“Actually, when we met,” I piped in, “I thought Bethany was the image of the young Gene Tierney,” I said, “which, in my book, is as good as you get.” But my wife, I saw, preferred hearing her calcium compared to Hepburn’s, and by a woman herself no stranger to good bones. Mom admitted Tierney had been beautiful, “but waxy. Not a real peach, more a wax one. Better full-face than in profile as I remember.”

Bethany seemed as easily wooed by Grace as our two pushover daughters. Decades of hearing about my boyhood abandonment had produced very little chilly reserve among my life’s other women. Gracie impartially cajoled and teased me. She flirted with her crew, her son, her husband. She flirted with seagulls, flirted out at an ocean called Atlantic, flirted overhead with a major necessary star named Sun.

And everything but me winked back.

Buck explained, as the two of us did a little casting off Trouble’s fantail, how in ’49 he’d come to invent a particular filtering-and-friction-reduction feature now used in all state-of-the-art offshore-oil-drilling bits.

“My first brother-in-law was a patent lawyer. Kid right out of U.T. and real ‘hungry.’ Just blind luck really, my getting there first,” Buck shrugged then cast.

He seemed so at ease with himself in reaching over and matter-of-factly showing me how to snap my reel’s release. Our hands touched but he offered none of the usual male cringing. Buck was certainly no beauty. I guessed some might’ve compared his seamed home-base of a face to that of the late Bogart’s, the very late Bogart’s.

I could, while squinting into the sun, see new ways he might be Grace’s latest try at recouping a Clyde. I felt glad that Mom at least remained loyal to one type! Monogamy takes many forms.

She said they planned to whisk us out for dinner once ashore, before we headed back to Orlando. More Trouble Than It’s Worth II would ride the waves till just at drinktime. Secretly, I already checked my watch.

While my daughters, Bethany, and Buck eased below decks, settling in the sleek galley kitchen to play cards, as our young crew forty feet aft of us smoked Camels (or could that wafting herbal scent be reefer?), I chose to join my putative mother sunning herself on the foredeck. I knew this private family moment only seemed arrived at accidentally; everyone, the crew included, must be in on it.

Gracie rested slung here in a powder-blue two-piece. She was mostly wearing just white wing sunglasses while inhaling one very white Doral. She’d basted herself all over with several sunscreens or balms or other. She smelled like a coconut just macheted whitely open; she also smelled like overheated rope. There blew off her in gusts a sweet and nameless scent I recognized. At first sniff, I felt some simple infant headlong gratitude; I smelled a girl.