by Phoebe Fox
Two things set me on the path down which Sasha was traveling: her guilty expression as she looked everywhere but at me, and her quick, throwaway use of the word theater.
“Sash, you’re not talking about a feature about the Breakup Doctor.”
She examined the ceiling and shook her head slightly.
“You’re...” I took a deep breath and then forced it out, knowing that where Sasha had looked Kewpie doll doing it, I probably looked blowup doll. “Are you doing a feature on my mother?”
She carefully investigated one baby blue fingernail. “Oh, you know...yeah.”
“Oh, my God! How the hell did they find out about that? Why would they care? She’s a community theater actress! She’s not even that, actually—at least not for the last thirty years.”
“Yeah, that’s part of the angle. A local performer’s return to the stage, in such a huge role.”
I thunked my purse back down on her sofa table, disgusted. “Sash, the last thing she needs is positive reinforcement. Can’t you kill the piece? Or at least get out of doing it?”
“Um, no. Not really.”
“You have to. My mother thinks you’re perfect. She would eat it up if you interviewed her. She’d think this whole thing was all okay. Can’t you tell the paper you can’t do it? Make something up—get them to send some crappy freelancer, if they have to do it.”
“Yeah. Thing is, Brook... I pitched the idea.”
I stared stupidly at her for a moment, no words forming in my head. I finally summoned up: “Why?”
She shrugged. “We were low on stories and were all throwing around ideas. It just popped out. Amid, like, five other pitches, but this was the one Lisa latched onto.”
“But...why? How is my mother newsworthy? Who is she? Just some middle-aged housewife who thinks she’s Blanche Dubois.”
Sasha looked like I had slapped her. “That’s what you think of her? Really?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Sash.” I yanked up my purse and charged over to her front door.
“But, Brook, you don’t think she—”
“I’m not kidding. I don’t want to talk about it. You know how I feel about you doing the article. You want to do it anyway, I can’t stop you. But don’t expect me to give you some Norman Rockwell happy-family interview for it.”
She was looking at me now with an expression I couldn’t read. Which was weird—I could always read Sasha.
“Okay,” she said after a few awkward beats. “Are you sure you’re fine with it?”
I shot her a look.
“All righty, then. Break a leg on Tuesday.”
“Right.”
“I’ll call you afterward to tell you how you sounded.”
“Yeah.”
“Brook...”
I turned around and faced her. She looked so forlorn it was all I could do not to rush over and hug her, tell her not to worry, that I wasn’t that upset. Except that I was.
“It’s rotten timing, Sash,” was all I said.
“I know.” It hung in the air like an apology.
Finally I heaved a great, long-suffering sigh. I couldn’t stay mad at her. I never could. “Call me after the radio interview. I want to know what you think.”
Her face brightened like sunshine after a storm, and I let myself out the front door.
ten
With Kendall at the office and Sasha on her date, I stopped at the grocery store and picked up a few things, then headed over to my father’s house. Though I’d checked in on him with phone calls since Mom had moved out and he’d sounded okay, I felt guilty for not making time to go see him.
I was nervous about what I’d find—Dad sitting motionless in front of a blank television screen, maybe, gazing down at the remote in his hand as if he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Or sifting through old photo albums and hurriedly wiping tears from his eyes when he saw me. Or sitting on their bed, clutching my mother’s bathrobe to himself and staring slack-jawed into space.
But I found him at his workstation in the garage, just like he always was. As if today were any other day.
“Doll!” he said when he saw me, and put down the paintbrush he was using so he could hug me. He smelled like wood stain and sawdust and sweat.
“Hi, Dad. I thought we might have dinner together tonight.”
My dad looked a little confused. “Oh, yeah? Well, that sounds great, sweetheart. Let me get cleaned up here and I’ll take you somewhere...”
“It’s okay. I brought groceries. We can eat in. Roast chicken and broccoli sound good?”
He beamed. “My favorite.”
It wasn’t—my mother’s beef bourguignon was. But it was just like Dad to say so. I settled onto a stool next to his work area. “How are you doing, Daddy?” I asked gently.
“Me? I’m fine, doll. Doin’ fine. Watch you don’t get your pretty blouse there into the stain.”
“Have you heard from Mom?”
Dad’s hand jigged to the side, just fractionally, enough to mar the almost perfectly straight line of stain he was applying.
“Well, you know, hon, rehearsals are so busy at the beginning of a show...”
“She hasn’t called you at all, has she?”
“Brook, honey, she—”
“Geez, Dad! Don’t make excuses for her she hasn’t even had the decency to make for herself!”
“This is between your mother and me, sweetheart.”
“But she—”
“That’s enough, Brook. We’re not going to talk about this anymore.”
The hard tone of his voice made my mouth snap shut in surprise. My father never reprimanded me. Ever.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you?” he went on easily, as though I’d imagined his sharpness. “Those columns you’re writing are really something. That gonna be your new job?”
His back was to me as he talked, a dark patch along his spine where he had sweated, the material of his shirt clinging and bagging, clinging and bagging as he moved his arms while he worked. The sight transported me back to my childhood, to a hundred other conversations just like this after school or before dinner or on a weekend morning. It was always easier to talk to my father than my mom. I watched every expression that flitted across my mother’s face for a clue to her reaction, tailoring my conversation according to her frown, a nod, the light of approval in her eyes. With my father I simply sat and let my mouth follow wherever my mind wandered, talking to Daddy’s back while he murmured just enough noises to let me know he was listening.
I found myself rattling off everything that had happened—the reaction to the column, my bulging roster of new clients, and the radio show. I even idly mentioned Stu’s idea to create an office out of the guest areas of my house.
“Hey! I’m proud of you!” my dad jumped in. “I tell everyone my girl knows which end of a drill is up. How ’bout I come over there and lend a hand till we get the job done?”
I thought about it. Maybe Dad and I could do it on the cheap, and with an office in my home I’d be back in practice in no time. Plus I’d be able to keep an eye on Dad meanwhile. It was actually a really workable solution.
“Really? You wouldn’t mind?” I ran my palm along a cabinet door awaiting staining. It was silky-smooth from hundreds of patient passes with a sander. “That would be fantastic, Dad. You just reignited my entire career.”
He made a dismissive noise and gave a partial shrug without disturbing the geometric precision of his brush line. “It’s nothing. My girl’s an entrepreneur—a parent’s proud of something like that.”
The words hung in the air between us, and I wondered if my dad was thinking the same thing I was—that only one parent was around to be proud.
“I’m going to start cooking, Dad,” I said, getting up off the stool. “I’l
l call you in time to wash up.”
He’d tuned me out before I was even out of the garage, utterly absorbed again in his project for my mother.
As I started putting dinner together in their gutted wreck of a kitchen, for just a shiver of a second I sympathized with my mom. Dad was a craftsman—when he did a job, he not only did it right; he did it artistically. Like the butter-smooth cabinet I’d run my hand over in the garage, everything he ever did, he did meticulously. When he finished a job, it looked as though it had cost a fortune. But he’d been promising her the refinished cabinets for months, and meanwhile my mom had been living in a kitchen that looked like a hurricane had swirled through.
I stopped in the middle of rubbing fresh rosemary underneath the skin of the chicken, frozen with a thought. Did that have something to do with her departure? In every way Dad’s philosophy was, “It takes as long as it takes to get it right.” Mom was more of the “Get it done” school of thought. If Dad was a Renaissance man, Mom was the Industrial Revolution.
The thing was, while I could appreciate my dad’s thoroughness and care with his projects, I was a lot more like my mom. Now that I lived in a half-finished renovation “before” of my own, I could understand how the disarray took a toll on your psyche. Living in a state of “almost there” and “not quite done” and “still in progress” made you feel like your whole life was on hold, waiting...always waiting to be “finished.”
I pulled my hand out, realizing it was just resting between the clammy chicken meat and its pebbly skin. I grimaced and turned to the sink to wash the stickiness away, my momentary empathy for my mother swirling down the drain with the fatty bits of chicken.
Over dinner I worked hard to keep the conversation lively, but my mother was as fully present in her absence as she ever was sitting at her end of the table. My dad’s eyes drifted to her empty chair too often despite his pasted-on smile, and looked like swallowing was an effort. I knew that my laughter was too sharp, too loud, like the barking of a maniacal seal. But at the end of the night, after we cleaned up the dishes and put them away, Dad gave me a massive hug in the foyer and repeated over and over how nice this had been, what a wonderful surprise. His cheerful smile lasted almost until the door closed behind me.
Almost.
The sky was clear and untroubled as a baby’s conscience the next morning as I steered Dad’s eighteen-foot runabout, the Joie de Viv—named after my mother—down the canal behind my parents’ house.
Kendall sat in the chair next to me with his feet splayed and planted on the deck, one hand gripping the starboard gunwale and the other clenched around the seat cushion as though it could be used as a flotation device. I made a mental note to dig out the life jackets so he could see them. The cooler I’d packed last night was stowed under the bench seat in the bow, and I had an entire romantic day planned.
We bobbed out of the canal and into the Caloosahatchee, motoring mostly at idle through the manatee zones until I could pick up speed. Just before the river opened up into the gulf, I pulled the boat into a cove that formed an inverted comma on the northwest side of Picnic Island, a little mound of land in the channel. I knew it as well as I’d known our backyard growing up.
Normally in the winter months, locals stay far away from the beaches. Snowbirds clog the roads and the sand, rowdy spring breakers make relaxation impossible, and vacationing families line the shore with their umbrellas, coolers, and plastic children’s toys. But Picnic Island is accessible only by boat, and it tended to be overlooked in the tourists’ rush to tonier Sanibel and Captiva and Cabbage Key. There’s nothing on the tiny island but mangrove and scrub pine—no restaurants, no souvenir shops, no palm trees, not even any bathrooms—and for that reason it tended to be a lot less popular with the weekend-boat-rental crowd.
“Just drop it straight down,” I called to Kendall, who was standing in the bow struggling to twirl the anchor line like a lariat, rodeo style.
“I don’t have to toss the rope way out there so this’ll hook us?” Kendall frowned at the Danforth anchor dangling from his hands.
“It’s line, not rope. And no—it’s all soft sand here. The anchor will bite in as we drift with the current.” I throttled into reverse to hold our position while he examined the line. I’d grown up here, and boating and the water were second nature to me. Kendall’s landlocked Nevada upbringing hadn’t prepared him for the life aquatic.
He dropped the anchor like a millstone into the placid gulf water, and after a moment I felt it catch. I cut the engine and came up into the bow, where Kendall was leaning over the port-side gunwale, staring down into the clear water.
“How deep are we here?” he asked.
“Right now? About five feet or so. But at low water this’ll be a sand bar. I wouldn’t anchor here in a bigger boat.” I’d learned that lesson as a teenager, after a couple of frantic missed curfews while my friends and I waited for the tide to come back in.
He straightened to look at me, and I saw that already his nose was turning ruddy. Kendall’s skin was tender and pale as a nectarine. I turned to the seat behind me and lifted the cushion to hand him sunscreen from the storage compartment.
“So how do we get to shore?” he asked.
“Up to you. We can swim. Or wade. Or float. There’s no standard technique.”
As soon as my feet hit the sandy bottom and the warm water wrapped around me like a hug, I felt all the stress and tension and worry of the last weeks ebb away with the tide. The gulf always did this for me—nothing was so bad that the sea didn’t make it better.
Kendall stood in the boat watching me for a moment, and then stepped awkwardly over the gunwale and thunked to his feet beside me in the shallow cove.
“We couldn’t just have driven to a beach the old-fashioned way?” he asked, wrapping one long arm around me and pulling me close.
I leaned in to kiss his soft, warm mouth, the taste of salt water splashed on his lips mixing with the feel of his hand on my waist and the sun on my shoulders. “You’re a local now. Regular beaches are for tourists.”
We waded toward the shore hand in hand, the bottom sloping almost imperceptibly up until we trailed out of the water and onto the dry, sugary sand and crisp brown drifts of seaweed. A congregation of fluffy plovers scurried up the beach to avoid us, their matchstick legs moving so fast they blurred, while colorless sand crabs sidestepped into their holes, saved from being a meal by our intrusion. One lone great blue heron stood forty feet away, tall and stalky and elegantly unconcerned with us. We were early enough that we had the beach to ourselves, but I knew it wouldn’t last. I wasn’t the only local who came here to escape the throng.
“You want to explore the island?” I asked, shoveling sand with my toe over a tiny deflated jellyfish.
Kendall hiked an eyebrow. “Barefoot?”
I pressed my lips to his shoulder, smelling coconut. “Pretend you’re on Lost.”
And then I showed him my world—the side he hadn’t seen yet, the world of my childhood, where mangrove roots grasped at the water in a forest of tangles, slowly claiming land for itself from the surf; where roseate spoonbills flashed incongruously pink and cartoonish on a narrow strip of sand fingering out into the gulf; where frantic coquinas worked to rebury their sherbet-colored shells when a passing wave carved them out of the sand.
When Stu and Sasha and I were kids my family would come out here and build campfires and pitch tents and spend whole weekends on an island all our own. Dad and Stu caught snapper while Mom wrapped potatoes and corncobs in foil and buried them in red embers to roast. Sasha and I went down to the water with my little brother trailing behind us like a hopeful puppy, and gave each other sand scrubs and mud facials, and snapped off the stiff sea grasses that grew at the high-water mark and pretended we were smoking spindly cigarettes while Sasha threatened Stu with an ugly death if he told my parents.
In high
school someone always had a runabout or a dinghy or a paddle boat, and there’d be ten or twenty kids from my school on the island on any given weekend night, standing too close to the fire, blaring music too loud, smoking things we weren’t supposed to smoke, and making furtive, forbidden body contact. Sasha lost her virginity on one of those nights—to Tommy Housworth, after making me swear to keep watch for overcurious classmates outside the lean-to they’d created from a raft and two beach towels.
I closed my eyes, soaking in the smells of saltwater and sea life and rich, earthy decomposition. I hadn’t come here in years, too busy with my practice and my house and everyday life to remember how basic the sea was to my makeup. Now I relaxed, feeling like me again.
I felt the jolt from Kendall’s touch before I registered his hands trailing around my hips from behind and coming to rest on my belly, pulling me close against the heat of him. We were both damp from sweat and salt air, a fine coating of sand on our skin, and as he held me I felt his heart beating against my back, strong and steady.
“I love you, Brook,” he said low into my ear. “I really do.”
I pressed back against him and we stood there like that, twined together alone on an island in a perfect moment. It didn’t matter that we’d been so busy at work lately that we’d hardly seen each other. It didn’t matter that my house was a wreck, or that my career path was up in the air, or that my mother had turned her back on our family and I didn’t know what would become of my dad. All that mattered was this moment by a gentle sea, the inviolate present, on an island rich with both my history and my future.
I had packed a feast too bountiful for two people to consume, and it took both of us to tote the cooler from the boat, buoying it on the water’s surface as we glided it to shore. From the Italian deli I loved on McGregor I had fat olives in every shade of black and green and brown and yellow; strips of prosciutto and sopressata and pancetta so thin you could almost see through it; hunks of bread that warmed in the sun, golden crunchy on the outside and tenderly doughy inside; cheeses in buttery shades. From Fat Louie’s, the gourmet shop, I brought containers of red pepper relish and wild berry spinach salad and Tuscan bean salad. For dessert there was key lime mousse and chocolate layer cake from a delectable bakery I’d discovered at one of my client meetings.