Episode 73. A Brief Window to Forever Part 3

"Just women!" said Big Bertha.

"Just women!" said Cousin Minnie.

"Just women!" said Delilah.

The former fishing boat renamed Noah's Ark for Delilah's son wallowed in the swells ten miles out. Big Bertha had quit the pilot house to join her cousin and granddaughter on the deck behind. They sat in folding lawn chairs and raised glasses to the toast. The seagulls made the same cloud around them as they would have if the boat were still fishing and old bait about to be thrown out.

"Here's to Cousin Minnie," said Big Bertha. "If not for her, I'm still sewing."

"And here's to Cousin B," said Cousin Minnie. "If not for her, I'd have drowned in my late husband's dough."

"And here's to my estranged husband," said Delilah. "If not for him and his leaving me, I wouldn't be out here with you two liberators."

Delilah refilled the glasses of the two older women and then her own and then chucked the empty bottle overboard.

"For you, Neptune," she said.

The other two women again raised their glasses.

"And if he don't treat the mermaids right," said Big Bertha, "may he choke on it."

The talk trailed off. The sky with its dramatic clouds changed from menacing to glorious and then alternated between the two. The women finished their champagne and lost themselves each in their own contemplation. Big Bertha went back to the wheel and guided them ever further offshore.

"Everything just disappears," said Delilah. "Every day, with cosmetics, I put a face on a corpse. And then my work goes up in flames. And that person I am the last to know is really a person I will never know."

"I was in Hollywood," said Cousin Minnie. "And it was this dress or that to keep up. But you could never keep up. I never knew what my husband was up to. It was like walking on water. Like in the cartoons. You can do it till you see what you're doing. Then you sink like a stone."

"Daddy Mac and Noah," said Delilah, "Today they're in close. They rowed out to the harbour islands, the ones you can barely make out now. It's like we all changed roles. Today the men are the homebodies."

"I hope your daddy doesn't mind," said Cousin Minnie. "He seemed a little thunderstruck."

"He had no idea," said Delilah, "that he could ever retire."

"Or that it would be a woman who made it possible."

"That anyone would make it possible. He thought he'd still have a hand on the blackboard with one foot in the grave. It blew his mind that you offered what it took to let Mama retire. When you offered to let him retire too, I think it just spaced him out completely. He can't imagine being this lucky. And at the same time, he doesn't know what to do with himself."

"I hope he doesn't end up resenting me."

Delilah took a rod down from its holder and cast into the sea. "Not Daddy Mac," she said. "He doesn't resent anyone."

"You don't fish," said Cousin Minnie. "What are you doing?"

"I'm putting a line in the water," said Delilah. "Because this goddamn planet is so slippery."

"You're crying."

"He's my daddy," said Delilah.

"You think he's forgetting again."

Delilah stopped reeling in. "I do," she said. "I fucking do."

14 July 2018
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia
www.granitecoast.ca