we’d found one
another so easily, fallen into step like a dance both of us had
known but had always lacked a partner for. When we announced our
engagement, there were replies of about time and took you
two long enough. We had our ceremony by the ocean, bare feet in
the sand, my pant legs and Del’s simple dress wetting from the tide
curling at our ankles. Now I wonder what I would have seen if I’d
been looking out past the waves instead of her beautiful face. Was
it there that day? I’m sure it was.
~
Before he died, my father had a fishing boat
along with a lobster license passed down through the generations
that had stopped with me. An only child, there were no others to
gift the inheritance of long days in the salty, stinging air, the
smell of fish and the sea never leaving your hands. I’d hated the
idea of being a fisherman but hadn’t voiced my opinion until my
senior year of high school, having already worked for six years on
the boat with my father. My mother told me this was when his health
began to decline, after we’d had our row. Because for some, the sea
is their first love, one that can’t be replaced by the passion of
flesh or the warmth of a baby in the crook of an arm. For some, the
sea fills their hearts like the chasms of unending darkness in the
deepest reaches. Sometimes there is no room for others among the
waves. My father was one of these people. When I told him I didn’t
plan on continuing his life’s work, I saw something go dark in his
eyes. And maybe it was the black love of the water there behind his
blue irises. Whatever the case, that was the end of our
relationship. I almost heard it break, like a stick frosted in
winter and crushed beneath a boot. He left on his boat the next
morning without me, and I began to make plans for college and the
rest of my life.
On a cool September afternoon, a day when I
was sitting in an advanced economics class, the way Del’s body had
looked in the semi-darkness of my dorm room the night before
consuming my thoughts, my father fell down at my childhood home,
steps from the front porch, and didn’t get up. The day’s mail was
still clutched in one of his callused hands. A massive heart
attack, the doctor said. Nothing that could’ve been done. But my
mother’s eyes, they told me different. That I could’ve been
different.
I inherited their house when she moved away
the following spring. Florida offered easy winters and other people
her age in the same position—widows, widowers, and I assumed
cynical as well as thoroughly disappointed by their offspring. But
it was more than that. She blamed me for his passing. Never spoken
aloud, but there, like a noxious gas between us in the room
whenever we saw one another. I tried not to let it bother me, but
ghosts don’t simply haunt you, they speak in whispers of doubt.
The week after Del and I were married we
moved into my childhood home. It was an old house with wide-planked
floors that never squeaked when you walked across them. The windows
looked over a short yard to where the rocks began, tumbled against
one another by time beyond meaning. Then the ocean. The entire
Atlantic stretched away from us in a horizontal swath of sky and
sea that blurred into one another on a clear day. The house was
paid off from the countless hours my father had spent freezing his
hands in the Atlantic, pulling out its fruits to sell to tourists
or restaurants, whoever was buying at the time. But even though our
bills were fairly low, they still existed, and when our job-hunts
both came up without any true prospects, I settled into the thorned
knowledge of what I would have to do. Most people know necessity’s
next-door neighbor is irony, and this was not lost on me when I
started fishing in my father’s boat to make the money we needed. I
could almost hear his thick chuckle between the waves that rocked
the craft in the early morning hours after rising from the warm bed
beside Del. I hated him then,
another so easily, fallen into step like a dance both of us had
known but had always lacked a partner for. When we announced our
engagement, there were replies of about time and took you
two long enough. We had our ceremony by the ocean, bare feet in
the sand, my pant legs and Del’s simple dress wetting from the tide
curling at our ankles. Now I wonder what I would have seen if I’d
been looking out past the waves instead of her beautiful face. Was
it there that day? I’m sure it was.
~
Before he died, my father had a fishing boat
along with a lobster license passed down through the generations
that had stopped with me. An only child, there were no others to
gift the inheritance of long days in the salty, stinging air, the
smell of fish and the sea never leaving your hands. I’d hated the
idea of being a fisherman but hadn’t voiced my opinion until my
senior year of high school, having already worked for six years on
the boat with my father. My mother told me this was when his health
began to decline, after we’d had our row. Because for some, the sea
is their first love, one that can’t be replaced by the passion of
flesh or the warmth of a baby in the crook of an arm. For some, the
sea fills their hearts like the chasms of unending darkness in the
deepest reaches. Sometimes there is no room for others among the
waves. My father was one of these people. When I told him I didn’t
plan on continuing his life’s work, I saw something go dark in his
eyes. And maybe it was the black love of the water there behind his
blue irises. Whatever the case, that was the end of our
relationship. I almost heard it break, like a stick frosted in
winter and crushed beneath a boot. He left on his boat the next
morning without me, and I began to make plans for college and the
rest of my life.
On a cool September afternoon, a day when I
was sitting in an advanced economics class, the way Del’s body had
looked in the semi-darkness of my dorm room the night before
consuming my thoughts, my father fell down at my childhood home,
steps from the front porch, and didn’t get up. The day’s mail was
still clutched in one of his callused hands. A massive heart
attack, the doctor said. Nothing that could’ve been done. But my
mother’s eyes, they told me different. That I could’ve been
different.
I inherited their house when she moved away
the following spring. Florida offered easy winters and other people
her age in the same position—widows, widowers, and I assumed
cynical as well as thoroughly disappointed by their offspring. But
it was more than that. She blamed me for his passing. Never spoken
aloud, but there, like a noxious gas between us in the room
whenever we saw one another. I tried not to let it bother me, but
ghosts don’t simply haunt you, they speak in whispers of doubt.
The week after Del and I were married we
moved into my childhood home. It was an old house with wide-planked
floors that never squeaked when you walked across them. The windows
looked over a short yard to where the rocks began, tumbled against
one another by time beyond meaning. Then the ocean. The entire
Atlantic stretched away from us in a horizontal swath of sky and
sea that blurred into one another on a clear day. The house was
paid off from the countless hours my father had spent freezing his
hands in the Atlantic, pulling out its fruits to sell to tourists
or restaurants, whoever was buying at the time. But even though our
bills were fairly low, they still existed, and when our job-hunts
both came up without any true prospects, I settled into the thorned
knowledge of what I would have to do. Most people know necessity’s
next-door neighbor is irony, and this was not lost on me when I
started fishing in my father’s boat to make the money we needed. I
could almost hear his thick chuckle between the waves that rocked
the craft in the early morning hours after rising from the warm bed
beside Del. I hated him then,
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