Twenty Dollar Masks at the Cozumel Pier

So I helped him with the mask the same way I had helped the kids. Spit, rinse, push your hair back, breathe through your nose. He did it without arguing, which I think surprised both of us.

Then he put his face in the water, and he came straight back up, gasping, mask full of nothing, eyes wide. “Yvonne,” he said. “Yvonne. There’s fish. There’s fish right there.”

There were fish everywhere. That is the thing about that water. You put your face in, and it is like somebody turned on the lights in a room you did not know was there.

Sergeant majors, the little striped ones, came right up to our masks like they wanted to say hello.

A blue tang drifted past, so blue it hurt. There was a parrotfish crunching on a rock, and you could hear it.

Ezra came up and spit his snorkel out and yelled, “Daddy, it’s eating the rock, it’s eating the rock,” and Ivan came up laughing so hard he got water in his tube and had to blow it out like a candle.

Fletcher and Carla came back with the waters and the fins, and they stood at the edge of the sand for a minute, just watching. I saw Carla put her hand over her mouth.

Fletcher waded out to me. He looked at his brother and his nephew floating side by side, holding hands, faces down, pointing at something on the bottom, and he did not say anything at all.

“He told me,” I said. “He’ll tell you. Let him do it.”

Fletcher nodded. Then he put on a mask and went in after his brother, and for a while there were two grown men from Southeast Texas floating in the Caribbean, pointing at fish like boys.

We stayed all day. We ate tacos from a stand at the seawall, fish tacos with lime and cabbage, eight of them for less than what one lunch would have cost on the boat. Judd ate three.

Bernadette and Linus found us at noon. Linus sat in a plastic chair under a palm roof with his hat over his face and pretended to sleep and did not miss a single thing. I saw him watching his son.

Bernadette took about four hundred pictures. She does not know how to turn the flash off, so half of them are of the sky.

But some of them are good. Some of them, I have on my refrigerator.

In the middle of the afternoon, I was floating a little way off with Judd, holding the back of his rash guard so he could kick, and I looked over and saw Ivan and Ezra.

They were in the shallow water by the rocks, both of them face down, holding hands. Ivan’s other arm was stretched out straight, pointing at something on the bottom. Ezra was nodding so hard his snorkel bobbed.

That was the moment. Whatever I paid for that cruise, whatever I lost on the boat, that was what I came for. A father holding his son’s hand and showing him a fish.

Judd saw it too. He spit out his snorkel and said, “Aunt Yvonne, are you crying?”

“It’s the salt,” I said. “Salt water gets in your eyes. Put your face back in.”

He did. He is seven. He believed me. Ezra would not have.