"Youngstown, Ohio. I graduated high school last June."
"You graduated from high school."
She gave me a crooked, tear-stained smile. "Old Dad takes over the grammar, huh?"
"Takes over whatever he can take over. Whatever you"ll let him take over. Have you been working?"
"At a Charming Shoppe. It"s a chain. I worked through Christmas and quit. Look, can I have a copy of that letter? To keep?"
"Why not? We"ll walk back and get a copy made at the bank."
She looked at me, her head tilted, her expression puzzled. "You know. I feel as if I"ve just gotten over being sick, sick a long time. I used to dream about you dying. You were always fat and bald."
"At times I have a fat bald disposition. Look, Jean. It"s just the same for me. That strange feeling."
"How can it mean anything much to you? You never knew I was alive even."
I reached for her and she put her hands in mine. "I don"t know if I can say this. It means more than I can say. It turns my life upside down. It changes a lot of things I thought I was. It"s some kind of a door opening for me. We"ve got lots of plans to make."
"I said rotten things to you last night."
"And enough of them were true."
"No. Now I know what you"re really like. Puss is telling me in that letter what you"re like. She didn"t know she was telling her daughter anything, but she was."
And we walked back slowly, talking all the way. There was a lifetime of good talk ahead of us. There was another feeling I had about myself more difficult to grasp. In the last few years I had been ever more uncomfortably aware that one day, somewhere, I would take one last breath and a great, iron door would slam shut, leaving me in darkness on the wrong side of life. But now there was a window in that door. A promise of light. A way to continue.
It is May, early May, a lovely time of year in Florida. We have taken the Busted Flush north up the Waterway to a place where it opens into a broad bay. I have dropped the hooks at a calm anchorage well away from the channel and far enough from the mangrove coast to let the south breeze keep the spring bugs away.
We brought aboard pungent cauldrons of Meyer"s Special Incomparable Chili, and enough icy beer to make the chili less lethal. How many of us are there? Twenty? Thirty? Let"s say a lot. Jim Ames and Betsy. The Thorners, Teneros, Arthur and Chook Wilkinson, the Mick and Carlie Hooper, Junebug, Lew, Roacy, Sue Sampson, Sandy, Johnny Dow, Briney, Frank and Gretch Payne, Miguel, the Marchmans, Marilee, Sam Dandie with two nieces, and a leavening of beach folks, and two dogs and a cat, dutifully ignoring one another.
We are here, and there is music and there are bad jokes, and so we are all a little bit longer in the tooth and have seen life go up, down and sideways without any rhyme or reason anyone can determine. We laugh at tired old jokes because they are old and tired and familiar, and it is good to laugh.
I am p.r.o.ne on a large sun pad on the bow, beside that incomparable bikinied, sun-lush figure of Briney, who"d been on loan to w.i.l.l.y Nucci until he breathed his last.
I am staring at four small freckles on the outside top of her left shoulder, four inches from my nose. Connect the dots and find the farmer"s cat. The freckles are brown against gold, and there is a fuzz of tiny white peach hairs, almost too fine to be visible.
"What are all these people doing in our home, sweetheart?" she asks drowsily.
"We invited them all, every one."
"Oh?" she says. "That"s nice."
"Figuring on staying a while?"
"Too long already, love. Gotta get back out to the big surf, ride the dark blue tunnel under the big white curl. Don"t let it get you. Bam, you"re out. Hey, two more weeks, then gone. No regrets."
Somebody brings us two cold beers. Briney rolls up onto an elbow and drinks with her eyes closed. I lift my beer and say, "To w.i.l.l.y."
She grins and says, "To the Nooch."
In a little while she is asleep, beer half gone. I study the amount of tan on her smooth broad back and I peer at the angle of the sun and decide she"s in no danger of burning. In a momentary flash of panic I believe the gaudy boat, the noisy people, everything is dead and gone, imagined long ago and forgotten. It pa.s.ses.
I get up and go ambling back through the folk. A great day. I find Meyer up on the sun deck leaning against the aft rail, alone for a change. He is now Uncle Meyer, a dispensation from my daughter Jean which pleased him immensely.
We talk about Jean, about her latest letter. "You two get talked out before she left?" he asks.
"There"s a couple of years of talk to make up," I say. "We"ll have time. You get a chance to look over the trust agreement Frank sent you?"
"Good work," he says. "As a trustee I can vote to invade the princ.i.p.al in case of emergency. Sound."
"She got one h.e.l.l of a score on her college boards."
"Three times you"ve told me, Travis."
"And she"s a horse b.u.m. Imagine that? A horse b.u.m from Youngstown who is going to go to a school of veterinary medicine eventually. Imagine me, fathering a horse b.u.m from Youngstown?"
"Travis, she is handsome. She is tough and good and staunch."
I look at him. It strikes me that he has not been surly or hostile at any time. Lately I have been bringing out the worst in people. No more.
He seems to know what I am thinking. "How much went into the trust?" he asks.
"Everything!" I say.
He stares in consternation. "Everything? Everything?"
"Well, I saved out about four hundred bucks, and so I"ve got to scramble around and find some salvage work real soon."
He puts his hand on my arm, beams at me and says, "Welcome to the world."