“Hey,” I said, and I put my hands on both of his arms. “Hey. Look at me, sweet boy. You are still going in the ocean tomorrow. I promise you. Aunt Yvonne promises.”
He nodded, but he was looking past me at his father. Judd had moved behind my legs.
He did that when he was little and a dog barked. I felt his hand on the back of my knee.
My husband Fletcher had been at the drink station ten feet away. He came over fast, set two lemonades down on a lounge chair, and stepped right up beside his brother.
“Ivan,” he said. Just that. Fletcher is not a loud man either. But he is a lineman for the electric co-op, and when he says your name like that, you stop.
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Ivan did not look at him. He put the torn pieces in his shorts pocket.
Then he turned and walked toward the stairs, and his wife Carla gave me a look I could not read and went after him.
The kids stayed with me. That told me something. Carla would never leave her kids with anybody she did not trust, not even for ten minutes, not even with family.
Fletcher sat down on the lounge chair next to the lemonades. He rubbed his face with both hands. “Yvonne,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what that was. I’ll go talk to him.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Let him walk.”
I took the kids to the ice cream machine, because that is what you do with kids when the grown-ups have made a mess. Judd got chocolate. Ezra got vanilla and did not eat it.
He held the cone until it ran down his wrist. Then he said, very quietly, “Did Daddy do that because of me? Because I said I never saw a fish?”
I had to put my own cone down. “No, baby,” I said. “No. That was a grown-up thing, and it had nothing to do with you. You did exactly nothing wrong. You hear me?”
He nodded again. Eight-year-olds nod at you when they have decided not to believe you yet. I knew that nod. I used to give it to my own mother.
Later that afternoon I went down to the shore excursion desk, which was the only thing I did indoors that whole day. The young man there was polite and sorry and could not help me.
Tearing up paper tickets does not cancel an excursion. The booking was on our cabin account. But it was inside forty-eight hours, and the charter was private, and the money was gone either way.
“I can reprint them for you, ma’am,” he said. “If the party still wants to go.”
I stood there with my hand on the counter and thought about it. I could have taken the new tickets straight up to Ivan and Carla’s door. Nobody would have stopped me.
But you do not put a man’s kids on a boat he has just told you, in front of them, that they are not getting on.
Not if you ever want that man to look you in the eye again.
So I said no thank you, and I let the $1,400 go. I had worked sixteen extra shifts that winter, through the worst flu season the hospital had seen in years, to pay for this trip.
I am a respiratory therapist at a hospital in Beaumont. I run ventilators and breathing treatments, mostly nights. That money had been earned at three in the morning beside people who could not breathe.