~
We were married a year later. It was apparent to anyone who was around us for more than twenty minutes that we were made for one another. I knew all her favorite songs by our fifth date. She began to finish my sentences a month after we moved in together. It sickened all our friends, how 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.