“I gave my notice at work, and we are going to live on a sailboat,” Mother said. “My parents died at sixty-one and sixty-six. If I only have ten years left, I’m not spending it in the office.”
“I already got us a contract doing sunset sails for gay and lesbian couples in Mexico,” Stepmother added.
Girl and Brother looked at each other. This was insane. They both knew that Stepmother’s experience sailing dinghies on a lake twenty years before was nothing compared to the open ocean.
“And the dogs?” Girl asked. George, the dog she brought back from Alaska, still lived with Mother, and Stepmother had a snaggletoothed Shih Tzu that she had impulse-bought on one of her manic shopping binges.
“They are coming with us,” Mother said.
“And the cat, too, of course,” Stepmother added, picking up the twenty-pound cat and placing him on her lap.
“We are putting the house on the market this week, so you’ll need to clean out any of your old things that you still want,” Mother said.
You weren’t depressed because you were on vacation, Girl thought, but said nothing. She understood that her parents deserved freedom. Girl was engaged and Brother was in college and they were twenty and twenty-one, respectively. Girl understood that Mother had done her time parenting—she always told Girl that children were an eighteen-year commitment. Girl still felt abandoned. She didn’t feel like she had moved past needing a mother. Girl was sad to her bones.
But oh, the irony of it! She had prayed for years, “Please, God, let Stepmother move somewhere far, far away, like Antarctica.” Now she finally got her wish and Stepmother really was moving far away, but Girl forgot to specify that she didn’t want her mother to go, too. Better she had not prayed at all.
That January, Mother and Stepmother paid to fly Girl and Samson down to Key West to visit them on the boat. Brother had gone for Christmas. “He’s not in a relationship, Girl, so I think it’s really important that Brother isn’t alone for Christmas,” Mother had explained. There wasn’t room for all of them on the boat, and Samson and Girl couldn’t afford a hotel. It had been Girl’s first Christmas without her mother, but she had managed. The worst part had been singing Christmas carols without her in church.
When Mother picked them up at the airport, she was deeply tanned. When the gray in Mother’s hair stopped being premature and became age-appropriate, she had started dyeing it, and the sun had bleached the dye in her hair to a weird yellow that was half-grown out. Stepmother was wearing a black captain’s hat and a nose ring. Girl tried not to comment—she tried not to even look at it—but she couldn’t help herself.
“You pierced your nose?” she asked.
“I got you! I have been waiting to get you and Brother back for embarrassing me my whole life! I finally got you!” Stepmother laughed. “It’s a fake,” she explained, taking the ring out of her nostril. “See? It’s a magnet. But it was broken, so I got it on sale, and it hurts. I was waiting and waiting for you to say something so I could take it out.” Stepmother had always thought Girl’s and Brother’s hair and clothing choices were done “just to spite me,” even though, as teenagers, they were far more concerned with being cool than they were about embarrassing Stepmother.
They rode in a gray, inflatable boat out to “the hook.” Mother and Stepmother had tried to rely on their anchor at night, but after drifting twice into other boats, they had given in and rented a mooring—an underwater concrete pillar with a cable running to the surface.
Their catamaran looked fat and stunted, not sleek like a motorboat, nor graceful like a sailboat. They had lost their mast. It was the oddest-looking thing Girl had seen on the water.
“So we were feeling pretty good about ourselves, and we decided to enter the Wrecker’s Race,” Mother explained.
“We got talked into it!” Stepmother was seething. “And your mother wanted the free T-shirt!”
“We were at a bar with a bunch of live-a-boards and they had these T-shirts from last year’s race,” Mother said. “I wanted a T-shirt, too! Plus, they told us that there were free appetizers and a party after the race.” She didn’t look regretful at all.
“Ten-thousand-dollar T-shirt, Judy,” Stepmother said, with no humor in her voice.
“We talked Madeleine and Penny into being our crew. It was a lovely, sunny day and we got there early,” Mother said.
“We were right out in the front row, just bobbing up and down and waiting for the race to start,” Stepmother added. “Then I turned around and looked behind us and saw all the other boats lined up for the race and I knew we were in over our heads. So I started the engine and turned around—”
“But the race had just started and there were like fifty boats coming toward us in the opposite direction,” Mother interjected.
“So we were crossing in front of one of the schooners,” Stepmother continued.
“And there were tourists all up and down the rail, and their sails were full,” Mother said, enjoying the story, even though she knew how it ended.
“And they hit us! It was not our fault,” Stepmother said.
Samson interjected, “If you were motoring and they were under sail, they had the right of way.” He had grown up waterskiing on lakes and knew more than Girl did about the rules for boating in populated areas. In Alaska, where the children had sailed with Father, there were very few other boats to contend with.
“They hit us,” Stepmother repeated. “And broke off our mast.”
“We ripped a hole in their side,” Mother said, in a fair’s fair tone of voice, an evilly happy look in her eyes.
Oh God, Girl thought. The tourists had paid good money for that race. There were a few tall ships in Key West, called schooners, over a hundred feet long. There was no
