Twenty Dollar Masks at the Cozumel Pier

“Okay,” I said, coming back up the sand. “Everybody listens to Aunt Yvonne for five minutes, and then we swim. That’s the deal.”

Fletcher and Carla went back up to the road to get bottled water and a cheap pair of kid fins I had seen at a stand by the seawall.

Ivan did not go with them. He stood a few steps off at the edge of the water with his hands at his sides.

So it was just the four of us when I stood at the edge of the wet sand with my mesh bag.

Me with my strawberry blond hair in a ponytail, in my black swimsuit and white cover-up, the kids in red and green, and Ivan a few steps off in his blue shirt, watching.

I took out the two small masks and held them up. “These are yours,” I said. “Twenty dollars apiece, so they are very fancy, and you have to take good care of them.”

Judd laughed. Ezra took his like it was the envelope all over again, in both hands, carefully.

I showed them how to do it. Spit in the mask and rub it around the glass so it does not fog.

Rinse it once in the sea. Push all your hair back. Fit it on your face before you pull the strap.

“Breathe in through your nose,” I said. “Feel it stick? That’s how you know it fits. Now breathe through your mouth, through this tube. Just your mouth. Slow. Like you’re sleepy.”

Judd breathed like a freight train and then laughed so hard the snorkel fell out. Ezra did it perfectly the first time, like he had been practicing in his sleep, which for all I know he had.

“Now the rules,” I said. “You stay where I can touch you. You never stand on the coral. You never touch anything. If water gets in your tube, you stand up, you blow hard, like blowing out candles.”

I made them both blow hard through the snorkels on the sand. Judd blew so hard he fell over. I could hear Ivan breathe out behind me, something that was almost a laugh.

I looked up at him. He was still standing there, but his shoulders were looser now.

He was watching his son roll in the sand with a snorkel in his mouth, and his face was not angry at all.

I took two of the adult masks out of the bag, and I walked over to where he was standing.

He watched me come. He did not move.

“These are twenty dollars,” I said, and I held one of them out. “I’m not asking you to take anything. I’m asking you to come get in the water with your kids.”

Ivan looked at the mask. He looked at the kids, who were standing at the edge of the water now in their red and green, holding hands, masks pushed up on their foreheads, waiting.

“You want to know why I tore them up,” he said.

“Only if you want to tell me,” I said.

He was quiet so long I thought he was not going to.

A boat went by out past the rocks, a big white catamaran full of people from some other ship, music coming off it across the water.

“I got laid off,” Ivan said. “Five weeks ago. Thirteen years at that plant, and they cut the whole board crew on my unit. They gave us a box for our stuff and walked us to the gate.”