For Rebekah Kowalski Ming and Joan Hoyt Thank you
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
I WAS SITTING ON THE WINDOW SEAT OF OUR PENTHOUSE unit in Belltown Terrace when Mel came back from her run. Dripping with sweat, she nodded briefly on her way to the shower and left me in peace with my coffee cup and the online version of the New York Times crossword. Since it was Monday, I finished it within minutes and turned my attention to the spectacular Olympic Mountains view to the west.
It was June. After months of mostly gray days, summer had come early to western Washington. Often the hot weather holds off until after drowning out the Fourth of July fireworks. Not this year. It was only mid-June, and the online weather report said it might get all the way to the mid-eighties by late afternoon.
-People in other parts of the country might laugh at the idea of mid-eighties temperatures clocking in as a heat wave, but in Seattle, where the humidity is high and AC units are few, a long June afternoon of sun can be sweltering, especially since the sun doesn’t disappear from the sky until close to 10:00 P.M.
I remember those long miserable hot summer nights when I was a kid, when my mother—a single mother—and I lived in a second-story one-bedroom apartment in a blue-collar Seattle neighborhood called Ballard. We didn’t have AC and there was a bakery on the floor below us. Having a bakery and all those ovens running was great in the winter, but in the summer not so much. I would lie there on the couch in the living room, sleepless and miserable, hoping for a tiny breath of breeze to waft in through our lace curtains. It wasn’t until I was in high school and earning my own money by working as an usher in a local theater that I managed to give my mom a pair of fans for Mother’s Day—one for her and one for me. (At least I didn’t give her a baseball glove.)
I refilled my coffee cup and poured one for Mel. She grew up as an army brat. Evidently the base housing hot water heaters were often less than optimal. As a result she takes some of the fastest showers known to man. She collected her coffee from the kitchen and was back in the living room before the coffee came close to reaching drinking temperature. Wearing a silky robe that left nothing to the imagination and with a towel wrapped around her wet hair, she curled up at the opposite end of the window seat and joined me in examining the busy shipping traffic crisscrossing Elliott Bay.
A grain ship was slowly pulling away from the massive terminal at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill. Two ferries, one going and one coming, made their lumbering way to and from Bremerton or Bainbridge Island. They were large ships, but from our perch twenty-two stories up, they seemed like tiny toy boats. Over near West Seattle, a collection of barges was being assembled in advance of heading off to Alaska. Nearer at hand, a many-decked cruise ship had docked overnight, spilling a myriad of shopping-intent cruise enthusiasts into our Denny Regrade neighborhood.
“How was your run?” I asked.
“Hot and crowded,” Mel said. “Myrtle Edwards Park was teeming with runners off the cruise ships. I don’t like running in crowds. That’s why I don’t do marathons.”
I had another reason for not doing marathons—two of them, actually—my knees. Mel runs. I walk, or as she says, I “saunter.” Really, it’s more limping than anything else. I finally broke down and had surgery to remove my heel spurs, but then my knees went south. It’s hell getting old. I talked to Dr. Bliss, my GP, about the situation with my knees.
“Yes,” he said, “you’ll need knee replacement surgery eventually, but we’re not there yet.”
Obviously he was using the royal “we,” because if it was his knee situation instead of mine, I’m sure “we’d” have had it done by now.
I glanced