by Deb Caletti
We’re actually having piña coladas in Hawaii, which seems pretty hysterical, but as I sip through my straw, I find it cool and frothy, a coconutty heaven. And, well now, the onion rings arrive, and they’re beautiful oniony art. Large and piled high, the Leaning Tower of Pisa in fried brown crisp. They’re so hot, I can barely touch them, but Dad plucks one right off and bites. Keiko sits up straight, hoping Dad’ll notice her best behavior and fine posture and reward her with a dropped nibble.
“I like Wade,” I tell Dad. “All your friends.” And I do. I’m feeling bighearted. I like the entire world right then. I like every single soul, with those onion rings in front of me. I even have a pang of fond goodwill for poor windsurfer Dean, who is probably about now coming face-to-face with his own mortality.
“It’s a fine life, it really is,” Dad says, though he too is under the spell of grease and salt. “But I miss you kids. Sometimes I wonder—”
“Oh, shit!” I say. You may think I just spilled ranch dipping sauce right down my front just then, but that’s not what happened. No, not at all. “Oh my God.” I grab Dad’s elbow.
“Indigo, what?”
“It’s him.”
“Who?” Dad’s lips are shiny. He wipes them with a napkin.
“Vespa guy. Shit! Right there! Stage right.”
He’s sitting at a table in the covered outdoor section of the restaurant in front of us, a grass-roofed place with ceiling fans and fishing nets and glass balls decorating the walls. He’s wearing blue swim trunks and his shirt is a bright, thirst-quenching green. The waitress moves away from his table after placing down a hefty plate of a hamburger and fries in front of him. He’s progressed beyond just coffee, I see.
I slap my hand to my heart. “Oh, man. This is so weird. It’s him. He was there, in Nine Mile Falls. Now he’s here in Hawaii and I’m in Hawaii.”
Dad knows what I mean. “That guy gave you two and a half million dollars,” he says.
Seeing him, the real him, makes this suddenly more unbelievable. I can almost wrap my mind around the fact when it’s just me and the fact, alone in my own mind. You can talk yourself into making sense of almost anything. We still have wars and capital punishment and guns in people’s houses and we all go, uh-huh, yeah. Women talk themselves into writing to convicted murderers. So, you know, the mind is fairly flexible. Still, I can’t grasp the idea that the man there—who is now lifting the bun from his hamburger and placing the lettuce and pickle inside, leaving behind the onion, reaching for the ketchup bottle—has given me a fortune as a tip for a cup of coffee.
“That’s him?” Dad says. “I pictured him different.”
“Like how? Dashing jet-black hair?” I think of the disappointing Mr. Moore.
“Top hat and tails? Uberhuman?” Dad says. The Vespa guy is thwopping the bottom of the ketchup bottle. “Look at that shirt, though. That’s not Jack’s Shirt Shack.”
“Elegance followed him here,” I say.
“Want me to go and talk to him?”
My eyes don’t leave Vespa guy. He’s leaning over a hamburger, his blond head tilted slightly to the side for the bite.
“No. I’ve got an idea. Hang here a sec.”
I scootch back my stool; take an on-the-way sip of my drink. Dad calls Keiko to stay. My heart is whumping away, but it’s not a dread whump, more an excited one. Funny thing is, I’m really glad to see him. I feel like I would if I turned a corner on this island of Maui and there was Leroy crossing the street, or Funny, emerging from a store with a shopping bag under one arm. I came to see this man, but the actual him is a happy surprise.
My grand entrance sucks, because I can’t figure out how to get to that part of the restaurant, and on first try, I end up near the restrooms. Chick in triangle skirt, boy in boxy suit. Back up and try again, and I see Dad gesturing like a madman from his seat, arm flinging and pointing the other direction, thanks Dad. There’s a little gate to walk through and then I’m in the restaurant, passing tables, and I swear Vespa guy looks up and right at me, but he doesn’t know it’s me-me. He probably thinks I’m familiar but can’t think of from where.
I approach his table. “Can I get you some extra napkins,” I say. “Or a refill? They’re free.” I don’t know if they’re free or not.
“No, thanks,” he says. He looks down. I don’t move. He looks up again. “No. Wait. Wait a minute.” And then he breaks into a big toothpaste-ad smile. “My God, wait a minute. Indigo Skye? My God. What are you doing here? I didn’t even recognize you.”
“Mr. Howards. I’m here to see you.”
“You’re kidding. How did you find me? How did you know where I was?”
“You said…I said—I told you about my dad. Maui. It was the first place we checked. You could have been anywhere…”
“Note to self: Work on predictability.”
I laugh. “It’s a good thing your imagination wasn’t more wild.”
“In my defense, I also considered Bali. All right? Give me a few points for that. But, passports…What are you doing here?” He seems genuinely baffled. “Because of the money?”
“It’s not exactly what people…People don’t just do that.”
“Well, I highly recommend it. It feels great. I wanted you to have it. That’s why I gave it to you.”
“It was…a lot.” I laugh, maybe a little hysterically. “Okay, this was beyond a lot. Fifty bucks is a lot.”
“Look, I didn’t give you my last dime or anything. I just spread it around. Got rid of it—gave it to people it made me happy to give it to. This is the best decision I’ve ever made. You’ve got to understand that. I wanted to. Trust me, I’ve never felt better. Here. You want to sit?” He pushes out the chair across from him with his foot.
“My dad’s over there.” My dad, apparently a skilled lip-reader, raises his arm and waves.
“Your dad. You mentioned him.” Richard Howards arcs his arm, gestures my father over. Dad winds his way to us, balancing the dish of onion rings and our glasses. Keiko follows, even though I doubt she’s supposed to be in this part of the restaurant. No one seems to mind.
Dad holds out his hand. “William Skye. Will. I’m the dad.”
“Richard Howards. I guess you played a part in my being here. Maui—I heard the word, and it was…yeah.”
“Well, at least the hamburgers are good,” Dad says.
“Oh man, the best. Hey, pup,” he says to Keiko, who sits down politely. “I’m sorry you went to the trouble of flying out here, though,” he says to me. “If you’re trying to give me my money back, I don’t want it.”
“It was very generous…,” Dad says.
“You say “generous,” but you think “crazy,” right? Or that I want something? I don’t, okay? That’s exactly it—I don’t want anything. I don’t want anything anymore. Just this.” He gestures to the air in front of him, the right-now air. “Here, it’s enough. A cheeseburger is enough.” He lifts the second half of his hamburger, shakes it a little in Dad’s direction. “If you moved out here, you understand why I am too.”
“I didn’t give away two and a half million dollars when I came. Of course, I didn’t have two and a half million dollars,” Dad says.
The waitress comes, offers Richard Howards a refill, which I guess they really do have. I smile at her—I’m always especially nice to other restaurant workers. When she leaves, Richard Howards leans forward on his elbows. “So, you may know this. But I started this little computer company,” he says. “Zeus?”
Dad’s eyes widen, and I have one of those shock-moments, when you actually stop breathing. Even Dad, who thinks a “hard drive” is something that happens only when there’s bad traffic, knows that Zeus is one of the biggest search engine companies around.
“So, you’ve heard of it,” he says.
“I thought your name sounded familiar,” Dad says.
“Listen, it was great at first. But a lot of things that you think will widen your world can eventually imprison
you. Right? Am I right? A marriage, some relationship, a job, a concept—success, religion? Can start to swallow you whole, if you let it. You don’t watch out for your spirit, and before you know it, bam. You’re in service to this it. I don’t know if I’m making sense.”
“To me you are,” Dad says.
“You end up feeling like you’ve been put in a box. And then a smaller box yet. You can’t even breathe.”
“Yeah, I remember I lost sight of my ability to just go for a walk. To watch the sky and be a human being,” Dad says.
Richard Howards nods. “I know. You can’t even remember who you once were. I wanted out so bad but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t see beyond the walls. I don’t know why. I’m a smart guy. But I couldn’t get loose from the way I was seeing and the way I was living. The top flaps of the box were open all along for me to escape, but it seemed…impossible.”
“Well, you lose the energy for escape. Until the balance tips somehow and it’s finally harder to stay where you are—,” Dad says.
“Exactly.”
“Than to make that change.”
“Exactly right.”
“What happens is, you become a slave to another person’s need, to other people’s idea of what you should be. And hey, I wasn’t anywhere near where you were. But, you listen to all the outside noise, and your own voice just doesn’t have a chance,” Dad says. “A lesson for you, In.” He waggles his finger at me.
“It feels like a hundred years ago already. Lifetimes. I feel giddy with freedom,” Richard Howards says. He looks it too. Younger, maybe? He is swirling a fry in a splotch of ketchup, pops it into his mouth. He’s a different guy from the one who sat so very still at Carrera’s, sipping that black coffee, staring outside.
“I’m glad you two understand each other,” I say. There’s a small scritch of irk lying somewhere near my surface, though. Dad’s leaving meant leaving Mom, Severin, Bex, and me. Dad’s box was a house with us in it.
Dad and Richard Howards look at each other for a moment, a man’s moment, not too long to be intimate, long enough to convey the fact that they’re not alone. “I don’t want that money,” Richard Howards says. “I’m not going to let another person or a group of people box me into who I’m supposed to be. Getting rid of this money—it’s the emotional equivalent of dropping it from a skyscraper and letting it rain down. I’m having the time of my life giving it away.”
“It was a bit of a shock,” Dad says. “For Indigo.”
“Was it too much? I was thinking, the taxes alone…Does it feel like a burden?”
I think of Mom, and Mrs. Olson with her liver spots and her cross necklace. I think of all those little envelopes on our kitchen table, with their narrow tissue-paper windows. Those envelopes, so heavy, and sometimes so feared that Mom would leave them unopened. I noticed that. The way she’d open the ones from school, or from magazine subscriptions she’d never order, or from Bomba. But she’d take those ones with the tissue-paper windows and set them aside, like they might burn her fingers if she touched them too long. Menopause was not her real problem, I knew. The money is not a burden. It is the end of all burdens. “It didn’t seem right to take,” I say.
“I’m giving freely. If you gave it back, it would hurt my feelings.”
“I don’t know how we could ever repay you,” Dad says.
“Listen. Indigo? Just promise me one thing. Let it make you bigger, not smaller. Okay? Right? That’s repayment enough.”
I just look at him, and he’s smiling at me, and I suddenly feel this largeness, this solemn swell of the momentous. This is real. And I’m not in shock anymore, I’m just…overcome. I blink. I could burst into tears right here, I think, into the now salty napkins. But the moment is too important even for that, held still in the tiny space of time between now and then, before and after. We’re quiet, but Jimmy Buffett is singing about wasting away in Margaritaville and there’s a burst of laughter from a table of six, and a guy shouts, “And she wasn’t even dressed yet!” and there’s more laughter. But in my world, this world, there’s the Vespa guy and Dad and Keiko and me, and my heart, which is trying its best to hold the fullness of unimaginable gratitude.
“Why me?” I say. Dad takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. My eyes prick with tears.
“That’s exactly why, Indigo Skye,” the Vespa guy says. “You ask ‘Why me?’ instead of ‘Why not me?’”
9
Richard Howards invites us back to his house after he finishes his lunch. He has rented a motor scooter, not quite his orange Vespa back in Washington State, but he is obviously right at home on it. His shirt flaps as he drives. When we get back to Dan Shugman’s place, there’s a golf cart parked in the driveway, and some old guy who turns out to be Dan Shugman himself.
“Just seeing that you’ve got everything you need,” he says. “And dropping off those extra keys I promised. Hey, William.”
Dan Shugman’s wearing crispy white old-guy shorts and a plaid shirt. He’s got bright blue eyes and silver, straight Republican hair. But his twinkle is nonpartisan. You can tell he thinks the world is a fine place to play within. I like Dan Shugman right off.
“Come on in.” Richard Howards is happy. “Dogs, too. My humble abode.” He steps aside.
“Not too humble,” Dan Shugman says. We step in, and the room is wide and bright. The windows look over a pool, and beyond, the sea. It feels good in here. I could sit and look out this window forever. “Looks so odd without the furniture,” Dan Shugman says. “We had a piano over there.” He points to the large windows. You can see the round indents from the piano legs still in the carpet.
“It’s a beautiful place,” I say.
“Now you won’t worry that I gave away my last dime and am sleeping in a dim room on a thin mattress.”
“I hereby stop worrying,” I say. Keiko sits by my heels.
“You play the piano?” Dad asks Dan Shugman.
“Hell, no. No one played. Stupidest thing in the world, having pianos you don’t play and dining room tables you don’t sit at and china you look at.”
“Big jewelry you never wear, or maybe worse, do wear,” Richard Howards says.
“You’ve got an ex-wife,” Dan Shugman says.
“And ex-jewelry,” Richard Howards laughs. He’s standing in front of the refrigerator. There’s not much in there, I can see. Bottles of Henry Weinhard’s Private Reserve, some cans of 7UP, several Styrofoam containers of leftovers. He hands Dad and Dan a beer, me a 7UP. I crack open the top, take a cool sip.
“I got some ex-diamonds,” Dan Shugman says. “The wife would pick ’em out and I’d write the check.” Dan Shugman’s thumb and forefinger make pen squiggles in the air.
“Ex–exercise equipment,” Richard Howards says.
“Amazing the shit you accumulate,” Dad says. He’s happy here too. “We have a teak hook to hang bananas on. At what moment in your life do you think you gotta have a teak hook to hang bananas on?” He takes a swog of beer.
“Right about the time you buy the ‘I Heart My Pekinese’ golf sweater,” Dan Shugman says. “Sorry, all, but I’ve got to run.”
Out the front windows I can see Dan Shugman drive away in his golf cart. We sit in Richard Howards’s empty living room and talk until Dad finishes his beer and we come to that winding-down place, that feeling of a battery run down, when you know it’s time to go. Dad and Richard Howards are pals now. Dad’s promised to show him the place with the best Scotch in town. Richard Howards shakes Dad’s hand and gives him a clap on the back.
“See, Indigo Skye?” Richard Howards says. “You give it up and it all comes your way.”
I guess it’s true, because the Vespa guy is as light as a soda bubble. You can feel the good air in and around him. He is a wide sky, the same wide sky he can look at every morning and every night now. I nod. He takes my hand and we shake, and then I give up on that and give him a hug. You never know, you see, when or where you will stumble on a sudden connection, a l
ifelong bond with another human being. A hundred people can sit down in a booth and it will be eggs and toast. And another one, just one, will sit down and will change your life, be monumental with just coffee.
“Thank you,” I say. The words are so small.
“Thank you,” he says. “If it weren’t for you, I might still be ingesting four thousand toxic chemicals.”
“Stay away from those nasty things,” I say.
“Never again,” says the Vespa guy.
The next day, my plane doesn’t leave until late afternoon. There’s one more thing Dad wants to do with me, he says. So we put on our swimsuits that morning, leave Jennifer behind with her magazine and her Special K. Keiko’s got to stay behind, because we’ll be in the water. Dad’s got the gear in his trunk already.
The beach where Dad finally parks is spotted with Dr. Seuss–ish beings with masks and snorkels and flippers, bodies of various shapes—large, bloated stomachs and tiny flat ones, muscled brown chests and bright pomegranate shoulders, noses smeared with streaks of white lotion. It’s an I-don’t-care beach, a beach of equals, a beach with a higher purpose than showing one perfect body to another perfect body. In the water the backs of people float along the surface, the underside of flippers making an occasional showy flap, the curve of snorkels pointing skyward.
I’m a little afraid of snorkeling, I admit. There’s a very rational (I think) fear of trying to breathe underwater, and then the strangeness of oversize feet, and the occasional bursts of salt water in the mouth, and the coordination of all of the above. I did it once before when Severin and Bex and I visited, and even Bex, who’s not the best swimmer, was paddling around fine while I was busy repeating the don’t panic, don’t panic mantra. I could stay under there only awhile before I’d flail around with the sudden splashy realization that I was doing something unnatural.
