Whale Season
Page 20
The rest of the story, everyone knows.
Hurricane Donna finally lumbered ashore around midnight. Her surge was enormous, several stories high. When she hit Old Buck and Jules’ tiny bungalow the roof lifted. The harbor poured in over the walls and overflowed the house like a bucket. Furniture. Orchids. Everything gone in one great wave. Old Buck grabbed for Jules and caught her by the hair.
“One thing I learned through forty-seven years of marriage,” he later said, “you hang on to each other no matter what. You don’t let go.”
“Grandpa Buck rode the surge into town,” Trot tells Carlotta. “Swam the flooded streets for hours. Too tough to drown, some said. Probably was true.
“When he was finally rescued, dehydrated, delirious, he thought Grammy Jules was still there. He held wisps of long gray hair tightly in his fist. Wouldn’t let go.
“‘Forty-seven years,’ he said over and over again until he grew hoarse.”
Trot took a deep breath. The story overwhelmed him.
“Till death do you part,” Carlotta says.
“Grandpa Buck never really got over it. Threw himself into the harbor and drowned on the first anniversary of the storm. ‘Missing Jules,’ the note read.”
Trot’s voice cracks when he says this. He falls silent.
“That’s a wonderful story. Thank you,” Carlotta says softly. Bites her lip. Doesn’t want to cry.
“Ever been married?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Not like that. What about you?”
Trot shakes his head. His hand moves to his chest, to the wound.
“I’ve been waiting for a woman who won’t let go,” he says, and Carlotta remembers sitting in the surf with him—remembers the prayers she prayed, the promises she made to a god she seldom believed in—so she leans over and kisses him.
Cherry pie, he thinks.
In the distance, well beyond them, in the fading fuchsia of the sky, there is an amazing sight.
Whale.
A real whale. A lost “firecracker,” as they’re called in Japan. Also known as “pygmy.” Its belly is filled with crab and squid. Happy, it lies on top of the waves, floating, bobbing. Its gray skin reflects the sky, turns the color of roses. When its mate finally catches up, the two dive underwater, somersaulting around each other. Playful.
As the sun extinguishes into the Gulf, and the world goes dark again, the firecrackers break through the surface of the water and blow ink into the sky like a tsunabi, as the Japanese fisherman say, a rocketing firework.
They are twin fireworks against the darkness of night.
But Trot and Carlotta don’t notice.
About the Author
Novelist N. M. KELBY is also the author of In the Company of Angels and Theater of the Stars. She spent more than twenty years as a print and television journalist before she began writing. Her poems and short stories have appeared in more than fifty journals including Zoetrope All-Story Extra, One Story, Southeast Review, and The Mississippi Review. She is the recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship in Literature, the Heekin Group Foundation’s James Fellowship for the Novel, both a Florida and Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in fiction, two Jerome Travel Study Grants, and a Jewish Arts Endowment Fellowship. She grew up in Florida, where she currently lives. Her website is www.nmkelby.com.
ALSO BY N. M. KELBY
In the Company of Angels
Theater of the Stars:
A Novel of Physics and Memory
Copyright © 2006 by Nicole Mary Kelby
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Shaye Areheart Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kelby, N. M. (Nicole M.)
Whale season : a novel / Nicole Mary Kelby.
1. Recreational vehicle industry—Fiction. 2. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 3. Sales personnel—Fiction. 4. Florida—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.E382W47 2006
813'.6—dc22 2005010836
eISBN: 978-0-307-34185-3
v3.0