Twenty Dollar Masks at the Cozumel Pier

At four we packed up. All aboard was at five thirty, and I am the kind of person who wants to be on the ship an hour early, because I have read the stories about people watching their ship sail off without them.

Ivan helped me rinse the masks at the shower by the seawall. He did it carefully, the way he does everything, turning each one over under the water. Then he stood there holding the last one.

“I’ll pay you for these,” he said.

My first instinct was to say no, don’t be silly. I opened my mouth to say it. Then I closed it, because I thought about my mother, and about what it would mean to him.

“Twenty dollars,” I said. “For yours. The kids’ are a gift from their aunt. That’s my right, and you don’t get a vote on that one.”

He laughed. It was a real laugh, the first one I had heard out of him on the whole trip.

He took his wallet out of his wet shorts and found a soggy twenty and held it out.

I took it. I folded it and put it in my bag. I still have it, in the zipper pocket of my wallet, dried out flat. I have never spent it, and I never will.

We walked back up the waterfront to the ship together. The light had gone gold. Judd fell asleep on Fletcher’s shoulders, both arms hanging down, mask still around his neck.

Ezra walked next to me and held my hand. Halfway back to the pier, he reached into the pocket of his shorts and pulled out a little folded square of white paper and gave it to me.

It was a piece of the ticket. One of the pieces Ivan had torn. It said Private Snork, and then the tear. He must have picked it up off the deck after everyone left.

“I kept it,” he said. “In case you wanted it. Because you were sad.”

I put it in my wallet next to where the twenty would go.

I could not say anything for a minute, so I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back, and that was enough for both of us.

That evening, the ship pulled away from Cozumel at sunset. The whole family stood at the rail on the open deck, all eight of us, with the island going pink and gold behind us.

It was the same deck. Almost the same spot at the rail. I noticed that, and I think Ivan noticed it too, because he came and stood right where he had been standing the day before.

Then he cleared his throat, the way he had at our wedding, and he said, “Mom. Dad. I need to tell y’all something.”

Bernadette turned around with her camera in her hands. Linus took his hat off. Fletcher put his hand on his brother’s back and left it there.

Ivan told them. All of it. The layoff, the box, the walk to the gate, the five weeks of pretending. The applications at night. He said it standing up straight, with his kids right there listening.

Bernadette cried. Of course she did. She put down the camera and hugged him around the middle, the way she must have hugged him when he was Judd’s size, and he let her.

Linus did not cry. He shook his son’s hand, hard, and then he pulled him in by it and held on, and said something in his ear that none of us heard. Ivan nodded and nodded.

Then Ivan turned to me. In front of all of them. In front of his children.