just starting to glow into light the next morning when I bike down to the beach. I can barely make out the figure standing at the end of the pier, hands on hips, surveying the water. Only that familiar stance tells me it’s Dad. As I get closer, I see his tackle box open, a big bag of frozen squid beside him. He called last night, told me to meet him at Sandy Claw early.
I’d expected him to get on me for bailing on him at Castle’s this summer. But when I’d said on the phone “Hey Dad, I’m sorry that I – ” he’d cut me off.
“You gotta do what you gotta do, Gwen. But, since you’re not gonna be around every day, I want to do this. I’ve got something for you.” Now he looks up from the hook he’s baiting as I scramble over the rocks. Noting the cooler I’m carrying, he gives me the flicker of a smile.
“What’d you bring me, Guinevere?”
He takes the loaf of zucchini bread with a grunt of satisfaction, motioning to me to pour coffee from the thermos. I stayed up late last night, following the directions in Vovó’s stained old copy of The Joy of Cooking, and turning that engagement ring over and over in my head. When she’s worried, Vivien gives herself pedicures and facials. Nic lifts weights. I bake. So, Vivien ends up looking more glamorous. Nic gets fitter. And I just get fat.
“Damn good thing you can cook. Not like your mom. A woman who can’t cook . . .” He trails off, clearly unable to think of a terrible enough comparison.
“Is like a fish without a bicycle.” I was on debate team last year and we used that quote from Gloria Steinem as a topic.
“What does that mean?” Dad asks absently, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. I guess you could say he’s handsome. Not stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks gorgeous, but good-looking enough that I can squint and understand what Mom was thinking. He’s still fit and muscular in his mid-thirties, his hair thick. Nothing soft about Dad. He wears flannel shirts, year-round, sleeves rolled up to reveal the ropy muscles of his arms. He’s got high cheekbones and full lips, which both Emory and I inherited. “Did you bring cream cheese?” he asks.
“No, I did not, because cream cheese on zucchini bread is disgusting.” I hand him a tub of butter and a plastic knife.
“Sorry I haven’t seen much of you lately, pal. I’ve been doing the grunt work, gettin’ set up for the summer crowd. Sysco trucks coming and going to restock – they never tell you what time, keep you hanging all damn day – and I’ve got the new summer bunch for training – you know what that’s like.” Even though it’s been twenty years since Dad moved here from Massachusetts, his er ’s are still a ’s and his ar ’s are ah ’s. In fact, his accent gets stronger every year.
I refill the cup of coffee he’s already gulped down and pour one for myself.
“Start cuttin’ up the bait,” he directs, mouth full, handing me a box cutter and jerking his chin at the bucket of squid.
It’s still early June and not all that warm in the mornings yet. I feel as though my fingers are freezing to the slippery squid as I try to slice them – harder to do on the jagged rock than it would be on a flat surface. The tide is high, so the air’s not as briny yet, there’s a fresh breeze coming off the water, and the waves slap gently against the rocks. The dark blue sky overhead is fading fainter in the east.
“Good coffee.”
“Thanks.”
“Gwen.”
“Yes?”
“You’re making the pieces too big. The fish’ll just run off with the hook like that.”
“Sorry, Dad.”
More silence as he polishes off half the zucchini loaf and I deal with freezing cold slimy bait.
“Dad,” I finally say. “You were eighteen when you and Mom got married, right?”
“Barely,” he says. “Here, let me bait your hook.”
“Would you say that was . . . too young?”
He gives me a sharp look from under his thick brows. “Wicked young. We had no business getting hitched. But . . . well . . .” He clears his throat. “You were on the way and – why are you asking me this? You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?”
“No! Of course not. Jeez. I’m on the Pill.”
He winces, and I realize I should have said I’d never even held hands with a boy, not reassured him about my effective birth control. Whoops.
“It was a medical thing. For my complexion and because my period was – ”
Dad holds up a hand, hunching his shoulders in pain. “Stop! As for me and Luce, we were kids. Had no freaking clue what we were getting into.” He holds out his coffee cup. “Got more?”
I splash hot black liquid into his cup, the plastic top of the thermos, then ask something I’ve always wondered about. “Do you regret it? Marrying Mom? Like, if you had a do-over, would you?”
Dad takes a sip of coffee, screws up his face as though it’s burned his tongue, blows out a breath. “I’m no good at this garbage” – the way he says it sounds like gahbage – “imagining things fell out some different way than they did. Waste of time. That’s your ma’s territory, with all her foolish books. If you mean, do I regret you, no.” He hands me my pole, reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a wad of bills. “Your back pay.”
I take it from him, count it out, then hand him back half. Our tradition. He’ll put it into his pocket, then take it to the bank for my college fund when he deposits Castle’s income. Dad’s big on the fact that it matters that I see the money before half of it is gone. I’ll give most of the rest to Mom.
“You can have first cast, kiddo.”
I hoist the pole to my shoulder, fling it out, watching the fragile transparent line shimmer in the air as the hook dips into the waves.
“Decent,” Dad says. “Put a little more arm into it next time.”
He grins at me. For a moment, I feel this surge of affection for him and I want, the way I wanted yesterday with Mom, to tell him the whole story . . . the boys and Nic and Vivien and the ring and . . .
But we’ve never talked like that. So, instead, I reel my line in, hopeful for an instant as it snags hard on something, until I realize it’s just a clump of kelp.
“Pal, look.” Dad clears his throat, squinting as he stares out at the far horizon. “I’m gonna give you something my folks didn’t give me when I was your age.”
Not a car. Not a trust fund. Dad’s parents were, as Mom puts it, “unfit to have pets, much less kids.”
“What is it, Dad?”
“You can bait that hook and hand me my pole. What I’m going to give you, Gwen, is the truth.”
Here’s where, in one of Mom’s books, or the classic movies Grandpa Ben likes, it would turn out that Dad was actually royal but estranged from his family. That
