The Week At The Gulf

Earl at the window

Earl found me in the kitchen at two in the morning. I had the CD paperwork out on the table, not because I was going to do anything with it, just to look at it. His whole working life, in a blue folder.

He put the kettle on. He is not a man who says much, but he says it at the right time.

“He’s not wrong that it’s his someday,” Earl said. “He’s wrong about the someday being now. And he’s wrong about the grandkids not being in the math.”

“He didn’t say one word about the grandkids,” I said.

“I know,” Earl said. “I counted too.”

We stood there and the kettle ticked.

“It’s our money,” Earl said finally. “Ours. Not his early, not anybody’s yet. Ours. We don’t owe him a loan and we don’t owe him a lecture. A man his age, with what he’s about to have, doesn’t need either one from us.”

“So what do we do?”

Earl looked out the dark window toward the barn like the answer was out there.

“When’s the last time all seven of those kids were in the same place?” he said.

I had to think. “Kim’s wedding. The little ones weren’t even born.”

“Rosie’s never met her cousins,” Earl said. “Four years old and she’s never met half this family.”

He turned around.

“Call your sister’s old spot. The Gulf. See what a week costs.”

The cottage

My sister Louise used to rent a cottage every summer down on the Gulf coast, a little place on the Florida panhandle, before her hip went bad. I still had the number in my address book, the paper one, in her handwriting because she gave it to me years ago.

I called the next morning. The woman who ran it remembered Louise.

A week in June, the second week, before the real summer rates hit. Three bedrooms, a screened porch, a short sandy walk to the water. She quoted me a price and I wrote it down and sat there looking at it.

With the gas to drive down, and groceries for a crowd, and a little extra for whatever a week at the beach costs when you have not done it in twenty years, it came to about nine thousand dollars.

Nine thousand.

Rick had asked for three hundred and ten thousand so he would not feel poor for sixty days.

I was going to take nine thousand of our own money, less than three cents on his dollar, and I was going to spend it on the seven children he had not named.

I called Earl in from the garage to tell him the number. He did not even blink.

“Book it,” he said. “All of it. Book the week.”