“What?,” it was my wife, now miming interest, face to face across the kitchen counter. I gave her my eye-rolling, exasperated, Ollie Hardy, you-won’t-believe-this ask-me-later look. But I did appreciate her concern and hovering. Marriage has its moments; odd, I recall Bethany’s hanging around while I awaited Mom as one of our marriage’s finest.

“Welcome to the Nuthouse. Grace, Proprietor. Dennis, that you? Because everybody’s waiting on deck, still rumless. You fall in or what?” It was a woman’s voice but dropped an octave deeper than my own and considerably more porcelain-crackled. (I heard a full-fledged local “character.”)

She still sounded perky, oddly girlish, if several steps nearer bass. Had Grace finally taken up smoking? That’d been the only vice she’d missed.

“Dennis? Cat got your tongue? Or the pussy or what?” (I could hear old-timers yuk at this; I pictured Grace’s snappy collusive wink.) “And if you bring your usual cut-rate brand, you’re not gettin aboard. Meyer’s Dark or nothin, Dennie.”

“This is actually Meadows.” There came a pause. I resisted adding a last name; I resisted restating, out of respect for her time-battered neurons, my actual biological relation to this old whore.

Then I realized, after eighteen years, “Actually Meadows” might sound (especially to someone with the DTs and awaiting her rum) as illogical as “Pelican Manor.”

But Grace replied at once: “Well, ’ll be damned. An answered prayer for sure. And here I’m talkin m’ party talk. You finally followin the sun south, son?—Because, do. Because, this Buck has quite a boat.”

(Of any sentence in my life’s account, the last one, hers, verbatim, is my favorite, I must say. I’ll give the old girl that.)

“Grace, I actually was calling about maybe visiting. Given Disney World’s location and our girls’ ages, and my duty to get them there at least once before college, my family will soon be in your ‘neighb.’” I cringed at this locution. Plus, I’d also just said “actually” twice. I feared I sounded like the fussy Northeasterner I had perhaps become. Almost at once, the old woman’s voice said, “Great.” Then, maybe addressing the gathered fisherfolk so enjoying our phone reunion, she announced, “My long lost son’s comin!” Next Grace added what my wife later guessed to be a favorite Cajun French phrase meaning, “Let the good times roll.”

Bethany slid a pen before me. I jotted on the Christmas-card envelope. Mother provided surprisingly cogent directions from Orlando. She added how, on “the day of,” I’d need to summon her right to this gatehouse. I’d best use the name of Buck’s boat. Ordinarily I could phone it direct. But the last trip out, during a sort of party, their cell phone had fallen in, was a long story. But Larry here, see, Larry wouldn’t budge from using the boats’ names only. He couldn’t be bothered with lists of all those owner-occupants.

“Whatever,” I told my mother. “I’ve got my pen poised. What’s his boat called? Your boat.”