A Drink Called Paradise by Terese Svoboda Page B

Three days, that’s great. Where can I make my phone call?
    Over there, in the poop deck.
    I sign.

Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? I start away from the cool plastic at my ear. Echo is a girl in a nymph costume, a shreddable tissue of green, who leans forward on a rock with her hands cupped to her lips, and another girl on another rock—a veritable Pacific of rocks, rocks that run right up to my ex’s own cool-plastic-touched ear—leans forward with her hands cupped, and another. Every word echoes, so I must sound startled too, and strange. Does my ex notice?
    I’m sorry, I say.
    He turns off a radio behind him. You’re what?
    I never told you I was sorry.
    That’s true, he says. He was my son too.
    Tell your wife I said so, I say.
    He sighs and starts to say something, but his voice breaks.
    What is it?
    It’s okay, he says. I forgive you.
    I hold the phone and hold it tighter. It wasn’t my fault, I say. It was an accident.
    I forgive you, he says again.
    I can’t say anything.
    So where are you? he asks. I called you about his savings account, but your office said you were gone.
    On a boat, I say. A very strange boat, and I’m hoping it will get me to an airport. Please call my office and tell them I’ll be back in a week.
    There’s silence on his side, an echo of silence. You still only care about work.
    No—no. That never was true. You know that.
    What? he says. I can’t hear you.
    Listen, I say, the name of the boat is—what? She told me. I lean from the booth, but she’s not around to ask and there’s no sign. It isn’t about work, I say. Really. Tell them that on I’m this boat—
    The echo girls have stopped. The echo girls sit back on their haunches and pick their teeth, bored with the actual transmission of information, and in a second I hear nothing at all from the other end, not even the insect swishing of static, of the electric wave tumbling. I say, It isn’t about work at all—but the phone is already dead.
    I hit the phone. I hit it again because it doesn’t hurt enough the first time. I manage with number two to put myself in pain. I’m in pain, I’m in pain.
    The man who lectures me, who says, That’s private property, ma’am, which I understand to mean I am private property, me, the one who’s in pain and hurt, not the jackass plastic, that I shouldn’t be misused, that man is, say, six years older than my son was, the size my son would have been in six short years, and this baby tells me it’s the only call I can make for three days and by that time we’ll be in port anyway, so relax. We can’t have everyone hanging on the line, he says, and maybe he pats the sucker or maybe he doesn’t, but the gesture is what boys learn with machines they love instead of women. He doesn’t, however, catch the way my face shifts in anger. He says, What about dinner, have you had it?
    I do smell its grease, the kind that hamburger makes. After all those boiled roots and puddings, that vast pig, and those tins of fat and fish and salt and wet leather, this smell has its virtues, starting with the smell of home. Home fries, I hear him say as he herds me away from that phone. I hold my hurt hand that is all I have to remember of what I said, I wind down corridor after corridor, the smell stronger than the antiseptic, then the smell is there and the rest folds behind into memory in the presence of clicking plastic silver.
    We walk in front of Day-Glo French dressing spread across equally bright greens, instant potatoes wallpaper-paste-fine topped with brown, a color that advertises a circle of meat somewhere below, ground from the tubes and ears of various short-lived creatures, all of which the server plops onto my plate in an almost musical series.
    This boy I have come with touches me on the elbow to guide me past the plastic tree strung with red and gold bits of sprayed food—popcorn,