“He’s not hurting anything,” I said, staring at her sunburned back. Her shoulders were red in places I must have missed putting the suntan lotion on the previous day when we’d been here swimming.
She stopped and gave me a stern look. “It’s illegal.”
I waved my hand. “Oh, come on, no one’s going to say anything to a little boy digging up a sand crab.”
“Yes, someone is.” She marched over to him and picked him up.
“Look, Mommy,” he held the creature in front of her face. She bent her neck backward to keep from being pinched. “That’s nice, sweetie, but don’t go on those sand dunes again. They’re here to protect us.”
His expression grew somber. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“Good,” she said softly. “Then maybe next time you’ll remember.”
“Look, Daddy!” He held the crab out toward me.
“That’s quite a critter you found there. Careful he doesn’t get you with those pinchers.”
Benji held him up in front of his face, examining him from every angle. “His name’s going to be Benji Jr.”
Kyra laughed as she set him back down on the sand. “I see the resemblance. He definitely has his grandfather’s good looks.”
“Ha-ha.” I slipped my hand around hers again. “And your mother’s intelligence.”
Still holding him, Benji kicked at the sand. “Can I keep him?”
“No,” Kyra said, without giving it a second’s consideration.
I gave her fingers a squeeze. “Honey, every kid should have a pet crab.”
She knelt down and set her hand on his arm. “Everything has a place it ought to be, Benji. Yours is with me and your father. His is in the sand here on the beach.”
His bottom lip pushed out. “I can get him sand.”
“It’s not the same,” she said. “If something’s not where it ought to be, it won’t be happy.”
Along with the sun, love warmed me. This is my family, I thought. That’s my wife, giving my son advice that he might remember someday when he’s a man. I knew I would. Or at least the way she looked right then with her red hair, lightened to near blonde from the summer sun and growing out of the pixie cut she’d let her sister talk her into.
I helped her stand. “What happened to ‘bloom where you’re planted’? That’s what you’re always telling me.”
She brought my hand to her mouth and kissed it. “Yes, but he has a chance to bloom where he was created to. That’s even better than blooming wherever the wind blows you, don’t you think?”
Benji looked up at me with those angled blue eyes of his. “Dad? I could get him sea grass and water from the ocean. I’d—”
I let go of Kyra’s hand to pick him up. “Your Momma’s right, Ben. How’d you like it if someone took you from us and put you in a big glass cage? Even if they stick a bed in there and some french fries, it doesn’t mean you’d really have what you needed, would it?”
“Can we get french fries?” he asked.
Kyra threw me a side glance. “We just had lunch.”
Benji yelped and dropped the crab. He held his hand, looking at it like he couldn’t believe what had just happened. Seizing his second chance at freedom, the tiny crab scurried as fast as his little legs would carry him toward the surf.
Benji’s eyes filled with tears. Kyra examined his palm, then kissed it.
“Benji Jr, you’re a bad crab!” my son called after his would-be pet.
“He’s not a bad crab,” Kyra said. “He’s just a smart crab.”
Benji gave her the evil eye.
“Honey,” I said, “you don’t always have to be right. If your son says he’s a bad crab, he’s a bad crab.”
Kyra put a hand on the side of her mouth to help her voice carry and yelled, “Benji Jr, you’re a bad crab!”
Benji cracked up and wriggled in my arms to be let free. Kyra and I each took one of his hands and swung him back and forth into the waves, letting his feet touch foam and listening to him howl with delight, forgetting all about his disappointment.
As I turned the bathroom light off, I heard the door open. Whoever it was made no attempt at stealth, so I figured a burglary was unlikely. “Hello?” I called.
“Hey, Dad,” Benji answered.
I laid the hand towel on the counter and hurried out. Despite being dressed in civilian clothes, my boy looked every bit the sailor, with his chest muscles clearly defined beneath a fitted T-shirt and black hair buzzed tight around a face that had lost any last trace of baby fat we’d sent him off to Illinois with. I couldn’t get to him fast enough.
I caught him in a bear hug. Between the Old Spice and a tinge of diesel I was probably just imagining, he even smelled like a sailor. As I held him, his arms hung loose at his sides until finally he gave my back an unenthusiastic pat and pulled away. It hurt my feelings a little, but I understood. The kid just had his lifelong dream crushed—he was entitled to a little grief.
Undeterred, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled back, looking him in the eyes—slanted like mine, but as blue as mine were brown. It never ceased to stun me that the toddler who threw himself on the floor with a bloodcurdling scream when I tried to wean him from his Pooh Bear was really a man now. A handsome, smart, hardworking, ambitious sailor—at least for a little while longer. I was the father of a man.
I looked him over. “I thought you didn’t come in until—”
“I took an earlier flight.” He pulled away from my grasp and set his canvas bag by the door. The thing was so bulky he could have been hiding a body in it.
I tousled what was left of his hair. The ticklish feel of it brought me back to summers past. I just couldn’t get over him. “Looking sharp, squid.”
He flinched. “Don’t call me that. I’m not a sailor anymore.”
“It’s not over until it’s over.” It was a stupid and maybe even cowardly thing to say. The Navy wouldn’t send him home unless the medical discharge was imminent.
He shrugged and walked past me. “Just because the coroner hasn’t pronounced the corpse dead, doesn’t mean it’s still breathing.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt his pain as if it were my own.
“Yeah, me too.” He headed for the kitchen, his boots clunking against the hardwood.
I followed. “You hungry?”
He opened the fridge, looked at the measly fare consisting more of condiments than anything else, and closed the door again. “Not really. Just tired.”
“Didn’t you sleep last night?” It was a direct flight, so it wasn’t likely he had jet lag.
“I haven’t slept well since they told me I was being sent home.”
“Maybe we can pick you up something to help until . . .”
When he looked at me, I knew no amount of Benadryl was going to give him the rest he needed.
“Mind if I go lay down?”
One of the things I was prepared for was Benji wanting to shut out the rest of the world and go into hibernation like he had when we moved here the summer before he started high school, then later when his first love broke his heart. Like Kyra, he was susceptible to wallowing in pity, and also like Kyra, a push and pull here and there kept him from it. “I kind of had a surprise for you.”
“Can it wait until after I have a nap?” Not pausing for an answer, he trudged upstairs.
Two hours later, I was practically asleep on the couch myself when he made his way back downstairs, looking twice as tired as when he left. “All right, I guess I’m ready for my surprise.” You’d have thought by the look on his face he expected me to give him a dead puppy.
“Up for taking a drive?”
He shrugged one shoulder. It killed me to see him so blue, but the trip would help. After an hour and a half of me trying to fill the silence with small talk and him giving me as many one-word answers as he could slide by with, we arrived at the marina. I’m sure he’d guessed our destination before now.
“Good old Braddy’s Wharf,” he
said, sounding almost happy.
I backed into a spot in front of an old-time parking meter that still took nickels. We looked through the windshield at the rows of salt-washed stilt homes facing the cove. Except for their sun-faded colors, they all looked the same, more or less, with their wraparound porches bordered by patches of grass popping up in resilient tufts from the sand, that neither sea salt nor drought had managed to kill.
Mostly artists and fishermen lived in these houses, supplying the nearby restaurants and gift shops that catered to vacationing families. As everything built up around this place, somehow it managed to age unaffected.
“Remember the first time you took me flounder gigging?” He looked over at the spot near the shoreline that we’d started from.
“You were really good at it,” I said. He was ten years old, and once I told him how to hold the gig and spear the fish between the eyes, he never lost another flounder. He took to fishing like Kyra took to music. Joining the Navy was the most natural thing in the world for him. I’m pretty sure he had seawater flowing in his veins instead of blood.
“I didn’t even get to go out once.” He stared at the sound side, which was as still as a mirror while we listened to the distant roar of waves.
I supposed he meant out to sea on a naval ship. I opened the car door. “Let’s take a walk.”
The smell of brine and fish filled the air. Benji opened his door and followed. It was early afternoon now, and the sun sat high above us. “You still think you can read the time from it?” he asked, squinting up.
“Is there anything I can’t do?”
He gave me a half smile, which was 50 percent more than I expected. “All right, without looking at your watch, what time is it?”
I shielded my eyes and squinted up at the sun, then over at the shoreline, and back again. “Twelve ten,” I finally said.
He looked at his watch and shook his head. “Twelve thirty; not bad.”
“What makes you think I’m wrong and that thing is right?”
He held his wrist out and sunshine gleamed off the glass face. “This is a diver’s watch. I bought it at the commissary with my last paycheck. The SEALs use these. They have to be accurate.”
“The military makes mistakes just like everyone else,” I said, realizing it sounded like I was being deeper than I’d intended.
“Yeah, they do. I’d have been a good sailor, Dad.”
“You’d have been the best.”
We hiked on awhile around a couple of small sand dunes and up the trail we’d been taking since Benji was old enough to walk. As we climbed higher up the large hill, the breeze finally began to sweep off the water—fresh, salty, and cool. Benji and I inhaled a lungful of it at the same time. “My word, I love it here,” I said.
“So why did we leave?”
“Better opportunities,” I said. “The economy was too seasonal here. Private school ain’t cheap, Ben.” I looked over the patches of red moss dripping down the sides of a nearby boulder like melted candle wax. Wildflowers bloomed all around us—purple, yellow, and orange—wherever the wind had scattered their seeds. “I’ll bet your mom knows the name of every flower here.”
Benji stopped walking. “What’s going on with you two anyway?”
I didn’t stop. “I told you about her fender bender, right?”
“You should have told me when it happened, and I wish you’d stop calling it that. A fender bender doesn’t cause amnesia. The accident had to have been pretty bad to give her a concussion.”
“It really wasn’t much more than that.” I picked up my pace, wanting to outrun the questions.
He caught up to me again, keeping stride easily with his long legs. “Whatever. Is her memory back?”
I shook my head and braced myself for the inquisition I knew would follow. Two seagulls circled overhead like a pair of vultures, then headed back toward the pier. “Not exactly.”
I found a rock big enough for the two of us to sit on and caught him up to speed, leaving out the worst, of course. He picked a piece of tall, dry grass from the ground and chewed it, as he stared at three men on a fishing boat dragging in their net. It looked like a decent catch from where we were. “So, you’re living at home, and Mom has no idea that you were separated? And no one’s going to tell her?”
“The doctor says it’s best for her to remember on her own.”
“Why?”
“He said in her mind we were kinda like newlyweds. She doesn’t remember the past few years and how bad things had gotten.”
He pulled the grass from his mouth and wiped debris from his tongue. “I didn’t think things were that bad between you.”
I looked at him. “C’mon, Benji, don’t act like you didn’t know we had problems.”
“I know you fought a lot, but lots of parents fight. I always knew you loved each other.”
“Well, she does now.”
“Wow,” he said. “Does she remember me?”
I stood and brushed off the cold dirt from the back of my jeans. “Of course she remembers you.”
His face turned red, which only made his eyes look bluer in the sunshine. “I mean about the Navy and all that.”
“She knows,” I said. “That’s why I sent her with your Aunt Marnie—so she wouldn’t have so much time to worry about you.”
He pushed off the boulder. “She’s worried about me, and I’m worried about her.” He looked off into the distance. “Hey, let’s go see if Sonny’s by the Sea is still there. Man, they had good oysters.”
We walked back down the side of the hill, this time with me following him.
He looked back over his shoulder. “I’m sure Mom would have let you come home, eventually. You guys have been together forever.”
“People split up every day,” I said. “People who’ve been together a lot longer than we have.”
“Not you and Mom.”
I let him have his fantasy and hoped he’d let me have mine. “So, how long do you think it would have taken her to forgive me?”
He stopped, shielded his eyes, and looked up at the sun. “Three months and four days.”
I tried to laugh but felt more like crying. He was probably right. She’d most likely have eventually forgiven me for the e-mail, and maybe with counseling and time we could have continued like we had the past few years, me on the guest bed and her in ours. But how long could I have gone on that way? The loneliness was killing me. I mean that in the most literal sense.
“What time is she coming home tomorrow?”
“I’m picking her and your Aunt Marnie up first thing in the morning,” I said. “Why? You want to come?”
He scrunched his face, indicating he’d rather not.
A sudden gale blew sand at us. I turned to keep it from getting in my eyes and watched Benji do the same. After a second it died down, and we continued on.
Ahead, we saw the old restaurant overgrown with weeds. The wood siding was falling off in places, and a tear ripped through the roof. Rodents and seagulls now called it home. With a troubled look, Benji met my gaze. “What happened to it?”
“I don’t know.” Then I remembered my mother telling me about a hurricane a few years back that flattened a few of the older structures and took out part of the pier. “Hurricane Janey, I think. Remember that?”
He ran his fingertips across the splintered shingles and looked up at the neon sign that never did have all its letters lit at one time. “This place is like my childhood. I can’t believe it’s gone.”
“Change is hard,” I said, or maybe I just thought it.
“You know Mom always wanted to play the piano here.”
“Is that right?”
“She thought that Sonny never hired her because he was prejudiced.”
“Against redheads?” I asked, confused.
Benji made a face. “No. His father fought in World War II.”
The truth hit me. “So the Japs were good enough to spend their money here, just not good en
ough to work here?” I thought back to how Sonny treated me. I hadn’t picked up on him not liking me, but then Kyra always said I was oblivious to that sort of thing. I guess sometimes that could be a blessing. “She never told me.”
“She didn’t tell me either.” He squatted and scooped up a handful of sand. “I overheard her talking to Aunt Marnie on the phone a long time ago.” Looking deep in thought, he smiled and let the sand spill through his fingers.
“What?”
“I just remembered that I told her when I grew up I would buy it for her, and she could play anytime she wanted.”
That was our Benji. “You sure do love your mama.”
He gave the restaurant a closer look. “Maybe I still can.”
“In this condition I’m sure you can get a good deal, but that still doesn’t make it free.”
“I’ll get a job. I just want to see us all happy again, like when we were here.” He looked more defeated than when we’d left the house.
“Can we go now?” I asked. I was sorry I brought him. It hadn’t been my intention to heap on more disappointment. Just to remind him of better times. Somehow I guess I’d managed to do both.
Twenty-Seven
Benji and I exchanged unimpressed glances as Kyra prattled on about Marcello, a designer she and Marnie had met in Italy. I tried not to be jealous, but the way she talked about him, you’d think the guy walked on water. She picked up a roll. “Besides being an incredible designer—and I mean incredible—he plays the violin like an angel.” She smiled between Benji and me as if this should amuse us somehow.
Happy day, a musician too, I thought. He probably was a great dancer, poet, and lover as well.
A kid shrieked in the booth behind us. The parents shushed her, which only made her shriek louder. Kyra threw a glance over her shoulder as she buttered her roll. “Get it? He plays the violin and his nickname is Cello.”
Benji took a sip of his soda. “Cute.” He looked about as thrilled as I was. I guess he didn’t like his mother gushing over another man any more than I did.
Her smile faded as she looked back and forth between us. “I just thought it was funny that he played a string instrument.”