Freaky Green Eyes by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

sort of way. He was nice to Samantha, too, and offered to take us sailing on Sunday anytime we wanted. Saturday evening, Mero Okawa invited people to his gallery first (he owned the Orca Gallery), then took about twelve guests out to dinner at this place that was everybody’sfavorite fresh-fish restaurant, on the river. At first I thought that Mero Okawa was sort of weird, then I really got to like him. Mom said of him he was her closest friend in Skagit Harbor, like a brother.
    Mero overheard, and said, deadpan, “Krista, I hope I’m nicer than a mere brother. My brothers are beasts.”
    Mero Owaka described himself as two parts Hawaiian, one part Caucasian—“But which part is which I haven’t been able to figure out.” He was a “sculptor, sort of,” but mostly a small-scale art entrepreneur, owner of the Orca Gallery and also a co-chair of the Skagit Harbor Arts Festival, which was scheduled for Labor Day weekend. (I heard a lot about this because other dinner guests, including Mom, were helping out too.) Mero was slender and not very tall, with stylishly bleached ashy-blond hair dark at the roots, and a smooth olive skin, and eyelashes longer than most girls’, including mine. He carried a Polaroid camera on a plastic strap around his neck and was always taking pictures. He wore rings onboth hands, a gold chain around his neck, and a sapphire in his left earlobe. People teased Mero in a funny, affectionate way for his “fashion sense”—his “Armani look.” He was really nice to Samantha and me without being condescending, like some adults. I didn’t want to see this friend of Mom’s as my father would, sneering at him as a “pretty boy” or, worse yet, a “fag.”
    That evening, Mero took Polaroid shots of Mom, Samantha, and me. He said we were “terrifically photogenic,” which made us laugh. “No, seriously,” Mero insisted, raising and aiming his camera, “you are. ‘Krista, Francesca, Samantha: A Mother and Two Daughters.’ Oh, to be John Singer Sargent, to do justice to you!” It was Mero’s way to be shamelessly flattering and to make you laugh, and yet you knew that, in fact, he meant what he said.
    Later, Mom said of Mero he was the “most honest” man she knew, and “probably the most good-hearted.”
    Next day, Sunday, Aunt Vicky was scheduled to arrive in the early evening. She was driving up from Portland, and would be staying at a bed-and-breakfast place in town, since there wasn’t room for another guest in Mom’s cabin. I’d decided not to be embarrassed when I saw Aunt Vicky but just to tell her, when I had a chance, that I hadn’t called her because I’d been feeling a little depressed about our family situation. But now I was feeling one hundred percent better.
    Though it was Sunday, Mom didn’t vary her schedule much. She dressed in her old paint-stained clothes and tied a scarf around her hair. She was preparing silk screens of big, luminescent green cattails and marsh grasses, and Samantha and I were helping her. Time really passes quickly when you’re absorbed in the technical side of art! Sometime between three and four o’clock, my new friend Garrett was coming over to take Samantha and me sailing. Unless the weather suddenly turned bad: by midmorning, the sky was ribbed with darkish clouds,but there was a wind out of the northwest, blowing them away. I checked the sky every few minutes, keeping my fingers crossed.
    Around lunchtime, a woman friend of Mom’s dropped by, and Mero Okawa bicycled over, on his way into town. The three of them were talking mostly about the arts festival. I asked Mero if it was okay if I rode his bicycle around, and he said sure. I hadn’t realized how hilly Deer Point Road was—I was coasting downhill toward the harbor and enjoying myself, and would have to struggle to pedal back uphill. In