At times, survival necessitated looking beyond apparent incongruities.
For a moment, Norman thought again of Mr Ahmet, a great friend to his father — Mr Ahmet who, as a lawyer, had spent the greater part of his career defending the indefensible because it needed defending, so careers in such circumstances often ended with inevitable regrets, in willful compromises where a different set of laws and underlying truths superseded what might be arbitrated and made sense of in a court. What Mr Ahmet had hated — he, of all people, a lawyer — was factuality, too much evidence and not enough understanding.
It was deeply appreciated. Mr Ahmet’s humanity evidenced in the comportment of how he carried out his duties. It was a way of negotiating life that Norman had never fully understood in his aloneness. This was how cities had once survived. Chicago, to be sure, this city that had sanctioned only so many histories, so there could be only one St Patrick’s Day, so that Mr Ahmet and Joanne’s Armenian boyfriend’s father, with his little known nation’s genocide, were left bereft, their histories held sacred in small Orthodox communities and yet somehow, their histories had survived among their kind.
They were gone the following morning, time collapsing in the run of mile markers and state borders crossed, the subtle and almost unnoticeable change until it was upon them. The retreat out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the sharp flint brilliance of an azure tropical light replacing the dappled interlace of a forest canopy with its slow dialed movement of bluebells and ephemerals, small faced flowers tracking the sun like a congregation of faithful in the slats of a radiant, life-giving light.
There was so much to be observed and praised.
*
Captain Cody’s outside Daytona had an All-U-Can-Eat seafood salad bar buffet done as a sandbar on an isthmus of castaway islands set against a wallpaper background of the bluest sky imaginable. A low level hush of breaking sea surf underscored the tranquility of this island paradise made real, the floor sprinkled with sand, the buffet done up like a shanty beach shack draped in fish netting and garlands of seaweed and fake starfish.
Norman was in the process of sprinkling a benediction of crumbling crackers over a bowl of hot chowder. They were in a clam-shaped booth.
Grace sat wearing a pirate’s patch over one eye, just like Captain Cody. The waitress called her ‘a pearl’, not once or twice, but every time she refilled Grace’s Pepsi. Grace was so taken with the name that she called herself Pearl.
The name Grace belonged to an affectation bestowed by Kenneth. She materialized in this new name, with an orientalism and beauty that eclipsed the Christian idea of Grace. The name, bestowed on her so casually, augured a cosmological order. This child would become his daughter in the best way he could accommodate and be her father. He would try his very best.
Norman felt the flutter of providence. All round him, half-alighted painted seagulls hung, suspended on filaments of invisible fishing line, turning in a breath of air conditioning. The restaurant’s namesake, Captain Cody, was a grizzled plaster cast with disconcerting blue doll eyes. Every so often, the cheap mechanical pulley apparatus mouth opened like a trap door, and he said, in a cragged English accent, ‘Ahoy, Matey’, and brandished a cut-throat sabre in a jolting contraption of wires. This all miraculously conjured daily, during the early bird lunch for $7.95!
Norman looked across as Joanne said, in a quieting conspiracy, ‘I’d stake a wager there’s not a woman of childbearing age in a vicinity of ten miles. I’m Queen Bee.’
She made a buzzing sound that immediately annoyed Norman, but he just smiled.
Norman was writing on a napkin with the logo of Captain Cody. A hot, radiant sun fell across the table. He was aware of other convergences. Helen’s sickness had been uncovered at a buffet like this, the single greatest debt paid out of her will, the six-minute Medevac airlift that cost $11,000.
Maybe Captain Cody’s was tied to a medical conglomerate. It seemed feasible. These cheap eateries, the hook, given there was a great trawl in the catchment of monies associated with end-of-life care. Everything else here was the lure — the sun, the palm trees, the beach and the sunsets.
There was no great hurry. The tickets to Disney were for the following day. They whiled away almost two hours. The sun grew in intensity until the asphalt wavered.
Norman regretted having declined valet parking with the reflexive opinion it was a great trap when tipping was at one’s discretion, and the service that much better for there being no set charge, no social frontloading of fees or hidden taxes. It’s how they liked it down here. You were underwriting nobody else. Individual rights remained intact. In tipping, you helped the economy while equally inflating your own benevolence for a dollar bill stuffed into the brown hand of a valet.
There were refills on the refills on refills, or that’s how Joanne described it in rising and coming back with another Pepsi in a beaded goblet in keeping with pirate booty. She held the Pepsi up like a chalice. This bad choice would end back home, but this was the grail of an earned vacation, a souvenir goblet to cherish and bring home for ninety-nine cents.
Toward the end, a garish fluorescence eventually killed the tropical mood. The waitresses were off smoking in a booth. Grace walked the aisles and eyed Captain Cody, circling him, prying. He was a great source of curiosity.
The waitresses got a kick out of it, while another waitress in her sixties, some castaway beauty of pageants, a one-time mermaid who had not fared so well on land, came out in waders and hosed down the remaining ice with steaming water, and the magic that had been the shanty beach shack was laid bare.
*
Norman took his time, observing and writing everything on napkins, to the amusement of Joanne, who wanted to see what he was writing.
He said shielding it, ‘You’ll read about it eventually.’
Joanne had aspirations of appearing in print. It ennobled her life to be in the discerning eye of someone reckoning with life’s great mysteries. She said this, while eying up a dessert, a key lime pie still beached on a sandbar not yet cleared.
Norman watched her rise, feeling in her absence what aloneness might feel like.
He had followed up on Nate and the enigma of his sudden return to Canada. It played in the deeper reaches of his mind yet. A month and then two had passed, before he uncovered Nate Feldman’s online obituary.
Nate had died of kidney failure related to medical complications arising from water contamination by legacy mining operations close to his property, the case in the courts, in a protracted battle of legal motions. Nate’s wife Ursula was referenced. She was a named plaintiff in an ongoing suit against a number of mining operators.
A week after he had uncovered the obituary, the law offices of Weatherly, Sutherland, and Saunders contacted him. Nate Feldman had bequeathed a set of reels and a projector to him. It was not formally disclosed how Nate had come into their possession, though, in procuring the reels, he learned that they had been bequeathed by Helen. Nate had traveled to Chicago to procure them.
What the reels revealed, well, it explained Nate’s abrupt disappearance.