3WW: blurred, illegal, match: fiction: Dinah's journey

These are true first drafts, and more outline than complete story. I can’t apologize for spending much time walking on the beach. My friends are here so this is kind of a holiday.
Thanks Bone for the words.
This is a continuation of Dinah‘s story.

When Dinah was another person the only South she knew was South Florida. She had been just 50 and floundering in 01. One day her husband announced he was leaving. It was the first time a man left her.

The books she edited were considered archaic. Interesting but limited in audience appeal. Fewer magazines wanted the articles she wrote. Dinah knew she needed a change, but New York was the constant in her life. She owned a small house in East Hampton and saw all the same people she saw in Manhattan.

After 9/11 she wasn’t allowed in her Tribeca loft for six months She could have lived in the East Hampton house but so many people had fled to the Hamptons and she was letting her second to last husband, Bernie, his flaky wife, and two very young kids live in her house They weren’t allowed back in their Battery Park City apartment and the kids were constantly screaming. Their therapist said it was normal, and Dinah understood. All the lines that said “normal” had been blurred. Five people living in her three bedroom house were three too many. Dinah liked privacy.

When Janey, her best girlfriend since kindergarten suggested they do a Thelma & Louise, without the ending, road trip Dinah found herself really psyched for the first time in years. They drove to Vancouver, down the coast, through the South West, Texas and the South visiting friends, friends of friends and even relatives everywhere.

Seven months into the trip, they stopped for a few days in a small town on the South Carolina coast. Bernie’s cousins, the ones Dinah had always liked lived there. They stayed in a sun drenched pink Charleston type hotel, in the Porter’s Inlet suite or the only one. Dinah liked how she could walk from the beach to town. There was something peaceful about the town, something that made her feel alive. After so many months on the road she might have been ready to find home.

One day she was in Kroeger’s comparing coffee’s. Good coffee was essential to Dinah’s life. A man asked if she had any suggestions for a strong yet not acidic robust brew. She was a bit shocked when she realized he was flirting as the last time she had been in the deep South many years before her parents had lectured her on the importance of seeming less hippie like to Southern cops. They would, her parents were sure, naturally assume Dinah was doing something illegal. Her first couple of husbands never found an illegal substance they couldn’t somehow ingest.

All these years later Dinah could pass as more WASP than thou, though there was something mischievous about her eyes, or so Mac the town sheriff said later.

He accepted her for who she was. After he realized she was the Dinah for whom so many songs were written, he freaked but just a bit. She was Dinah who wouldn’t live with him but would be with him. Dinah who decorated her house differently, and he thought nicer, than any other person in town. Dinah who wore clothes all the other women would imitate, but never Mac thought as well.

Dinah couldn’t believe she found nirvana in a small South Carolina beach town nobody had ever heard of, Porter’s Inlet. So different than New York, she had finally found her home.

Dinah, Porter’s Inlet and Mac were a perfect match.