It was almost one o’clock when the last of Nan’s friends filed out the front door, leaving lipstick marks on our cheeks.
“What’s with all the pink t-shirts?” I asked as I helped Nan hand wash martini glasses.
Nan took the next clean glass from me, drying it with a dishcloth. “Bitsie and I started an exercise group. We decided it was about time we were mermaids again, so we’re teaching the others.”
“You were dancers, right?” I asked, remembering a yellowed black-and-white photo I’d seen when I was little: Nan and Bitsie, young and glamorous, in matching seashell tops, applying lipstick side by side at a dressing room mirror.
“No, Kay, we were mermaids. Underwater.” She put down the glass and walked out of the room.
I froze, remembering how Homer Lampert used to come for drinks on Fridays and tell us crazy tales about his days at sea. At first they were old sailor stories. A girl in every port. An epic bender in Bora-Bora. But over time, his tales grew more fanciful. Sirens and sea creatures. A fierce battle with an octopus I was fairly certain came from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. One time he asked me what a girl like me was doing in a place like this, as if he were still a twenty-year-old boy in a sailor suit.
We all took care of Homer as long as we could, trading shifts watching war movies with him on his tiny old Zenith. The first time I drove without Nan in the car was to take Homer to his doctor’s appointment.
I liked when it was my turn. I’d bring my homework with me, but I always ended up doing it on the bus the next morning so I could listen to Homer’s stories. The way he lived in his mind and shared it with us, the way he got to be young again even though his bones were old and brittle, was sad and awful and beautiful at the same time.
I cried the day Nan called Homer’s daughter in Oklahoma City, after he slipped out on Bitsie’s watch and tried to swim in the water trap at the golf course. I helped Nan pack up Homer’s things and finally got to see pictures of him as a sailor: young, smiling, strong enough to wrestle an octopus.
When his daughter came, tight-lipped and unamused by Homer’s new penchant for racy jokes, we moved martooni night to Tuesday so he could join us one last time. We toasted to Homer and Homer toasted to the sea, and then he left with his daughter the next morning. Landlocked for the rest of his life.
A few weeks later his daughter called Nan to say that Homer had a stroke and passed away. We all felt awful. We could have kept taking care of him until the end. He would have been happier with the family he had with us than the one in Oklahoma.
I placed the martini glass in the sink and held on to the counter to steady myself. Bitsie and I would make a list of who to ask for help watching Nan. Maybe Billy could continue her training so she could keep her body fit even if her mind . . . I gasped for air.
Nan walked in carrying a big black photo album and dropped it on the kitchen table with a smack, sending dust from the pages. She flipped the cover open. “Look!” she said. I joined her at the table, hands at my sides so she wouldn’t see them shake. There she was: a mermaid. Smiling wide, bubbles escaping from her nose, her long blond hair curling around her face in weightless tendrils.
I sat across from her, trying to catch my breath. I didn’t understand, but at least it was a real memory, not made-up. She had a fin.
Nan turned the book to face me and flipped the page. “And here’s Bitsie, and remember my friend Bernadette?” She pointed to a photo of two identically dressed brunettes underwater, their arms around a man in an old-fashioned diver’s suit. She turned the page again and pointed to more mermaids. “Audrey, and Hannah, and Woo Woo.”
“Woo Woo?” My hands stopped shaking.
“Her name was LouEllen, but underwater it sounded like ‘Woo Woo.’ ”
“Nan, what is all this?” I asked, pointing to LouEllen’s picture. I’d never even seen the album before.
“It was a mermaid show at a roadside attraction shack off Highway One, and we were the stars. The Caloosahatchee Mermaids.”
“Mermaid show?”
Nan grinned, nodding. “There were dozens in Florida back then. Entertainment on the way to someplace else. Mermaid shows, alligator wrestlers, fortune-tellers, mystics. There was something at almost every exit.” She turned the page and touched a picture of her young face. “Mr. Crozier, the owner, built a huge tank with windows for a dolphin show. But then he couldn’t get dolphins, so he got us girls instead.” She laughed. “We weren’t the only mermaid show, and we certainly weren’t the biggest. But I like to think we were the best.”
She flipped the page to another picture: Nan and Bitsie, arms around each other, blowing bubble kisses toward the camera.
She shook her head. “Your grandfather was embarrassed. Like he’d started dating a gypsy or a burlesque star. Swimming around and breathing from tubes, having people see me in a shell bra . . . He convinced me it was something to be ashamed of. But now”—she smiled and her blue eyes sparkled—“now I look back and I’m amazed at myself. At all us girls. We were strong. It took guts for us to do what we did. It took skill and practice.”
“Where did they all end up?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Nan said. “Bernadette was in West Palm Beach until she passed away, but the others . . . they got married and moved on. We used to send Christmas cards, but eventually they came back without forwarding addresses.” She sighed, and I realized how close she was to crying. “I still miss Woo Woo. Me and Bitsie and Woo, we were a team. The three of us rented a teeny-tiny studio apartment and slept on camping cots. We were so broke. But it was the most fun I’ve ever had.” She touched a photo of Bitsie pulling off a bathing cap to shake out her hair. “I miss swimming like that. Mermaid class isn’t quite the same.”
I stared at a picture of Nan underwater, arm curled like Rosie the Riveter, looking straight at the camera, offering up a dare.
“We could look for Woo Woo,” I said. “On Facebook. I’ll set up my old computer tomorrow so we can search.”
“I can do it on my cell phone, I think,” Nan said, pulling her phone from her pocket, holding down the home button until it chimed. “Siri, open the Facebook.”
She handed me her phone with the blue Facebook sign-in on the screen. “Now what?”
“Do you have an account?” I asked.
“Can’t I just look?”
“You need an account.”
“I don’t want an account. I just want to see if Woo Woo is there.”
“Fine,” I said, typing my log-in into her phone because mine was almost out of battery power.
“Is she there?” Nan asked before my account finished loading.
“Well, I can’t type ‘Woo Woo’ into Facebook and find her!”
“LouEllen Griggs,” Nan said. “LouEllen is one word. Capital L, capital E.”
“Do you think she has a married name?”
“That is her married name,” Nan said. “Her maiden name was Welsh.”
“Woo Woo Welsh?”
“Pretty great, huh?” Nan smiled.
I typed LouEllen Griggs into the search bar. “Where did she last live?”
“Atlanta.”
“There’s a Lorna Griggs,” I said, pointing to a photo of a woman with salt-and-pepper hair and a sweet smile. “Atlanta, Georgia. But she’s only fifty-three.”
“That’s her daughter. Let me see!” She pulled her folding reading glasses from her pocket and squinted through them. “It’s so tiny.”
“Here,” I said. “Let me see.” I flipped through Lorna’s pictures until I saw a family photo, with a dozen people in matching white shirts and blue jeans. An elegant woman with fluffy ivory hair sat in a chair in front, Lorna’s hands on her shoulders.
I pinched and spread my fingers across the screen to zoom in. “Is that . . . Woo Woo?” I asked, still awkward with the nickname.
“That is her, isn’t it?” Nan took the phone from me, tipping the screen from side to side like it might give her a better view.
“I’ll go dig up my old computer—”
“Oh, this is silly. She has her own life. And it’s late anyway! Past our bedtime.” She waved the idea away with her hand, but I could see the wanting in her eyes.
* * *
Before we went to bed, I ran to the car to get the rest of my things.
“You know,” Nan said, following me to help, even though I told her I didn’t need it, “liquor stores will usually give you boxes if you ask.” She grabbed several plastic Wegmans bags with each hand.
“Bark is afraid of cardboard,” I told her as we walked back to the house. I slid all my bags to my left arm so I could lock the front door behind us. They weren’t heavy.
“Bark is lucky to have you.” Nan handed me her bags when we got to my bedroom door. “I can’t say many other people would be so patient.”
“I’m lucky to have Bark.”
Nan put her arm around my shoulder and hugged me close, kissing my forehead. “Goodnight, sweetheart. I’m so glad you’re home.”
“Me too,” I said. “It was like a piece of me was missing.”
“Did I ever tell you you’re my favorite grandkid?” Nan grinned. My dad was her only child, and I was his. A stale joke, but one of her favorites, and there was comfort in the familiarity.
The powdery scent of her perfume stayed with me as she shuffled down the hall to her room.
I shoved the bags in my closet and climbed into bed. Bark snuck under the covers, resting his head on my pillow. He sighed in my ear.
When I was four or five, my dad took me to the Catskill Game Farm and I got to feed a goat pellets from a gumball machine. His warm breath and the whiskers on his chin tickled my hand. I felt it in my head, the same wonderful tingle across my scalp that I got when someone drew me a picture or braided my hair—a buzz of closeness and attention. I remember seeing a video my dad took that day. I was squealing with joy. “He’s eating the food! He’s eating the food, Dad!” The camera got closer and then shook when my dad dropped more pellets into my chubby palm, again and again, the smell of alfalfa sweeter each time as they warmed in his hand. I could hear him laugh, breath crackling against the camera’s microphone. “He’s eating the food, Dad!” And we were both so happy.
Sometimes, I’d watch Bark do normal dog things and think, He’s playing with the toy! He’s drinking the water! He’s eating the food! It was the same magic, if I let myself slow down enough to notice it.
Bark yawned and stretched, then he tucked his nose under my chin, and I felt the tightness at my temples dissolve.