18mm Blues by Gerald A Browne Page B

mortgage with balloons. Not a payment had been missed.
    â€œGayle wants the house,” Harold said. “You know how much it means to her, the time she’s spent on it. That’s all she wants. No alimony or any of that, just the house. That’s fair enough, isn’t it?”
    â€œNo.”
    Grady stood, took up his suit jacket by the crook of a forefinger, didn’t give Havermeyer even another glance. Went over to where the sales report was caught in the oleander hedge. Wounded a few birds of paradise getting to it. He decided against going out by way of the garbage side of the house, went up the steps and into and through it, on the way taking what he was certain would be a last look at the large painting he especially liked in the entrance hall. An Elizabeth Bouguereau. So long painting, he thought, you’re too good for him.

CHAPTER TWO
    A half hour later Grady was sitting on Muir Beach. Up on the shoulder ridge of sand the tide had built. His shoes and socks off, trouser legs rolled to his knees, shirt unbuttoned and its tails pulled out.
    Thinking of other places he’d rather be.
    Cozumel, Mexico, came to mind. In a world out of the ordinary, seventy feet down in the Tormentos Reefs, among the huge coral pinnacles and heads, being merely one of the swimming creatures along with eagle rays and schools of angelfish. His favorite dive, Tormentos. Did the black, big-eyed, at least two-hundred-pound grouper he’d had such lengthy communion with there eleven years ago still claim that sandy valley? Groupers probably didn’t have such a life span. But he hoped so.
    Even more where he’d rather be was Litchfield, Connecticut. Home. The three-story Federal-style house. Not purely, severely Federal because of its Victorian revisions, but in its heart and bones recalling the year 1785. Painted white, of course, with black wooden shutters, and like most of the other houses there along North Street set back the distance of a large lawn. Wrapped in front and along nearly all of one side by a wide, railed porch. A glider on the porch, an old standing one of metal with springs that refused to be silenced and striped canvas-colored cushions, kept up for the sake of memories. Wicker chairs and tables that were brought from the garret of the barn every year about the time when the dogwood petals fell. Returned to the barn soon after yellowed maple leaves began accumulating in their seats.
    He could go back. Would. Not phone and have younger brother Jeff meet him at Kennedy or Bradley. Hurry the surprise of himself up the uneven brick walk and up the five steps of the porch and on in to his father, Fred, and his mother, Ruth, and perhaps even his older sister Janet and perhaps even his grandmother Wilma. They would be at the supper table passing portions or eating from trays while watching television. They’d maul him with hugs, pepper him with kisses, and after things had settled he would sit and exchange updates with them and he would notice that his mother and father, as ever, couldn’t be within reach of each other without in some way touching.
    His mother would love readying his room on the top floor, the one where the apple tree tips scratched eerily across the window screen when there was wind. Just below where the wasps squeezed in and built combs. He’d lie in that bed and reacquaint himself with that certain darkness. He’d delight in regression.
    He would be eighteen again, no, fifteen. It would be the June when he’d begun at the White Flower Farm. There’d be the early morning two-mile bike ride to work along the black-topped road, passing the piled and nearly continuous rock walls and the jostling patches of wild lilies with that particular day’s blossoms enjoying their turn. He’d do whatever tasks the people at White Flower wanted, proud of being able to work, whether it was helping customers load purchased plants into their cars or dividing seedlings