an arched brow.

"Verdadero," she concedes with a wry smile, and moves, in spite of herself and the God of her childhood frowning down on her with crossed arms, judging, weighing, finding her coming up short, toward the bed, toward su amor.

Vinny

Sharp cheddar omelets, buckwheat pancakes, butter syrup, orange juice, brown sugar bacon, butter. These are the things she does not eat.

We should stop at a fruit stand. She says this to the car at large, as she does every year as they roll near Defuniak Springs and the stands start to pop up as they go from the Alabama highways to the Florida byways.

You say that every year, Mom, her son, Rand, informs her, her beautiful, oversized puppy of a son, like a caramel lab with his oversized feet and palms, his pro-ball wingspan, his Yeats and Welty vocabulary.

We never stop, Merritt, charmingly annoying, chimes in.

Never, affirms Gabe, her youngest: journalist, coach and mini-Tony Robbins.

This can be the year! Vinny attempts to cajole with a strain.

We’re good, Mom, Merritt tells her, "Publix is fine. We just want to get there."

Vinny smiles at her daughter in the rearview mirror, her lazily elegant daughter of the lithe limbs and the pointed chin and the teeth that have almost grown out of being horsey, after years of braces. She glances too at her baby, finding the top of his dark head as he is locked in to a video of last year’s Wimbledon. Her first born has his long arm propped against the window, his quarterback fingers, long and elegant propped up his wide forehead as he stares pensively out the window. She is worried about him today. This is the life of a mother, a constant rotation of worries. She will likely solve Rand’s problem today only for Gabe to need her fretting the next. Merritt needs the least amount of fretting, but Vinny worries it is because Merritt is such a good liar, and perhaps somewhat vapid. Vinny guiltily describes Merritt to people as a parade: parades don’t stop, they just keep going, they are beautiful and lovely, but they have their own route, no matter where you are standing. A parade will run you over while waving and looking pretty. This is Merritt. Vinny worries it would both take her far in life and be her demise. Vinny’s mother is like a parade, and she always lands on her feet, no matter who is underneath them.

She resists the urge to roll down the window to see if she can smell the salty air. She knows she can’t this early; she’s been trying for years, although this was not the route they’d taken when she was a girl. She had always said she was going to live at the beach, stay there forever; these were her tear-filled statements every time her family rolled out of Santa Rosa to go back to the gray world of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It wasn’t that it was gray, so much, although it was, but how could anything compare to the fairy tale of crystalline green vacation and blinding, blistering sunshine. And besides, the waters were medicinal, according to the Lila Parade. Vinny was sick, she’d claim, with the vacation blues. Vinny believed this, believed the water could heal; she knew it was why her mother and father kept bringing her back. What she didn’t understand is why they could not just stay and be healed all year long.

Freeport, Florida blurs by with its last options of chain restaurants, she debates on swinging in to Chick-Fil-A for a caterer’s count of sauce and nuggets, as she would always do when the kids were little. Merritt lived her best life when she could sit and watch the waves crash into the sugar sand while licking honey barbeque flavored mayonnaise off her fingers. Vinny doesn’t. She just wants to get there (!).

Clouds roll in off the Gulf and blot the sun just a little as they stay the course, south on 331. She can see the water! Glimpses of the Gulf of Mexico tease them. They are on the poor man’s side and the houses sit close and the state landings and RV parks rim the water, which is not yet, (not yet!) that vivid transparent trapiche emerald, Vinny can feel the pull and she knows her children can feel it too. This salt water is in their blood, their veins, raised on it. Rand shifts and adjusts Vinny’s phone and Luke Brian fills the Yukon XL. Luke likes Panama City, which Lila’s mother has always called trashy, but Luke gets it, he knows what the Emerald Coast can do for a person. Magic, change your life, upside down, inside out. Rand presses his nose to the window and Vinny knows he assessing, as she has been for the last twenty miles, if now (not yet!) is the time to roll down the window and catch the gulf breeze, smell that salt air. She glances in the rearview mirror and sees Merritt bobbing her head, her eyes turned toward the window. This is her place. Gabe has abandoned the tennis game. No small feat. A peaceful satisfied smile plays on his lips as he watches the Spanish moss and the loblollies and the mangroves pass by, the water winking at him. Vinny’s chest clutches. Gabe has to work harder to find peace than her other two and Vinny has had to fight in the tattered fray to help him find that peace. She will give all of hers away for him to have it. She mostly has.

Then… then, there! They burst forth from the trees and hit the bridge and the sun blesses them. Choctawhatchee Bay stretches out on both sides of them, the bridge rising and dipping as they race toward home. She and Rand exchange glances and catch the eye of the backseat. Almost (not yet!). Then… then, there! They leave the bridge and hit land.

Windows down, y’all!

Marc Broussard tunes up with Home, right on time, perfect timing, and Rand drums the dashboard. They are across the bridge and The Bay passes by on the left with their crab cakes and sake beurre blanc and pork cracklings and banana pudding and peanut butter cream pie and the Funky Monkey and the Bay Margarita and Frosé. On their right is the restaurant that was now North Beach Social, but has gotten so many makeovers over the years, that Vinny has pretty much given up on it. It is tempting to stop. They’ve made it! But they haven’t. They made the mistake once when the kids were younger and crankier and less entertained by mini TVs. They’d rolled across the Bay and stopped, hot and tired and in need of butter noodles and rum punch and respite. They should have kept going. It wasn’t that the lunch wasn’t good (it was delicious, they think). It wasn’t that it was still so hot (this was before they got the Portacool and were still depending on ceiling fans). It wasn’t that Merritt was teething and a well-heeled woman frowned at Vinny for rubbing her rum punch on Merritt’s gums (maybe it was. Vinny works in child welfare. She knows better. But she was desperate!). It was that they weren’t there yet. So close, and yet so far away.

And so now, they resolve, consciously and not, to just get there (!). Vinny tries not to speed down 331, and then breathes easy as she hooks a right onto U.S. Highway 98. A promising road, but not quite the magic of 30A. She ignores Publix on the right (get there!), and they exchange glances again and Rand flips to Duran Duran in honor of their missing father.

Vinny flips the blinker and waits for the surge of cars to pass so she can hang left on County Highway 393. It is Friday afternoon, just past lunch, and the Emerald Coast is hopping. Memorial Day weekend has happy southerners out in droves, arriving mostly, because if you leave 30A, you must do so in the early morning, before the sun and the water blind you enough to talk you into staying a few more days. New construction blurs past on both sides after the turn; Vinny remembers when it was nothing but sea oats and scrub and skinny pines and now it’s townhouses and condos and golf carts and bike trails. Vinny feels sorry for these vacationers, even though she shouldn’t. They don’t get to wake up to hear the water; don’t get to see the sunrise and sunset on that clear turquoise water. They have to drive to the beach, and not just walk down the rickety wooden stairs. She is lucky, she knows.

Saint Rita Catholic Church on the left (almost!), the historic Gulf Cemetery (so creepy) on the right and then Ed Walline Beach Access bursts forth as they hit the T at Gulf Place, yellow flag! The sun chooses that moment to completely shove the clouds aside and surge forth. Vinny’s chest cracks open and contracts in gratitude at the sight of the water. Life Shines! Life is Better!

Rand skips Sam Hunt for another Luke and Vinny wants to ignore the right turn to her mother’s house and drive straight into the public beach parking lot and run to the sand and waves and bottle green waters. Vinny and the kids and Phillip used to do this, get in the water and have their lives changed before they landed at their grandparents’ house.

In an act of defiance one year (she was annoyed with her mother), she had loaded up her brood and Phillip and, amidst annoyed confusion and resigned irritation from them all, trekked down to Dauphin Island in Alabama. But the idea of quaint and nothing to do had not compared to the glistening emerald waters of 30A and they had spent the majority of a week facilitating between wonder at the new and longing for the old and avoiding the jellyfish and the dark water. In the end, it was a losing comparison to the vacation rhythms of old and the Lillenhammers had, not only tacked an extra two days to their trip and hauled it east to Santa Rosa Beach, but had to add another trip that year to make up for missing the blue green waters of Dune Allen Beach. Vinny and Phillip tried to plan a trip to Disney World for spring break one year and the kids had mutinied and begged for Vinny to beg her parents if they could borrow the beach house instead, even though the beach was cold then, and they had to wear wetsuits in the water. They don’t care, these Lillenhammers. Water dogs!

Vinny has a hard time describing this place to anyone who hasn’t been here. It’s the Caribbean, but better? The water is clear and glass and greenish turquoise? The sand is like sugar, and doesn’t get hot? It’s the only place in the world besides Australia that houses the phenomenon of dune lakes? It’s perfect? Vinny has been coming to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, since she was a baby; specifically Dune Allen Beach since she was seven and her parents decided to stop renting and buy. She is lucky.

Gulf Place is nuts. She remembers when it was nothing, and then just a realtor’s office and a tile place, and now it’s Jewel Toffier and Pizza by the Sea (dinner! Tradition!) and the 30A store and Yolo Bikes and Boards and SOWAL Beach and Bravura and Steve’s Market and Sunrise Coffee and now Shelby’s and The Perfect Pig (mimosa and avocado toast and vanilla pancakes! Gabe’s favorite) and Shunk Gulley across the street and Pecan Jack’s. Vinny slams on the brakes to let a family of four pass in the crosswalks, pedestrians are supposed to rule 30A. They don’t but Vinny always worries and respects the crosswalks. Two little girls in matching Hanna Andersson strawberry-print tankinis hold hands to cross and their mother in a pink suit and white linen man’s shirt as a cover-up trots behind them, weaving some. The girls have on strawberry sunglasses and those terrible plastic tennis shoes (in bubble gum pink) that are so popular but Vinny hates because they have no arch support and leave blisters. The mom wears a straw fedora and totes an oversized Lilly Pulitzer plastic tote bag, her gold studded flip-flops wink. The dad rolls a red ballpark wagon with ice chest and chairs and shovels. Vinny feels sorry for them. They have to walk to the beach.

30A is a coastal highway, the coastal highway in Vinny’s opinion. It is dotted by tiny towns, which aren’t really towns at all. Seaside is a town, incorporated in the 80s. But Vinny’s family beach house is officially in Santa Rosa Beach Florida (this is where the zip code comes from if you want to send a package), but if you know 30A, they are at Gulf Place. But if you know the beach, really, they are at Dune Allen Beach. It’s complicated, and Vinny would like to think it’s complicated on purpose, but the more accurate explanation is that the shops that popped up on the beach to support the vacationers are an easier way to note geography than knowing the beaches themselves, but Vinny knew the beaches before she knew the towns, so it’s backward for her. The Lillenhammers tell people they go to Santa Rosa, which is sort of inaccurate, but Merritt decided that was easiest and sounded the prettiest.

Vinny stops again at the next crosswalk for middle-aged parents with their arms free except for matching Tervis tumblers with liquid that could be iced tea or iced tea. Vinny doesn’t judge. She spots the Santa Rosa Beach Club and the Vue on 30A and smiles as she hits the blinker again and waits for two golf carts, four bikers, three walkers, a Jeep full of teenagers and a navy blue Mercedes convertible filled with octogenarians. They turn into the half-oval cobblestone driveway, flanked by short palm trees at the street.

The house sits, like a cloudy blue sugar cube, or a dirty piece of blueberry taffy that has been dropped on the boardwalk, defiantly defying the urges of progress around it. It is the shortest house on the beach, almost; and nothing to look at. It is a square dingy baby blue saltbox headed toward gray and an almost flat tin roof with only one small eve to give it a little shape. Three too-small rectangular windows with white (leaning toward gray) shutters pock the front and an offset screen door with bricks for a stoop make up the entrance. There is one small shrub, beach elder, a nod to decoration. Vinny helped plant