in Clinton where he kept his boat, a thirty-two-foot sloop, which when it was still true he’d named Amy’s Delight. It had two bunks and a head, and a tiny galley below. He was well aware that if Amy were the same age as Claire, who’d be a college girl if she were not doing an extra year at that school he hated, he would have bought beers instead of cokes. Amy wore his black L.L. Bean woolen shirt over her bathing suit. It dwarfed her, coming down to her knees, and made her look younger than she was, a middle school kid instead of a high school sophomore. That was all right with him. She could stay that age forever. Claire wore his big red hoodie. It covered her down to just below her bikini bottom because she was that much taller, and it made her long legs look as naked as they really were. It was hard not to imagine that the hoodie was all she wore.
They jumped down into the boat and Claire said, “I don’t know a thing about sailing,” and had the good sense to climb halfway down the companionway to get out of the way. Amy went forward, like he’d trained her to do before the trouble between him and her mom, to take the clips off the furled jib and then came aft, and they hauled it up together, and then she helped him haul the main sail halyard. Then he turned to her and said exactly what he knew she knew he would say: “Will you take us out, Amy?” And as if no misery had ever happened between them, she smiled and said she would, and gave that little funny salute he’d taught her, and there was such a hot red surge of love for her like a live thing rising in his chest that he thought he’d never be able to breathe again, his eyes flooding and his lip quivering, and he turned away so she wouldn’t see a grown man crying and jumped up on the dock to cast off the lines.
He took the stern line off the cleat on the float and flipped it to Amy, who, sitting at the tiller, coiled it at her feet while he went forward to cast the bow line off. Claire still stood in the companionway, a mere passenger, nowhere near center stage, just watching. He uncleated the bow line, pushed hard on the nose of the boat to swing it away from the dock, and jumped onboard, and Amy pushed the boom and the tiller hard to the left and jibed expertly around in the very narrow space of the crowded marina to head for open water.
Anybody else would have used the motor.
As soon as they were past the jetty, a strong wind heeled the boat way over and he was glad to see that Claire, still standing in the companionway, was scared. He sat down on the bench on the windward side, just forward of his daughter, and said, “She’ll go a little faster if we tighten it a bit,” meaning closer to the wind, but what he really wanted was to heel even more and scare Claire more. He wanted water coming over the lee rail into the cockpit. He wanted her to lose her composure, but you might say he just wanted to show off for her.
Amy nodded her head, and pushed the tiller down and he pulled the main sheet in a little further and adjusted the jib sheets, and Amy’s Delight came up still closer to the wind and heeled still further over. Water did come in now over the lee rail, sloshing in the cockpit before exiting through the scuppers, and Claire, feeling much too close to the down side of the boat, abandoned the companionway and climbed up the slant to the windward side and sat down next to him, bracing her feet against the floor of the cockpit to keep from sliding down off the bench. There were bands of paleness on the tops of her feet where her sandal straps had prevented the sun, “Isn’t this fun!” he said, and Claire nodded her head and tried to smile.
They sailed like this for another half an hour or so until they were several miles out from the Connecticut shore. Amy said, “Now, Dad, is it time, do you think?” raising her voice over the sibilance of the rushing water and the wind and the throb of the windward stay, and he nodded his head to say, Yes it is time—because even if it wasn’t time yet for them to come around and get the sail on the other side and start the long slide downwind toward the Connecticut River, this was one day he wouldn’t correct her. He uncleated the sheets and Amy pushed the tiller way down, and the boat first heeled even further over so that Claire grabbed his hand and said, “Oh!” Then the boat righted itself as it swung and there was the lovely shuddering of the sails as the boom came over, and they were going downwind now, even faster, and except for the fact that Claire wasn’t scared anymore because the boat was upright with the main on one side and the jib on the other, Mitch Michaels, who hadn’t dropped a pill since three in the morning, was as happy as he’d been in years.
So happy, in fact, that he forgot all about the tendency of the wind to fade on summer afternoons and ultimately cease all together—which is what happened that Saturday afternoon of the Labor Day weekend a few hours later, just as they were about to poke into the mouth of the Connecticut River. The sail that had been so taut went almost slack and the boat slowed. Amy didn’t even ask him whether she should come about and head for home; she just did. “We should have headed for New Haven instead,” she said. If they had, they would have tacked upwind while the wind was strong, and come home downwind when it was weak. Now they had to do the opposite. They both hated to use the motor.
Soon the wind died altogether, and Amy’s Delight lost all way, rolling in the swell, the boom swinging back and forth, and it was suddenly hot and misty, the sky turning from blue to white, and even the Sound itself succumbed to lassitude. He started the motor, and Amy put it into gear and steered straight for home, and the exhaust from the motor, with no wind to blow it away, hovered around them, stinking.
Even so, Mitch was still happy. These things happen when you go sailing. But then Amy asked Claire, over the throb of the motor, if, since sailing wasn’t fun anymore, would she like to sunbathe “up there,” pointing to the deck forward of the cabin. Claire didn’t answer right away, glancing at him, catching his eye, asking, without saying, Would you mind? Of course he minded. Who knew how long it would be before he had Amy’s company again? But he said, “I’ll take the tiller.” He could have put the automatic pilot on and gone forward with them, but he wasn’t invited.
He moved over and took the tiller from Amy, and the girls took a step forward. “Wait!” he said, and reached into a cutty built into the bench and pulled out a tube of sunblock. “You better put some more on,” he said, holding the tube out. He knew it was silly to try to postpone Amy’s going up forward and leaving him alone. How long does it take to put sunblock on? Amy took her L.L. Bean shirt off and Claire took the sunblock from him and handed it to her. Amy rubbed the sunblock on her arms and, bending over, the front of her legs. Then she handed the tube to Claire and turned around, and Claire applied the stuff to the back of Amy’s shoulders and legs. It wasn’t so long ago that it was still okay for him to do this for her.
“Now you,” Amy said, and turned around and took the tube from Claire. He could swear that Claire turned her head to make sure he was looking before she peeled his big red hoodie up over her head. Claire bent over, reached her two arms up to her shoulders, and pulled the hoodie up, slowly, slowly, he thought, to tease him, he was sure, while his daughter watched him watch, and there Claire was seconds later, tall, flat bellied in her tiny bikini bottom and thin top that didn’t cover the rounded tops of her breasts, about as naked as you can get and still be in a bathing suit. She didn’t glance at him now; that would have been too obvious. If any other girl her age, even one just as pretty, tried to do this to him, he’d laugh and tell her to put her clothes back on, but there was something knowing about this one, something that made her older than her nineteen years.
Claire took the sunblock tube from Amy. She said, “I’ll put this on up there,” pointing forward where they would sunbathe. He knew she knew perfectly well what she had been doing. Maybe she was beginning to have second thoughts.
“But what about you, Dad?” Amy asked. “Shouldn’t you put some on too?”
He shook his head. “Never use the stuff.” It was true. He didn’t wear a helmet when he rode his bike either. And once when the buzzer in his brand-new BMW told him to put his seatbelt on, he smashed his hand against the dashboard so hard trying to shut it up, he sprained his wrist. He could actually laugh at himself about stuff like that, but he wasn’t laughing now. He’d been played
