The Week At The Gulf

The photograph

On the fourth evening the light went gold the way it does down there, and I got all seven of them lined up on the sand in their teal shirts.

It is not easy to get seven children to look at a camera at the same time. It took Kim and me and a bag of gummy bears and a lot of hollering.

But we got it. All seven of them, mixed sizes, the two oldest kneeling in the back and the little ones in front, Rosie on the end with her shirt still damp, every one of them laughing at something Earl said just off-camera.

And behind them, up the beach a little, in the one folding chair under the striped umbrella, was Earl himself. He had sat down for just a minute, he said. He was asleep. Dead asleep, mouth open, a grandfather worn out from a week of cast nets and sandcastles, under an umbrella, with the Gulf behind him going gold.

I took the picture on my phone, the one Kim set up for me so I could see the grandkids.

I looked at it a long time that night on the porch.

Seven children he never named, laughing in matching shirts. Their grandfather asleep behind them, a man who left in the dark for thirty-eight years so there would be something in a blue folder someday.

I did not write Rick a letter. I thought about it. I had a whole speech in me by then, about names and timelines and what a cushion is for.

But Earl was right back in March. A fight is hot and burns off by morning. I wanted the quiet thing that stays true.

So the next morning, while the coffee was going and the kids were still asleep in a pile, I sent Rick the photograph.

Just the photo. No words. No caption. Nothing under it.

Seven grandchildren in teal shirts on the Gulf. Their grandpa asleep under the umbrella behind them.

I set the phone face down on the porch rail and I did not pick it up again for an hour.