When he got up at seven he felt relieved, maybe even proud, that he’d managed not to dream of Claire, and he didn’t swallow any pills, just black coffee, and took a long walk on the beach to kill time until Amy and Claire woke up. An hour later when he returned they were still asleep, obviously, being teenagers. So he mowed the lawn, the big green sward in front of the cottage that swept down to the seawall. He figured the roar of the lawn mower engine would do it, but at nine o’clock they still hadn’t appeared downstairs. He was tempted to climb the stairs and wake them, but he was afraid to annoy his daughter. As soon as they did wake up, he’d propose they go sailing. It was one of those blue-skied September days you get only once in a while and you remember forever, the air light and buoyant, and everything sparkling, the Sound as blue as the sky with little whitecaps. If they got going early enough, they could take a lunch and sail all the way across the Sound to Long Island and back on the southwest wind, a broad reach in both directions. In the meantime, he might as well mow the back lawn too. He liked the mindless back-and-forth; it soothed him. So he cranked up the mower again and set to work. The scent of the honeysuckle that trailed up the trestles on the back of the cottage drifted to him and he was almost happy, thinking of how Harry Truman mowed his own lawn in Missouri even though he’d been the president of the United States, and Ronald Regan cutting brush in California.
The window of the room where Amy and Claire slept looked out over the back lawn, and so he left the mower’s engine on and parked it in neutral right below the window, where it roared for at least a half an hour while he raked up the cut grass, a finishing touch he’d never done before and never would again. After he saw through the kitchen window that the girls had at last come downstairs to the kitchen, he went on raking to show them the reason the mower was still roaring—and sending exhaust fumes through the open kitchen window into the house—was that he had simply forgotten to turn it off, and that it was very important to get all this grass raked up. But they weren’t even aware he was raking the grass. Sitting at the kitchen table, side by side, their backs were to the window.
“Oh, you’re up!” he said, sauntering into the kitchen a few minutes later. He was still holding the rake, as if he’d forgotten it was in his hand.
“Why didn’t you just come upstairs and wake us up?” Amy stared at him. “Don’t you think that would that would have been better?” Her irritation frightened him. Claire looked at him, then back to Amy by her side, then back to him, like someone watching a play.
He felt his face get red and turned away, and carefully leaned the rake against the wall in a corner, as if that was why he’d brought it in. “I thought we might go sailing,” he said, still facing away.
They didn’t answer. He turned around. Amy and Claire were looking at each other. Claire was wearing blue pajamas. Amy was in pajamas too, he supposed, but he didn’t know what color because they were underneath a robe. “We could take a lunch,” he said. Claire turned her gaze from Amy’s face to his. “How about you, Claire,” he said, “would you like to go sailing?”
Claire held his gaze just to see if she could, though she’d never admit to herself that’s what she was she was doing. When he couldn’t hold his gaze on her any longer and had to look away, she turned to Amy and nodded her head.
“All right then, let’s go sailing,” Amy said.
It was too late now to sail all the way across the Sound to Long Island and back. He wasn’t surprised by how disappointed he was. They’d sail east instead, toward the mouth of the Connecticut River.
They bought sandwiches and cokes for lunch at the grocery store by the marina in Clinton where he kept his boat, a thirty-two-foot sloop, which when it was still true he’d named Amy’s Delight. It had two bunks and a head, and a tiny galley below. He was well aware that if Amy were the same age as Claire, who’d be a college girl if she were not doing an extra year at that school he hated, he would have bought beers instead of cokes. Amy wore his black L.L. Bean woolen shirt over her bathing suit. It dwarfed her, coming down to her knees, and made her look younger than she was, a middle school kid instead of a high school sophomore. That was all right with him. She could stay that age forever. Claire wore his big red hoodie. It covered her down to just below her bikini bottom because she was that much taller, and it made her long legs look as naked as they really were. It was hard not to imagine that the hoodie was all she wore.
They jumped down into the boat and Claire said, “I don’t know a thing about sailing,” and had the good sense to climb halfway down the companionway to get out of the way. Amy went forward, like he’d trained her to do before the trouble between him and her mom, to take the clips off the furled jib and then came aft, and they hauled it up together, and then she helped him haul the main sail halyard. Then he turned to her and said exactly what he knew she knew he would say: “Will you take us out, Amy?” And as if no misery had ever happened between them, she smiled and said she would, and gave that little funny salute he’d taught her, and there was such a hot red surge of love for her like a live thing rising in his chest that he thought he’d never be able to breathe again, his eyes flooding and his lip quivering, and he turned away so she wouldn’t see a grown man crying and jumped up on the dock to cast off the lines.
He took the stern line off the cleat on the float and flipped it to Amy, who, sitting at the tiller, coiled it at her feet while he went forward to cast the bow line off. Claire still stood in the companionway, a mere passenger, nowhere near center stage, just watching. He uncleated the bow line, pushed hard on the nose of the boat to swing it away from the dock, and jumped onboard, and Amy pushed the boom and the tiller hard to the left and jibed expertly around in the very narrow space of the crowded marina to head for open water.
Anybody else would have used the motor.
As soon as they were past the jetty, a strong wind heeled the boat way over and he was glad to see that Claire, still standing in the companionway, was scared. He sat down on the bench on the windward side, just forward of his daughter, and said, “She’ll go a little faster if we tighten it a bit,” meaning closer to the wind, but what he really wanted was to heel even more and scare Claire more. He wanted water coming over the lee rail into the cockpit. He wanted her to lose her composure, but you might say he just wanted to show off for her.
Amy nodded her head, and pushed the tiller down and he pulled the main sheet in a little further and adjusted the jib sheets, and Amy’s Delight came up still closer to the wind and heeled still further over. Water did come in now over the lee rail, sloshing in the cockpit before exiting through the scuppers, and Claire, feeling much too close to the down side of the boat, abandoned the companionway and climbed up the slant to the windward side and sat down next to him, bracing her feet against the floor of the cockpit to keep from sliding down off the bench. There were bands of paleness on the tops of her feet where her sandal straps had prevented the sun, “Isn’t this fun!” he said, and Claire nodded her head and tried to smile.
They sailed like this for another half an hour or so until they were several miles out from the Connecticut shore. Amy said, “Now, Dad, is it time, do you think?” raising her voice over