Chapter 8

“I don’t believe this guy,” Mary Katherine told me over the phone late that night. “Did you know about this? Why didn’t you tell me he was calling?”

“He wanted it to be a surprise.”

“God. At first I thought he was some sort of pervert. He sounded like some goosy high-school kid asking me out to the prom.”

“Did you accept?”

“Of course I accepted. He’s your friend, isn’t he? And it should be fun, I suppose. I don’t know what to wear, though, I mean for the Petroleum Club! Molly has a dress I can borrow. I think she was married in it or something.”

I told her I thought that would be fine. The next day I left my corduroy pants at the cleaners, and went on my lunch hour to the Dad and Lad store and bought a drab sport coat and tie and a pair of wing-tip shoes that made my feet feel as if they had weights attached. It all cost about a hundred dollars, but Mr. Granger was paying me two hundred and fifty a week, plus my free room at the Salt Sea, and the indulgence itself was somewhat therapeutic.

When I put my dry-cleaned pants on that night they felt wonderful against my sunburned skin, like fresh linen. I jiggled the battery cables on my old Chevy when it wouldn’t start and drove the few blocks to Mary Katherine’s beach house, feeling all the way quaint and dignified, in line with some order of behavior I had barely known existed. Here I was, an adult, going on a date.

She opened her door. She was wearing a dress whose color reminded me of litmus paper, as if her tanned skin had caused a reaction that turned the material a faint blue. The dress left the cool planking of her shoulders bare. The muscles of her calves twitched as she teetered down the stairs in her high heels.

“Do you think this is all right?” she asked.

“Of course it is. You look lovely.”

“So do you. You really went whole hog. A tie and everything.”

“You kids have a good time on your big date,” Molly said from the top of the stairs. Nat leaned against the rail and looked down at me resentfully.

When she got into the car Mary Katherine sat close to me at once, and I was grateful for that. I kissed her before I started the ignition.

“Let’s go in by the causeway,” she said. “Then we can come back by the ferry.”

I drove south along Padre Island and then turned onto the causeway. On the way to Corpus Christi neither of us said much. Mary Katherine kept smoothing her dress and picking off lint. Through the open window we could hear the rumble of the car, perfectly pitched to the sound of the smooth passage of the salt breeze. When we reached the top of the causeway bridge (it was lower than the harbor bridge on the opposite side of the bay, but the sensation of height was greater) she slipped away from me to the passenger window and put her head outside. It was still twilight and we could see for miles up and down the Laguna Madre. A few boats plied through the intracoastal canal. Padre Island, the spoilbanks that lay behind it, the mainland itself all seemed part of the same unpatterned fabric: a mixture of water, land, and sky, all on the same level, all resting on the same still surface. It was the flat unmarked interface of sea and land I remembered from my childhood.

We passed a bait stand I used to visit with my father, and I wondered if the painting I had marveled at as a boy was still there, a painting of a fisherman standing knee deep in the surf coaxing a naked woman from the waves. The woman, I remembered, was trying to cover herself with her hands, and looked at the dry land as if it was something she had never seen before.

It was almost dark by the time we reached Ocean Drive. The lights had come on on the T-heads, illuminating the white hulls of the sailboats docked there. In the failing light the water of the bay was taut and shimmering, and the skyline, with its prim, even buildings, gleamed like a toy city.

The Petroleum Club was on the top floor of an old office building that rose above the bluff separating “downtown” from “uptown.” We parked near the cathedral and stood for a moment at the top of the bluff, looking over the downtown rooftops at the manicured bayfront.

“I wish I’d been born here,” she told me. “Like you. I think that would have helped me in my work.”

“How?”

“It would feel more ordained or something. Sometimes I feel like I’m trespassing, or like I used to feel when we’d come down here from Oklahoma on vacation. About the time we hit Dallas Mother would start babbling about how wonderful the ocean was and by the time we got here and I actually saw it I was kind of disappointed. The Gulf of Mexico seemed like a bargain-basement ocean. And then I’d get stung by a man-of-war, and of course not know what it was and think I’d been attacked by ants, and then my mother would say, ‘Honey, there are no ants on the beach.’ I hated it.”

“You seem to have gotten over that.”

“I had to get over that, because I knew that salt water was what mattered to me. Now of course I can’t stand the thought of being landlocked. I don’t even like fresh water. Oh, sure, a babbling mountain stream is pretty, but there’s nothing there. Salt water, though, you can sense it right off—gravity. I don’t see why you ever left.”

“I suppose when my parents died I felt I’d had too big a dose of that gravity.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sound so self-righteous.”

“I didn’t mean to sound solemn, either,” I said.

In the lobby of the building we boarded an old-fashioned elevator that had been designed for an operator but converted to self-service. A brass grating closed automatically when I pushed the button for our floor, and when the doors opened again we were met by a maitre d’. I mentioned Mr. Granger’s name and he escorted us to a table in front of a picture window where Mr. Granger was standing with his hands out for us. He was wearing a carnation in his lapel and his face was so pink it looked as if he had scrubbed several layers of skin from it.

Mr. Granger took Mary Katherine’s hand into both his own and stood there simply admiring her. She blushed, charmed.

“I was so happy when you agreed to join me,” he said. “I’m just a lonesome old man, and you don’t know how it cheers me up to have a pretty girl like you at my table.”

“I can’t believe you’re that lonesome,” she said, in a mock flirtatious voice I hadn’t heard before. “You look pretty dashing tonight.”

Mr. Granger had us sit down. A young man my age in a white jacket reverently set three menus before us. I noticed there were no prices on them.

“Would you like drinks, Mr. Granger?” he asked.

He ordered us all False Dawns, another drink he had invented.

“It’s the opposite of a Tequila Sunrise,” he explained. “Now I want you two to get the lobster. Or a good steak. Or both. You look like you could use a decent meal, you’re both so skinny. Hell, yes, you get the steak and the lobster both. It’s got protein.

“That’s what we’ll have,” he said to the waiter, “and then we’re all going to want a great big piece of chocolate cake.”

When the waiter left Mr. Granger played with his napkin and looked out the window at the dark bay, which seemed like a vast pit into which the center of the city had fallen.

“So what do you think of our porpoises?” he asked Mary Katherine.

“They’re very nice,” she said. “Of course you know I’d rather see them free.”

“Well, honey, you just keep thinking that way. You may convince me yet. I’m willing to admit I’ve got some mixed feelings.”

Mary Katherine took a sip of the False Dawn the waiter brought her and ran her finger around the rim of the glass.

“It’s a very simple process,” she said, “just opening the gate.”

Mr. Granger put his hand on her forearm and winked at her. “We’ll talk about it sometime.”

I wondered how serious he was. Setting the porpoises free was an idea that he kept suggesting but would never develop. I think he was as tied to them as I was, that he wanted to keep them, that by having them around some channel was open that would otherwise be closed.

The lobsters came, looking like nightmarish insects.

“I’ve never had a lobster before,” Mary Katherine said. “How do you eat it? What is there to eat on it?”

“You eat the tail and the claws,” Mr. Granger explained. “You take this little nutcracker thing here and just go after it. Jeff, you help her out.”

“All right,” I said. “But I’ve never done this either.”

“What’s the matter with you two? Never had a lobster!”

Mary Katherine poked around the carapace until she found the meat in the tail.

“It’s wonderful,” she said, tasting it. To me the lobster tasted springy and insubstantial, and I cut into the rib eye sitting next to it.

“It’s a strange animal,” Mr. Granger said. “I don’t know whoever got the idea you could eat it. You know, I’ve been in some parts of the world, in restaurants, where they had porpoise on the menu. Supposed to be a delicacy. I would never try it, though. I just didn’t want to.”

“There are lots of places where people still hunt them,” Mary Katherine said. “In the Azores the kids practice their harpooning on them, and then when they grow up they go after sperm whales. Then of course there’s the tuna industry.”

“They’re just not safe anywhere, are they?” Mr. Granger said.

I saw Mary Katherine look frankly into his face. I knew she was looking for something there, a trace of irony or guile, but there was nothing, just the smooth, uncomplicated, swollen face, the thick glasses, the slick hair.

“I’m very sorry about that letter,” she told him. “I mean the part about you. I didn’t know you.”

Mr. Granger blushed and pushed his half-eaten lobster across the table toward us.

“You two finish this,” he said. “I can’t eat another bite.”

We both protested, but there was no point. He had apparently had a few False Dawns before we arrived, and he was slightly drunk and feeling too much like a master of ceremonies. We picked at the remains of his lobster. Under the table she slid the edge of her shoe up and down my shin. Mr. Granger leaned back in his chair, beaming at us. Ricky Nolan and the Stargazers took their places on the bandstand and after tuning up for a while began to play a brassy version of “The Girl from Ipanema.” The Stargazers all wore red blazers with a shooting star on the pocket, and between riffs they would hold their instruments in the crooks of their arms and wag their heads and smile. A few couples stood up and began to dance, big beef-faced oilmen and their wives. Mr. Granger insisted that Mary Katherine and I join them.

“I don’t know how to dance,” I said.

“Neither do I,” said Mary Katherine. “Not that way. I had ballroom in the eighth grade but I’m sure I’ve forgotten everything.”

“That’s no excuse. There’s nothing to it. You just go out there and shuffle around a little. It’s good for you.”

The music stopped but Mr. Granger went on in a loud voice exhorting us to dance. The whole restaurant was listening.

“Dance with her!” Ricky Nolan said into the microphone. Everyone applauded.

“Well, I guess that’s our cue,” Mary Katherine said. I stood and held out my hand as I had seen people do in movies and led her to the dance floor.

“A lovely young couple,” Ricky Nolan said. Everybody applauded again. Mary Katherine hid her face in my shoulder.

“A-one, a-two,” the bandleader said, leading his group into “Feelings.”

A few other couples came onto the floor to take the pressure off us.

“Okay,” I said, “give me some sort of hint.”

“Just move your feet in time with the music.”

We leaned back and forth, like dancing robots. It seemed to me the other dancers were actually gliding by us, as if they were on roller skates.

“This isn’t so bad,” I conceded.

“Look at him looking at us.” She was pointing with her eyes toward Mr. Granger, who was staring at us, drunk and happy.

“Everybody else is looking at us, too,” I said.

“Why not? We’re a lovely young couple. Do you mind?”

“Not really.” I ran my hand up her spinal column and then slid it back down to rest on the small of her back. We danced jerkily to the other side of the floor.

“You know what this reminds me of?” Mary Katherine said. “Did you ever stand on top of your father’s shoes while he walked around? I think we’ve got the same effect going here.”

When the song was over there were a few drunken yelps and sporadic applause that I realized was meant for us. We turned to go back to the table but Mr. Granger was waving us back onto the floor. We danced through two more songs. I set my eyes over Mary Katherine’s head and looked out the wraparound window at the lights of the city and the abrupt chasm of the bay where they disappeared, listened to the ta-shew, ta-shew of the snare drum, played by a man with long sideburns and slicked-down back hair. We began to move rhythmically, to anticipate one another’s direction, to adjust ourselves to it the way Wanda and Sammy silently aligned themselves for their tandem high jump, gauging speed and distance and height with a perfection that had always mystified me, even though I knew I had taught it to them.

During the third song—some movie theme I half-recognized—I looked over and saw Mr. Granger at the table gesturing to us, his face even more flushed than before. First I thought he wanted us to come over, then for us to hold back and keep dancing. The signs he was making seemed frantic, discordant. I couldn’t understand what he wanted, and my helplessness was aggravated by the momentum of the dance, which seemed to hold me from him, to keep me from understanding.

Finally Mary Katherine saw and took her hands from my shoulders.

“Is he all right?”

I saw the sweat on Mr. Granger’s forehead, the skin prickling on his scalp where the hair had thinned out. I reached him just as he lurched forward from his chair onto the floor. He was looking up at me, his face bloated, unrecognizable.

“Somebody please call an ambulance,” Ricky Nolan said calmly into the microphone.

I loosened Mr. Granger’s bow tie and then the collar of his silk Taiwanese shirt. He was breathing, he was licking his lips with his tongue.

“What went wrong?” he said very slowly. “Did I have a stroke?”

“I think you may have had a little heart attack,” Mary Katherine told him. “Just lie still now and wait for the ambulance.”

“Did the band stop playing because of me?”

“They’ll start again in a minute,” I said.

“I feel silly just lying here.”

“It doesn’t bother anybody.”

Ricky Nolan came over, took off his red blazer, and tucked it under Mr. Granger’s head.

“How you doin’, Dude? For a minute there I thought I’d lost my biggest fan.”

“Ricky,” he said, “why don’t you play something so all these folks can dance instead of just standing around?”

The bandleader nodded and left. In a moment the Stargazers were playing “Three Coins in the Fountain.” Mr. Granger lay very still, blinking his eyes, not speaking. Two ambulance attendants arrived and eased him onto a stretcher, then wheeled him through the crowd and onto the elevator.

“I feel like I’m floating,” he said as the elevator descended. “Like this place is underwater and I’m just swimming through it.”

“Is that right?” one of the attendants said.

“You ride with him in the ambulance,” Mary Katherine said to me. “Give me your keys and I’ll meet you at the hospital with your car.”

Mr. Granger said nothing in the ambulance. He was very calm and looked about in wonderment, as if he had just opened his eyes on the world for the first time. He was hooked up to a portable EKG machine. The attendant gave him an injection of something.

“Yeah, you’ll be fine,” he said without much interest. “Having a night on the town, huh?”

Mr. Granger nodded. The attendant looked over at me.

“How you doin’?”

“Fine.”

The ambulance hit a rut in the road, and Mr. Granger’s bulk pitched a little on the stretcher. He seemed to have relinquished control of his body, he was so passive.

I found Mary Katherine in the lobby of the hospital. She was talking to Nat on the phone.

“I can’t, honey,” she was saying. “A friend of Jeff’s is very sick and we have to help out. I’ll be home before you wake up. We’ll go out and have some doughnuts for breakfast, okay? Now let me speak to Molly again.”

Across the lobby was a large mosaic mural. A fragmented Christ gathered sheep into his lap, holding his hand above them in the sign of blessing, the sheep and the man-god all wearing the same simpering expression on their faces. I remembered the mural—I had stared at it for a long time before each of my parents had died.

Mary Katherine hung up the phone and took my hand.

“How is he?”

“I don’t know. He seemed pretty listless in the ambulance. Listen, you can take the car back if you want to get home. I may be here all night. I don’t think he’d expect you to wait around.”

“Don’t be silly. Molly loves staying at my house. She plays all my records.”

“The doctor’s on the way here,” I said. “As soon as they know something they’re supposed to tell us. I told them we’d be in the coffee shop.”

“Let’s wait there then, come on.”

We took a booth and drank two cups of coffee each without saying anything.

“You’re pretty upset, aren’t you?” she said finally.

I nodded.

“I wasn’t sure exactly what he means to you.”

“I’m not either. He was a good friend of my parents’. I guess he’s the closest thing to family I have left.”

“He’s a sweet man.”

Dr. Rush came into the coffee shop a half hour later. He had not changed much since the day eleven years ago he had told me of my mother’s death. If anything he looked younger, his hair fuller and his face thinner and tanned.

“How have you been, Jeff?” he asked, taking my hand. “Son of a gun. I think it must be ten years.”

“About that,” I said. “This is Mary Katherine Severin.”

Rush took her hand and gripped her elbow with that same cool professionalism that had taken me in so long ago, making me feel relieved at even his most tragic news, flattered, a colleague.

“Well,” he said, “Dude is just fine. I’ll tell you what, let’s go into the conference room and I’ll fill you in there.”

The conference room was the size of a large closet. There was another picture of Jesus there, pointing at his swollen, radiant heart.

We sat down on a kind of pew affixed to the wall; Rush leaned back against the opposite wall and crossed his arms.

“He’s doing fine,” he repeated. “He’s had a coronary occlusion, a fairly serious one. He’s in intensive care where we can keep an eye on him.”

Mary Katherine and I nodded our heads dumbly. Already I felt the crisis leaving us, receding before this solemn shop-talk.

“He knows you can’t go in to see him for a few days yet, but he’s concerned about you and told me to tell you to go back to Port Aransas tonight and look in on the porpoises.

“Now what the hell”—he laughed—“are you doing with porpoises?”

“He’s got a porpoise show over there.”

“The hell he does? Ol’ Dude. You know, I never knew porpoises were as smart as you hear about them being today. I used to see them in the bay, try to catch them with a rod and reel, but I guess they were just too smart to go for it. Now everybody’s got them doing tricks.”

I looked up at the picture of Christ, pointing to his heart. It seemed in bad taste, like LBJ displaying his gall bladder scar. The image came back, the porpoise hung by its flukes from the post.

Rush unfolded his arms now and rubbed his hands together.

“Jeff,” he said, “this is not a good thing for a man Dude’s age, and he’s not in particularly good health, so I don’t want to give you a pie-in-the-sky prognosis. His condition is stable right now, he’s doing fine, like I said, but he’s still very critical.

“I want to get him up to Houston as soon as he’s a little better, have Cooley look at him. The best thing in his case might be a bypass, I don’t know. Right now we just have to wait it out. You go back to those porpoises like he said, and I promise I’ll call you if there’s any change at all.”

I gave him my number, and the number at the compound, and Mary Katherine gave him hers as well.

“When will he be out of intensive care?” she asked.

“We’ll keep him in there for three or four days. Now don’t worry anymore. Go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

We obeyed. The hospital parking lot had been full when Mary Katherine drove up, so she had parked the car illegally on Ocean Drive. There was a two-dollar ticket under the wiper blade.

“Sorry,” she said.

“That’s all right.”

“Do you want me to drive home? You look so tense.”

But I felt like driving. I steered the car north toward the harbor bridge, and we climbed high above the bay, which was as dark as the moonless sky above us.

When I was in high school I dove once on the wreck of an oil tanker that had sunk long before in a hundred feet of water. At that depth it was very dark, even in the clear water of the Gulf. I had been swimming along a kind of spar, thinking I was heading toward the surface and confused by the gloom that huddled closer about me with every stroke of my fins. Someone grabbed me, pointed toward the surface and shook his head, then pointed downward and made an okay sign with his fingers. It took a few seconds of agonized, slow-witted thought for me to understand that we were hanging upside down in the water, that I had been swimming down into the blackness rather than up from it as I had thought.

Nearing the summit of the bridge I remembered that feeling, an absence of gravity and bearings that made it seem possible that the car would keep ascending, soaring away from the water below us and into the corresponding darkness of the sky.

But we were soon back down at sea level, following the curve of the bay. We recognized the land only by the lights set down upon it by humankind, but I could sense the desolate reach of it, the great smooth brow of land shelving off into the dirty waters. Near Aransas Pass a barn owl swung down across our headlights. We saw its blanched, startled face.

Ours was the only car on the ferry. Mary Katherine and I both got out and sat on the hood during the brief crossing.

“I’m going to check on the porpoises,” I said. “I’ll take you home first, if you’d like.”

“Would you rather I went home?”

“No.”

“Okay then.”

The porpoises greeted us in a lunatic manner, walking on their tails, waving with their fins, leaping so high and so recklessly I was afraid they would miss the water altogether and land on the dock.

“They’re glad to see us,” I said.

In a few moments they calmed down and swam over to us, resting their chins side by side on the dock. Mary Katherine bent down and stroked Wanda’s beak. The porpoise rolled over on her side and made her contented clicking sound.

“Let’s get in with them,” Mary Katherine said. “That’s what they want.”

I looked at her as she crouched on the dock in her blue dress and high thick heels. She was staring at me.

“Okay?” she said.

I nodded. She began to take off her clothes with an affected casualness. Standing in her underwear, she laid the borrowed dress along the bleachers with a prim, embarrassed attention to detail. She put her shoes there too, and then her underwear, and walked unhurriedly to the edge of the pool and slid into the water with more grace than I was able at that moment to absorb. I followed her, taking off the formal clothes, feeling the salt breeze on my skin. The water was warm, a well-drawn saline bath that lulled rather than excited us. Wanda passed in front of me and I grabbed her dorsal and took a ride across the pool, letting go when we came to the place where Mary Katherine treaded water, her shoulders just above the waterline. Two rows of teeth began gently raking up and down my leg.

“They did it to me, too.” Mary Katherine laughed. “That’s mating behavior. They want to make love with us.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for that,” I said.

She leaned back and floated for a moment, her breasts rising out of the dark water.

“I don’t know,” she considered. “I can see it. Maybe if you weren’t here with me I’d give it some serious thought. I don’t think it’s so disgraceful.”

Sammy breached very close to our faces, spraying us with vapor and with exhausted air that smelled close but not foul. The porpoises were growing calm again, either from our discouragement of their advances or from an increasing interest in one another. For a while we swam with them chastely, grabbing them by the dorsals and running our hands across their backs, or holding them by the pectoral fins in the parody of dancing that was part of their performance. Letting go of one of the porpoises, I would turn to Mary Katherine and touch her bare skin, not really registering the difference, not knowing which smooth body belonged to which species.

We came out of the water to make love. I spread my sleeping bag out by the side of the pool, unzipping it all the way so that it was twice as wide, and we lay down together on the printed pattern of a hunter taking aim at a deer. Our bodies retained a brittle layer of salt, which did not interfere. It had been a long time since the Seamstress’ last grudging tenderness. We listened to the porpoises beside us and to those in the channel, slapping their tails, exhaling with all the power of their lungs into the night air. I moved in and with Mary Katherine, thinking of that feral reach of dark, muddy water just beyond us, greater than any continent, unpeopled, waiting for us.

We could see Sammy and Wanda entwined (as much as their blunt bodies would allow them to be) in the pool beside us, Sammy rolling out of the water, his odd penis exposed, their quick, fervent face-to-face coupling.

“All this time,” I said, “and I’ve never seen them do that.”

“We set them off.” She was beginning to shiver a little. I brought a towel from the shed and we dried off and dressed. Then we drove to my room at the Salt Sea and stood together in the tiny shower stall, beneath a stream of fresh water.

“I love this place,” she said, crawling naked into the sheets I had washed that morning, in hope. “It’s so bare.”

I turned off the light and got into bed too, putting my glasses on the nightstand. She reached over me and turned the light back on.

“What?” I asked. She was looking into my face.

“I just wanted to see. You have nice eyes.”

“They don’t do me much good. You’ll be a blur if you move away.”

She moved even closer, and though we were both exhausted we began all over again.

I fell asleep worrying about Mr. Granger, and dreamed that he and I were clumsy slithering beasts lying on the beach of Corpus Christi Bay. We were dragging our bellies along the oyster shell, about to enter the water, knowing that there we would be buoyant and swift. We saw Wanda out in the bay, hovering in the air, desperate for us to leave the shore.

It was one of several dreams I had that night, for I woke half a dozen times from a need to assure myself that Mary Katherine was beside me. Each time she was asleep, perfectly asleep in the same position all night, her head on a corner of the pillow we were sharing, her mouth slightly open but still. Her whole body rose and fell with her breathing, but the stillness was dominant, like the hidden, changeless ocean bottom far beneath the surface swells.

The last time I woke I reflexively reached out for the alarm clock and shut it off before it rang. It took me a few moments to wake her, and I was afraid that when she did wake she would not remember me, would not know where she was.

But she smiled from her sleep and without opening her eyes cupped her hands around the back of my neck.

“What time is it?”

“Six thirty. You have to pick Nat up for breakfast.”

“Hmmmm. Are you coming?”

“If I’m invited.”

“Of course.”

“What time does he get up?”

“Seven. He watches Captain Kangaroo. Did you know they still have Mr. Greenjeans? And that dancing bear.”

“That’s reassuring. You get dressed. I’m going to call the hospital.”

Over the phone a terse voice told me that Mr. Granger was resting comfortably. There had been no change in his condition.

No change. I had longed once to hear those words. Even when my father had been in his coma and I had been told he would not break through it, “no change” filled me with a strange, static hope. It was not yet necessary to grieve or despair, I could be happy and secure a little longer.

“I suppose that’s good, isn’t it?” Mary Katherine said as she pulled her dress over her head.

“It’s okay. I’d rather hear he was doing better, but at least he’s still alive.”

“Of course he’s still alive. Don’t be such a pessimist.”

I put on my cutoffs and my Bigfoot T-shirt, which made it necessary to explain my brief career as a bête noire. Mary Katherine laughed and looked at me in wonder.

“I can’t imagine it,” she said.

Nat was watching television when we arrived. I doubt that he was glad to see me, but his mother’s good humor won him over. We went to a little bakery, a carry-out place with only a few tables.

“Can I have chocolate doughnuts?” Nat asked his mother, staring at them in the bakery case.

“Not this early,” she said.

We sat down at one of the tables. I watched Nat raise his doughnut to his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, looking at it the way a predator regards an unfamiliar victim, searching for the place it was most vulnerable. He was a quiet child, at least in my presence. After each bite he held his doughnut in front of his eyes, as if to measure any changes he had caused in its form. He took half an hour to finish his two doughnuts.

Mary Katherine and I sat with our coffee and waited patiently for him, our legs grazing against each other beneath the table.

Nat looked like his mother. He had the same eyes, spaced rather far apart above his broad cheekbones. His nose was unformed yet, but it would be hers too—straight, with a faint cleft at its base. I was glad he looked like her and not like his father.

“Hurry up, honey,” Mary Katherine had to say at last. “Jeff has to go to work.”

“I don’t have to be there for a while,” I said.

“Are you going on the boat today, Mommy?” Nat asked her.

“Not today. What would you like to do?”

“Can we see Jeff’s dolphins again?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Let him,” I said. “Come to the one o’clock show. I’ll tell whoever’s at the gate to let you in.”

“I’d rather pay, Jeff.”

“I understand.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“No. I’ll pay for breakfast.”

I drove them home and kissed her reservedly at the bottom of the stairwell outside her house. Nat watched us without emotion.

“I’ll see you later,” I said to him. He grinned and ran up the stairs.

“He likes you,” Mary Katherine told me. “I could see you were worried he might not.”

She shifted away from me and leaned back against one of the pilings that held up the house.

“One thing. Please don’t start acting paternal around him unless you’re very serious. That’s happened to him before, and I don’t want to explain it to him again. You can be like some jolly uncle who’s always playing practical jokes, pulling quarters out of his ears, things like that. He won’t miss you half as much.”

I started to say something, but she held her hand up. “I’m sorry. I’m already backing you into a corner. But I really care for you, Jeff. If it’s going to be casual, fine. I can handle that. I just have to have certain ground rules because of Nat.”

“I love you,” I said.

“No. Let’s be calm.”

She looked at me steadily, and I was calmed and sure. She put her arms around my waist and grabbed my empty belt loops familiarly, and I laid my face into the wide berth of her shoulder.