FOURTEEN

Monday night, coming from an early dinner at Gumbo Jim’s Oyster Shack, they drive into a cloud of moths. Paul has his brights on, and to Ruth it looks as if they’re in the middle of a blizzard. Instead of snowflakes, though, thousands and thousands of bugs splatter against the windshield of Paul’s minivan. The wipers only succeed in smearing the protein in semicircular streaks across the glass.

Ruth is sometimes undone by Florida’s fauna. There is a cockroach in her room so large that she can see under its body as it scurries along the floor. Every time she goes into the bathroom, she instinctively looks to the ceiling, to find out what kind of large insect is perched there, ready to pounce.

The air is heavy outside, and Ruth is wishing they were headed for the cottage instead of away from its superior air conditioning when she realizes Paul is slowing down.

They ease onto the sand shoulder, less than a mile from the causeway bridge, and Ruth first thinks they must have a flat tire, or engine trouble.

Then she sees that it’s Hank.

He’s out the door before the minivan has completely stopped, walking off in a straight line toward an abandoned gas station turned into a roadside bar 100 yards ahead.

Everyone is quiet at first.

“Too many people, too crowded,” Ruth says at last, breaking the silence and shaking her head.

Naomi gets out and goes to walk with him, but he doesn’t seem to want her company. She has to move fast to keep up with him. Her shoes are not made for walking in powdery sand.

Hank stops beside a live oak tree. He’s leaning against it, breathing as hard as if he had just run five miles. Naomi stays with him for another minute, then comes back and returns to her seat.

“Poor Hank,” she says as she lights a cigarette. Naomi’s hand, in the neon light of the bar, is shaking. The air-conditioning is going and the windows are rolled up, but they can all feel the beat of the roadhouse’s country band working its way up through the dirt. Leigh and Stephen, who have never seen their uncle like this, are as quiet as the rest.

Harry finally drifts off to sleep half an hour before his plane touches down, after he has given up all hope of catching a nap on this long, airborne day.

First he had to get up and get dressed and packed and, with help from Freda and Artie, on the 2 p.m. flight out of Richmond. Sitting there in front of his gate, flanked by his sister and her husband, he felt like a kid going off to camp. He saw Freda have a furtive word with the woman behind the counter, who looked his way and nodded.

They let him get on first, with the halt and lame and mothers with young children. Freda hugged him so hard when he stood up to go that he almost fell over.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, sweetie. I’ll be back. I will.”

“Damn right you will,” Artie chipped in, but even Artie, salesman deluxe, wasn’t doing such a good job of selling, it seemed to Harry, who hugged the big oaf anyhow.

“Take care,” was what they said to each other at last, in unison, and then he was walking down the ramp to his plane.

He’s seen men, younger than he is now, who didn’t handle it so well when they found out they weren’t going to live forever. He’s seen them just stop doing anything, pull down the blinds and close the store. Harry feels their pain. It makes him sad to go out to a favorite restaurant and order a favorite dish for maybe the last time, to see the state of his health reflected for half a second in the maitre d’s face. But Harry isn’t ready to go home, sit in the dark and watch television.

When he was 7, his parents threw him a birthday party. All his friends were there; his relatives all gave wonderful gifts. There were pony rides and a clown. No kid on the North Side of Richmond had ever had such a birthday party. Harry felt loved by everyone. But late in the afternoon, it hit him that it would soon be over, and the next day couldn’t possibly be as good as the one he was living right then. They found him in his room, crying. No one knew what to do, and the party broke up soon afterward. His parents were upset; Old Harry kept bringing up the cost, and neither Harry nor Freda ever had such a party again. But he couldn’t find the words, at 7, to tell them he just couldn’t bear to see the party end.

That’s what Harry thinks he understands about the old guys he doesn’t want to be like: They don’t want the party to end, and they’re too big to cry in public.

He saw his father turn old friends away toward the end, and he promised himself, right then, that he would take every scrap life offered rather than sit home and watch the second hand steal from him.

I’ve given up on living forever, he told Freda, but I haven’t given up on living.

When the plane landed, Harry was escorted to his connecting flight in one of the airport golf carts that used to annoy the hell out of him, coming up behind him and beeping him out of the way so some codger could keep from walking a few steps. Now, he was the beeper instead of the beepee. He was embarrassed, and grateful. It was at least half a mile from his inbound terminal to his outbound one.

After a 90-minute wait, in which Harry was afraid to drift away from his uncomfortable seat into the hard-charging traffic that would lead him to a hot dog or a newspaper, he was ushered on to another plane, again at the head of the line.

Then there was an hour wait for takeoff. It was 6:30 by the time they cleared the ground. Wedged against the window by the overweight businessman next to him, Harry wondered why he wasn’t asleep. An attendant had brought him some water to take with his pills, and the pain had subsided, but yet he was awake.

And then, he wasn’t.

The dream is on him, has him right back in that same bloody stream. He is thrashing to get away from Sergeant Stevens.

“Sir! Hey, sir!”

The attendant is looming over him, and the people in front are sneaking furtive glances at him.

“Bad dream,” Harry mumbles.

“Are you OK, sir?” The attendant, a middle-aged woman with reddish hair, looks concerned that he might die before they land.

“Fine,” is all Harry can say, and then they finally leave him alone, with one last admonition: Fasten your seatbelt.

Harry takes his baseball cap off and rubs his head, where the hair is only coming back as stubble, not long enough to comb, too coarse to be pleasant to the touch. Who, he wonders, would want to see such a person?

When they first met, Ruth loved to say his name. Later, she sometimes would write it out three times—“Harry Stein, Harry Stein, Harry Stein”—usually as prelude to commiseration over some confessed misdeed on Harry’s part. Reading such letters, he could imagine a slight shake of the head, a small smile, a certain tolerant exasperation.

In his letters to Ruth, Harry unburdened himself, admissions and complaints that might better have been directed to Gloria.

Ruth responded in kind, although Harry came to know finally that she soft-pedaled the bad times more than he had.

When her world with Henry Flood began to tilt dangerously on its axis, she hinted more than told.

“What’s the use in whining?” she asked Harry years later, when he knew what she hadn’t written.

“If you’ve got a good whine in you,” he told her, “you have to let it out. Otherwise, it just turns to venom and kills you. Self-pity should not be hoarded.”

She told enough, though. Maybe her store of self-pity was not as massive as Harry’s, but such unburdening as she did, she did in her letters. He likes to think he was there, if only in the form of clandestine mail.

Hank seems calm now, at least calm enough to continue their trip.

Ruth knows that Naomi remembers Hank as he was before he couldn’t bear to be in tight spaces with other people. She never really lived at home after everything changed for Hank, and in some ways, she has never accepted it.

Ruth’s strategy toward Hank’s “spells,” at this late date, is to just let them slide. She knows he’ll be better soon, and she knows how much it hurts him to be pitied.

They ride the rest of the way in silence, Ruth staring out the window and wondering why she couldn’t have just had a nice quiet birthday back in Saraw.

The plane lands, and Harry Stein waits, obedient as a child, until they have come to a complete stop before unbuckling his seat belt.

He reaches into his pocket to make sure he hasn’t left his key ring, with his car and house keys on it, back at Freda’s. These days, he’s forever double- and triple-checking. He’s almost worn out his plane ticket by now, pulling it in and out of his coat.

He fishes out his keys, and the piece of bright plastic attached to the ring catches his eye, an old friend. The letters on the garish, orange-and-yellow rectangle are almost worn off. The establishment itself has been out of business for years.

Everything he touches lately, even this cheap trinket barely bearing the name of the Fairweather Grill, reminds him of Ruth.

He feels, from somewhere, a surge of energy.

He is glad to be here.