Colby

Colby is both the coastal setting of Auden’s summer before college and the place where familiar routines give way to an unexpected life after dark. Its oceanfront homes, beach paths, boardwalk businesses, and scattered late-night meeting places form a map that Auden learns by moving through it—first alone, then increasingly alongside Eli. The town also holds the beginnings of Heidi and Robert’s relationship, making it not merely a backdrop but a place where separate lives have repeatedly changed direction.

Coastal Setting and Arrival

Auden arrives at the house her father shares with Heidi expecting a summer that may feel awkward and overly domestic. The white house has green shutters, a broad porch with rocking chairs and potted flowers, and a yellow ceramic pineapple on the front door. Robert’s battered Volvo and a newer Prius occupy the open garage. The sea is close enough to be heard as soon as Auden cuts the engine; around the side of the house, beach grass gives way to an uninterrupted stretch of blue reaching the horizon.

That view does not immediately settle her doubts. Auden wonders whether she will be drawn into activities with Heidi and the baby, but remembers how bored she had been alone at home and how little she had seen her father since his marriage. The eight weeks before college become a limited opportunity to spend time with him. Colby thus begins as a place Auden has chosen partly for family reasons, even as she is unsure what that choice will ask of her.

The town’s shoreline is not a single, orderly beach. A path from a cul-de-sac winds through beach grass and over dunes to the Tip, where erosion or a storm has left a peninsula of sand. On a first visit, Auden finds people gathered around a firepit, sitting on driftwood arranged as makeshift benches or standing beside a truck with a keg in its bed. The approach is informal and slightly uncertain: the path appears after the sidewalk ends, and the gathering comes into view only after the dunes. That hidden, reached-on-foot quality gives the Tip a different character from the town’s houses and streets.

Streets, Shops, and Gatherings

Colby’s social life is distributed among ordinary businesses and improvised meeting places. Clementine’s is one of the shops along the boardwalk; outside it, Auden first notices a group of young men talking about bikes. One turns toward her and flirts as she walks past, an encounter that makes the boardwalk feel less like a row of storefronts than a place where strangers can suddenly address one another. Later, the town’s commercial spaces become part of her developing acquaintance with its people.

The Tip’s beach gathering joins that social landscape to cycling. Riders come down the dark path and race past Auden onto flatter sand, laughing as they go. The same combination of bikes, beach, and company recurs in her growing knowledge of Colby: the town’s nighttime geography is made through movement between places rather than through one central venue. The beach can be both a quiet edge of the town and a lively meeting ground, depending on the hour and who has found their way there.

The boardwalk also hosts the annual Beach Bash, the last major event of the summer. Held in a hall there, it sells tickets and involves the merchants, while Heidi volunteers to organize it. Previous editions have had pirate and Renaissance themes; as the next one approaches, Heidi is struggling to devise a theme while she is not feeling festive. The event gives Colby a shared seasonal calendar as well as a public gathering place: local business and community participation converge at the end of the summer.

The Town After Dark

At first Auden’s nights in Colby are solitary and repetitive. She drives to the Wheelhouse, circles through neighborhoods and streets, and sometimes stops at Gas/Gro. The routine feels like waiting rather than discovery. Her sense of the town changes when she begins crossing paths with Eli after work: she may leave Clementine’s after closing, talk with the other women there, and then head out alone, only to meet Eli fifteen minutes, half an hour, or an hour later at Gas/Gro or Beach Beans.

Those encounters open a chain of small excursions. At the laundromat, Auden shares pie and coffee with Clyde, who talks about his experiments in baking. He owns the bike shop and the laundromat, as well as several other Colby businesses, and prefers being called a renaissance man to a mogul. At Park Mart, she and Eli search for items that include dental floss and wind chimes. After the clubs close, they find Mohammed’s pizza cart on the boardwalk and buy slices of cheese pizza for a dollar fifty each. On the pier, they fish and watch phosphorescence light the water below. Each stop is modest, but together they give Auden a fuller sense of what the town contains and whom she might encounter there.

The contrast is between Colby as a circuit Auden once drove through alone and Colby as a night she can share. The Gas/Gro does not disappear from her routine; it becomes a point of return and chance meeting. When she and her companions part at the pier, Auden walks back toward the store by herself, makes fresh coffee, adds milk, and, after a pause, buys a candy bar. A late-night cashier named Wanda yawns over her crossword and remarks on the hour. The exchange underscores how ordinary and ongoing the town’s nocturnal life is: even a brief stop for coffee belongs to a world that keeps moving while other people sleep.

Family Histories and Changing Attachments

Colby also contains the earlier turns in Heidi’s life. She came to town for the summer to care for her sick mother and took a waitressing job at Last Chance, intending to earn money for a move to New York. She met Robert when he came in for lunch after his faculty interview at Weymar. Their conversation began during a slow shift. At summer’s end, Heidi said goodbye to him and left; after reaching New York, she found that the city no longer felt right and that she no longer had the same hunger to go there. What she had treated as a pit stop became a destination through a relationship and a change in what she wanted.

That history gives Auden’s own stay a quiet parallel. She, too, arrives with a plan and an expectation of what the summer will be, yet the town’s places acquire meaning through repeated encounters: the beach path, the boardwalk after closing, the pier, and the brightly lit convenience store. Colby’s significance lies in this accumulation. Its shoreline offers both distance and access, while its businesses and gathering spots bring people into one another’s orbit; for Auden, learning the town is inseparable from becoming less alone in it.