For Summer
Levi
Weather forecasts don’t always get it right. That’s why, when sailing, you have to rely on your own knowledge of nature and your gut instincts.
Remember the five, my dad would say. Clouds. Scent. Breeze. Rings. Pressure.
He said them in that order, the first time he ticked them off his fingers like a song when I was a kid, pumped to be just like him—or a pirate, whichever happened first—but they don’t always run in that order; they don’t have to, more often running parallel. But I memorized them that way, because while the order wasn’t important, my dad and his ways were.
They still are.
Every day, I check the forecasts, even days in advance for changes, then determine my own prognosis.
Today, the coronas have been tight, the smell of fish faint, no change in the wind, clouds huge and pillowy, a mash-up for good weather. Pressure is last, because it’s the one that throws me off. I can hardly feel a difference anymore. The only ache in my bones is in my chest, my only hunch the one telling me my dad is dead.
In the spring of last year, when he dropped off some gear at Rosalee Bay Fishin’ and Cruisin’, which I now manage, and grabbed a quick lunch with me, was the last time I saw him.
Breakfast with Mom was the last time she saw him.
Storms can be known to come from nowhere in North Carolina, and the Gilligan crashed not far from where I’m anchored.
We recovered the boat, but not him.
Mom believes he’s still out here, surviving like the newest cast member of his boat’s namesake.
But I know he’s not.
So do the crews who have stopped searching for him.
So do our family friends who’ve made searching for him part of their daily life three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—but they’d do anything for my mom.
I’d do anything for her, too, except that.
My dad’s death wasn’t my first run with heartbreak—I’ve technically been nursing a broken heart since I was seventeen—but it dragged me down the worst, no chance to go back. And even as the pressure puts an indestructible crimp in my ways now, it’s not in me to stay down, because that wasn’t in him. He’d tell me the more I lose, the more I have to hang on to.
So I had to grieve, then I had to let him go.
Nothing can ever fill the hole of his absence, but I’ve had to leave him out to sea. My solace is knowing he died doing what he loved. No better way to go out, if you’re asking me, the boy my dad raised to be the man who loves the sea with the same immensity.
This boat is my church, the sea my therapy. My answers, no question. This life teaches strength. I’ve made a lot of tough decisions out on this boat when I needed that strength to make them. You learn how to hold on, and when to let go. I’ve never felt nearer , more solid, then when I’m cradled by the current.
And I can still feel my dad. On land, he’s gone. On water, his spirit will always be alive.
I don’t come out here chasing storms. I don’t tempt fate. But I do notice every day the weather doesn’t take a turn for me like it did for him.
And now another day is drifting into night, the sky goldened by the sunset, and my arm is numb.
I shake it out as I rise up from the cockpit, coming out here so often, whenever I can, lying in these suspended moments, that I forget to not use my arm as a pillow.
I’ll need both functioning to take care of a father who’s still alive, and more stubborn with me than his daughter.
She has a reason to be. He doesn’t.
****
I have a photo of my dad hanging from the rearview mirror of my truck. He’s giving a thumbs-up, smiling double, and I keep it with me to still have his encouragement, which I need each time I roll up Floyd Kinnison’s driveway.
He grunts at me when I shoulder and knee my way through his front door, my hands filled with bags of heart-healthy groceries. I grunt back as I kick the door shut, waiting for his smile—and there it is, small in the corner in the light of the TV.
He can stomach me and the food I bring him more than he feigns otherwise.
“Easy,” he carps at the slight slam of the door. “This house is older than me.”
“Yet it isn’t the house on its last legs,” I say back with a note of challenge in my voice he’ll rise up to accept. And getting him up on those legs is the goal.
He clicks the remote in response, eliminating the light from Family Feud and slowing my trek to the kitchen as I step around the furniture, but his chair also creaks with his released weight. “I’m not, either,” he argues, following me with pride in his walk, heel to toe, no more dragging since we’ve worked the strength back in with daily, then weekly treks up and down the street. He’s finally taking them himself, not that I haven’t offered to keep accompanying him, but he wanted me off his back a little, doing some things now without my hustling.
And I hustled, hard , in the beginning. He wasn’t risking another heart attack on my watch, especially when I’m the one who found him when he had his first.
He lashed out at me, said I’d stolen his chance to see his wife again. I countered that with this being his second chance to make things right with his daughter.
When he responded with maybe , after beats of consideration, that was when and why I vowed to keep him alive.
.
Even if she hates me when I have to come clean and removes me from her life.
Just the thought of her is a heart-splitting, full-strength sensation that always puts me on my ass for how I was an ass.
I won’t say Adam deserves to have her, but I deserved the pain of seeing her move on.
So did her father, but now he can get her back.
And if he doesn’t do right by her, we’ll both wish I hadn’t been driving by when he collapsed.
This street was originally my nostalgic, regretful, longing for the past detour back home at the end of the day, and I happened to be driving by at the right time to see Floyd in the yard as he fell over.
As I deposit the bags on the counter, pride frames my own grin for helping to get him this far. He can do most of this on his own now, but that doesn’t mean he will. I don’t trust he will. And he won’t admit it, but he likes having me around. His health took a hit and he’s not locking the door to the only person who knocks.
Facing death can change your view on life. I’m choosing to trust it’s changed his.
I open the fridge to start shelving, and he slips in in front of me to fill a glass with the filtered water from the dispenser I ordered he get, then had to pick up and install myself. He was using it the next day, declaring it was cheaper than buying bottled water every week, owning the decision like it was his idea.
He can take credit for all of this if it means he’s swallowing what I tell him to.
“What you got?” He still asks, when it’s a lot of the same foods, with some variety. But I show him each item as I fill up his stock, here, then the cupboards.
I divide the meals—breakfast, lunch, dinner—so he has a balance, which, thanks to me, he said, he’s getting better at. He was grateful and grudging.
He denies liking fish, but he’ll eat sardines, which are some of the fishiest fish, but I keep my mouth closed so his will stay open to at least two servings a week.
I turn my head at the right second to spy him covering a yawn at the table. They used to have sound until I started questioning him about his sleep, and now he works to hide them.
“Tired?” I ask, unable to help my half smile of gotcha .
“I slept fine and I’ll sleep fine tonight.”
“Did you get a nap?”
“Did you get a nap?” he repeats, bringing me back to the sea and my smile to full.
“Yep,” I answer. “On the water.”
Floyd huffs a laugh. “You should just sell everything you got and get a houseboat.”
I have thought about that. It would lower costs, and I’ve already grown accustomed to a reduced living space. But there would be other charges, other maintenance and costs, and I already have good views and tide at my fingertips.
“When are you getting my daughter out of her situation?” he asks, like his daughter’s a damsel.
I pause my hand around the last opened cupboard door before I close it, the dull thump ricocheting knifelike in my chest. He’s asked me this in various ways after I told him things about Summer’s life she wouldn’t want him to know. She wouldn’t want me even helping him—at first discovery that I am—but I’m taking this chance for her, and if I founder, I’ve at least swum these waters before.
I normally ignore the question, but this evening, I have news.
News I’ve held out from my chest since Adam told me, because I can’t make Summer’s return about me.
I pause a few more beats, to control mine, hanging tough through that gap, before I turn to hopefully see Floyd’s hope for a reunion when I tell him he’s about to have his second chance.
“She’s coming back.”
He stares into his near empty glass, tapping the side, then swallows the rest down like a shot of the wine he would tear into before his heart attack.
And that’s just not good enough.
“She’ll be here in two days.” I push the time frame, leaning toward his profile, pulling for his initiative, his interest , his groveling and planned speeches for Summer.
He grunts, giving a pull for mine as he meets my stare. “Are you gonna fix your mistake?”
He’s swinging the pendulum, the counter question an adrenaline signaling danger , and I lean away from it, the counter now pressed into my lower back its own balance for me as I swing the pendulum back. “Are you gonna fix yours?”
He smiles with one side of his mouth, aiming a finger from his grip on the glass to me. “We’ll see who fixes their mistake first. It’ll be me,” he adds without a pause, leaning back in his chair with another yawn he doesn’t cover now.
I can’t help but chuckle at his tone, one that does vow to repair his relationship with his daughter, but one that also says I’d sooner start clucking than fix what happened on my end that summer.
“Oh you think?” I half tease, rising up to this challenge, in a lowly illuminated room, with no Summer, so I can fall back into the wuss her father thinks I am for only one set of eyes.
I’m not a wuss. I just—
“You have more to lose,” Floyd says, speaking my defense for myself with a shred of understanding, not actually thinking me a clucker. I do have more to lose on top of other losses. “I have nothing left to lose.”
I nod, letting him know I’m hearing him, something like thanks , but I’m still feeling defensive as I turn to close up the bag with the few things left to drop by my mom’s. “What I fix and don’t fix is my business, so mind yours.” I mean to tell him his chance is more important in the grand scheme of Summer’s life, and I’m halfway turned back to drill that in, when he lets me know again we’re on the same page.
“Well, don’t mind yours. I could use a good word.”
My response is pointed, a mustered smile through my slackening jaw. “So give her one.”
He waves his glass. “Why don’t you give me some more water? I’m on my last legs,” he kids, as my boots already do their shuffle over to him. “Any stories from the shop today?”
“Always,” I say as I refill his glass, hearing the scrape of chair legs across the floor as he kicks out the one across from him for me to park.
And I park for the length of time it takes to relay my customers’ tales for the day, of fishing, boating, riding, this one about twenty minutes.
Floyd will never be my dad, nor do I ever want him to be, but he’s a dad someone I love can still have.
And he’s not terrible to talk to.