But something clamped down in me like some titillated hanging judge’s verdict—“No.” I breathed briefly, censored, through my mouth. If she had once smelled like overripe fruit, that’d mellowed. Time had salted that toward, say, braised grilled baby vegetables—a range easier to live with day to day, if also something of a loss.

The bikini showed the body of some rawboned divorced lady park ranger. Strong, but from what? For what?

Still, yeah, admit this, it was still pretty darn “good.” As a body, I mean. Is it strange to admit you’d—in a blind taste-test—probably choose to jump your sixty-odd-year-old Mother if invited? And if you didn’t know. She was. Your mom.

I flashed on the ancient tale of a young man who—not knowing—marries his own mom and kills his father on the road. Once he understands, he can only blind himself. I turned to stare at her.

This particular matured and glazed Grace seemed related only by marriage to that gloomy pallid novel-reading girl. The girl whose sighs had once contained blank white cartoon thought-balloons, each waiting to be filled by statements, anybody’s. I recalled her muttered inventory of people and place names. I imagined I had once heard “Boca” huffed aloud among that wild kid’s dreamed and itchy destinations.

Now I hoisted one of the teak deck-chairs and resettled it, angled nearer hers. Surprising to find a young sailor stationed in the wheel-house, steadily guiding More Trouble. He posed beyond domed green glass, just four feet behind Grace’s forward-looking chair and out-turned thighs.

I nodded toward the boy as he gave me, through windshield, a mock three-fingered salute. It was then I noticed on the wheelhouse window ledge (the ship’s dashboard, as it were) two awful brand-new-looking anchor-shaped import-store brass bookends, orange price-stickers still showing. And wedged between those, one Nurses’ White Bible from our old days, flanked by first editions of my own two books. Their only editions, come to think of it!

A felt bookmark had been left at the very back of each. I’d admitted she still looked great; that was hard enough. Now, to find Clyde’s gift and my own work on board: it was the only thing so far that had truly moved me. She’d probably guessed how this would throw me way off guard. But maybe that was cynical. I don’t know.

“So—Clyde gave you the Bible?”

Behind shades, she nodded, “And the sweet fool signed its front page, ‘Because no other Good Book is Good enough for MY little woman!’” Even with our eyes averted, we both laughed. Each of our laughs stretched out and died its own rolling natural death. Two laughs, evolved, complete, but utterly different. Unified only by shared subject.

“And you have my books.” Craning around, I kept staring at them. “Which is rare. Hell, I hardly have my books.”