I didn’t push it.
Those two years since Irene died had shown me that whenever I raised a complaint in this family, it fell the way a stone falls into water that no longer moves.
The next morning, Curtis had rented paddleboards for everyone.
He called it a bonding activity, a phrase I was fairly sure he’d lifted from some workplace seminar.
I told him the stomach trouble had gotten worse.
It had gnawed at me most of the night, a dull ache that was sharpening by the hour.
“You’ve been complaining since you got here,” Petra said.
Not quite cruel, but nowhere near kind.
“Maybe try to just enjoy the trip, Eugene.”
Curtis laughed at that.
A quick snort.
Then he said, “Dad’s always got something going on. Remember Mom’s memorial, when he said his back was out and skipped the reception?”
My memory of that afternoon was nothing like his version.
I’d stood at Irene’s memorial in genuine agony. My back had seized up from helping shoulder the casket, something I’d refused to leave to strangers.
I couldn’t accept that other hands would be the last ones to carry her.
But Curtis had his own telling of it.
And nobody at that breakfast table on Chincoteague Island was inclined to push back.
So I climbed onto the paddleboard.
There’s something I need you to understand about a certain kind of pain.
Not the surface kind.
Not a cut.
Not something you can press your finger against and locate.
This kind doesn’t announce itself.
It moves in quietly.
Each paddle stroke pushed something sharp through my right side.
Low.
Insistent.
A wrongness I had no name for.
Over 31 years in that hardware store, I’d used my hands to diagnose countless broken things.
I’ve always been able to tell where something has failed.
This was failure.
Dougal drifted alongside me for a stretch, and I caught him looking over twice.
Fast glances he withdrew the instant I returned them.
He paddled on without a word, pulling up ahead to where Curtis and the others were.
And I fell behind on that gray-green water, feeling like someone the group had already moved past.
Come afternoon, they were set on taking the ridge path on the east side of the island.
They said the view made the climb worthwhile for photographs.
I stayed behind.
Told them straight out that I had to rest.
Petra looked at me in a way I’d learn to recognize over the next two days.
The look you give something that’s marring an otherwise clean surface.
“We’ll be back in a couple of hours,” Curtis said. “Try to rest.”
I guess it was two hours I spent alone on that deck.
Eyes on the water.