The Taste of Salt by Martha Southgate

definitely an everyday thing. But I could still be persuaded by her smile.
    I was a little high, just feeling good, not over the edge or anything. It was a sunny day, and she had been riding her bike around the block the way she did. She loved to do that. I was sitting on the porch, watching the day go by, and her mama and her brother, Tick, were off somewhere, and she pulled her bike up in front of me and said, “Daddy, you wanna go down to the lake with me? You never go. Wanna go with me today?”
    And I said yes. I got into the car and settled a beer in a paper bag between my knees. I thought it would be nice to look at the water and hold it and watch her and sip. She looked at the bag once, but she didn’t say anything. Just hopped into the front seat next to me. She was getting leggy, looking more and more like her mama every day. She wore her hair in two braids, and one was coming undone. She had a serious look on her face. “So, little miss,” I said, “what is it you do at the lake so much?”
    She turned from the window to look at me and her facebrightened. “I like to skip rocks. And I like to look at stuff I find. It’s not like the ocean. I really want to see the ocean sometime. There’s way more stuff living in the ocean. But sometimes I can see a good fish or some vegetation or something.” Vegetation. How about that? Eleven years old and talking like that, so smart. But the kind of smart she was seemed to have no end. I had my limits and I wasn’t all that interested in the physical world, in understanding it and finding out where each piece of it fit together. She was. She wanted to know every bit of it. Started keeping lists of things around her—leaves, rocks, the different animals she saw—not that we had many, living right in the center of the city. But whatever she saw, she wrote down as soon as she could write. And you couldn’t keep her away from those nature shows on TV. Anything she could watch she would, especially stuff about the ocean. She spoke again, interrupting my thoughts: “I like the water on my feet, too. The way it feels. I love the way it feels to be underwater.” She fell silent. “How come you don’t like the beach, Daddy?”
    â€œDidn’t grow up around it. Don’t like being wet.” I took a little taste. Growing up like I did, down south in one of those blink-and-you’d-miss-it little towns, I never did learn to swim anyway. She didn’t know that, and I was embarrassed to tell her. Sarah had made sure that the kids knew how to swim. We both thought they needed to learneverything they could; that they should go to good schools and learn everything that would help them feel comfortable wherever they went. I’d spent so much of my life feeling uncomfortable. I didn’t want that for my children. “I’m glad to be going there with you though, little bit. Real glad.”
    She smiled a small smile. We pulled into the parking lot and got out.
    There were just a few cats out fishing, casting their lines over and over again into the greenish water. The air was very clear—“Fresh as if issued to children on a beach.” That’s what Virginia Woolf wrote in
Mrs. Dalloway.
I like her stuff, especially
To the Lighthouse.
I like a lot of writers that people don’t think a guy like me would like. We got out of the car and Josie ran down to the rocks along the shore, yelling, “Come on, Daddy, come on!” I followed slowly, still sipping, still feeling pretty good. It was, I dunno, my sixth beer? My seventh?
    She was taking her shoes off and wading into the water. She wasn’t afraid at all. I stood on the shore, a safe distance from all that water, just watching her. The sound of the waves was kind of nice, I had to admit. I found a rock to sit on—didn’t want to get sand in my pockets. And I didn’t go so far as to take off my shoes. Josie ran and