As in:
Tori’s father, Samuel, died promptly on his 62nd birthday. The doctor who’d driven over from Bridgeport listed the cause as pneumonia. Still, the sense of the family was that anything would have tipped him over the edge at that point, he was just so done, like a salmon at the end of his long migration.
In his last year Samuel’s face had become leathery and he no longer had the energy to communicate in full sentences. But he did speak enough to Tori to let her know that she shouldn’t be bitter about losing her right leg to cancer.
“Then I’ll need something else to be bitter about,” she told him, walking the line between humor and sarcasm.
He just looked at her and, for the last time she could remember, used her full name.
“Don’t joke about this Victoria.”
What she’d lately decided she could be bitter about was her ex-fiance, Lester. Before she lost the leg they would take the power boat Lester had inherited from his father, Dickie, and bomb around Lake Roosevelt. He would drive. She would water ski.
It was so interesting, now, how her brain had stored the full muscle memory of what it had felt like to cut an edge in the flat water.
It might be easier, now, if her memories of their time together were all bad ones. But there were many good memories, like the mid-summer day in 1991 when they’d gathered blueberries in the morning and taken the boat out late in the afternoon. The water was surprisingly warm and silky that afternoon and as the sun began to set Lester tucked the boat into a small bay sheltered by tall pines south of Hunters.
He fell asleep in the cockpit after a couple Molsons. Small waves lapped at the boat and the only other sound was Lester snoring and the high-pitched squeaks of Little Brown bats as they darted through the sky snatching insects. A gibbous moon shone increasingly bright as the last of the sunlight faded.
Tori had crushed a pint of the blueberries and mixed the juice with vodka. As she drank, and Lester snored, small clusters of high clouds visited the moon and made it appear as though the moon were trying on various items of mid-summer apparel.
Regardless of the way things had turned out between her and Lester, that was a good day to remember.
