“Ruth!” Mama called.

Ruth wiped the charcoal pen from her hands and set her sketchbook down. “Coming.”

“Time to greet the guests. Put those drawings away.”

“I am.” Ruth tucked her pencils and pad in the back corner of the kitchen pantry and rose up off her stool.

Her mother stood by her father, who was stirring a large pot of fish-chowder stock, which, along with corn bread and peach pie, would serve as the welcome dinner many regulars expected. Daddy was particular about his seafood, only bought from people he trusted, and he never used a recipe.

Ruth paused by the simmering pot. If she had a nickel for all the bowls of chowder she’d eaten or stirred in her twelve years, she’d be the richest girl in North Carolina. She swore a few times her parents had filled her baby bottle with it. “Looks good, Daddy.”

“Thanks, baby girl.” Daddy was older than all the other fathers. Though he never said, she guessed he had to be at least sixty. Muscled forearms and a lean frame belied the graying hair and skin wrinkled by a lifetime of working in the sun, first as a fisherman, then as a navy man, and finally as a hotel owner. The tattoos along his arms chronicled years served in World War I, and his wooden right leg was a reminder of the onboard ship explosion near France that had forced him to retire.

He’d returned to the Outer Banks in 1920 with a wooden leg, a limp, sizable savings, and a grim determination to rebuild his life. After an all-night poker game, he took possession of Roy’s Folly, a collection of small bungalows housing winter duck hunters and summer fishermen.

Roy’s Folly had no luxuries in the rooms and no central meeting place where guests could gather in the evenings. Daddy’s first order of business was constructing the center building that still housed a bar, kitchen, and dining room. Back then, men gathered at night to smoke cigars, drink, and play cards, so he saw no need to furnish the space beyond the bare necessities.

When Mama moved to Nags Head in 1920, her first stop was Roy’s Folly. Daddy said he’d hired Mama on the spot to waitress because he’d fallen head over heels in love with her the instant he’d laid eyes on the tall blonde with alabaster skin. She said he’d been drinking and couldn’t possibly remember their first meeting. Either way, the two were married in 1921. He was thirty-one, and she was nineteen. It would be seventeen years before Ruth came along.

When Mama wasn’t fretting about opening day, Ruth liked to hear the story about the day Mama had found Ruth wrapped in the pink blanket in Bungalow 28. Mama would get really quiet, as if the retelling were a solemn occasion, and start by describing the screaming winds of a nor’easter and how it was pure luck she’d decided to check the cottages for storm damage. Mama said that, despite fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, a woman must have sneaked into the bungalow and given birth before running away. Edna had heard Ruth hollering for attention. When she opened the door to 28, she thought at first a cat had gotten into the room, and then she saw the wiggling pink blanket. She saw no signs of the mother, so she scooped up the baby and took her home.