Chapter 12 - Clear Skies and Calm Waters
One year after the gala in Washington, the ginkgo tree in the side yard of the Coronado house dropped its leaves in a single, golden carpet across the grass.
It was a Saturday morning in late October.
The air smelled of cedar shavings, roasted coffee, and the sharp, clean brine of a thirty-foot tide rolling out toward the Coronado islands.
I sat on the seawall with my bare feet dangling six inches above the water, holding a blue ceramic mug between my palms.
Behind me, the arbor was finished.
The cedar beams had weathered to a soft, silver-gray, covered now by a climbing bougainvillea that Jack had planted in the spring. Its bright magenta bracts dropped onto the flagstones like confetti whenever the morning breeze kicked up from the south.
Through the open French doors of the kitchen, I could hear the radio playing.
It wasn't a military broadcast. It wasn't the news.
It was an old Dave Brubeck jazz record Dad had found in a crate of vinyl at an estate sale in Hillcrest three weeks ago. The piano notes rolled out across the porch like smooth, cool pebbles rolling down a beach.
"Breakfast!" Jack’s voice called from the kitchen.
Jack Mercer walked out through the screen door carrying a heavy wooden tray loaded with sourdough toast, scrambled eggs with chives, and a bowl of fresh blackberries. He was wearing an apron that said *The Captain’s Mess*—a gift Dad had ordered for him from an old ship’s chandler in San Pedro—over an old gray Navy PT shirt.
"He’s still reading," Jack said, nodding toward the end of the porch.
Arthur Whitmore was sitting in his usual spot, but the wheelchair was gone.
It had been moved to the garage three months ago, tucked behind the lawnmower beneath a canvas drop cloth, where it was currently serving as a temporary nesting spot for a pair of California wrens.
Dad was sitting in an old leather recliner we had moved out onto the covered veranda. He had a pair of reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, his gray hair neatly combed, his feet resting on a cedar footstool Jack had built to match the arbor.
He was reading the *Army Times*.
Beside his chair, on the small table that had once held an emergency oxygen concentrator, sat a glass of orange juice and a half-eaten piece of toast with apple butter.
The concentrator had been returned to the Balboa medical supply depot in August.
His lungs were scarred—the fibrosis would never leave him entirely, and he still walked with a slow, deliberate shuffle that made him look like an old tugboat navigating a narrow canal—but his oxygen saturation on room air was ninety-two percent.
The doctor at Balboa had shaken his head during his last pulmonary review.
"I don't have a medical explanation for this, Colonel," the young Navy physician had said, tapping the chest X-ray against the light box. "Your lung capacity hasn't increased, but your arterial oxygenation is twenty points higher than it was in Washington."
"Simple explanation, son," Arthur had told him, picking up his hat from the examination table. "In Washington... the air was full of liars. Out here... it’s just the Pacific."
Jack set the breakfast tray on the low redwood table between our chairs.
"He got another letter from Petersburg," Jack said quietly, leaning his hip against the seawall beside me.
I looked down into my coffee. "Evan?"
"Yeah."
"Did he open it?"
"Burned it," Jack said simply. "In the barbecue pit. Before I could get the charcoal started. He told me... that once a casualty report is filed, you don't keep checking the telegraph wire."
I took a sip of the coffee. It was hot, rich with chicory, the way Jack liked it.
"And Gloria?" I asked.
"Agent Lin called yesterday while you were at the grocery store," Jack said. "Gloria sold the last of the silver. She moved to an assisted living facility near Richmond. One of those places funded by the county. Single room. Lin said she spends most of her time in the community hall telling the other women that her daughter is an admiral who’s going to buy her a house in Palm Beach as soon as she returns from a secret mission."
A tiny, dry ache touched the center of my chest, then dissolved into the morning air.
It was not grief anymore. It was just the acknowledgment of a ghost that had finally stopped haunting the house.
"Clairey!" Dad’s voice called from the porch.
I set my mug down on the seawall, stood up, and brushed the cedar dust from my trousers. "Yes, Dad?"
Arthur was holding the *Army Times* up with one hand, his other hand pointing to a small photograph on page four.
"Look at this," he said as I walked up the cedar ramp. "The 1st Cavalry... they’re testing an autonomous reconnaissance vehicle at Fort Hood. Look at the tires on this thing. Looks like an oversized golf cart with a machine gun."
I leaned over the back of his chair, resting my chin on my folded arms, looking at the newspaper over his shoulder.
"It’s an unmanned ground vehicle, Dad," I said. "Saves soldiers from having to walk the lead file through minefields."
Arthur grunted, turning the page. "In my day... the lead file was a nineteen-year-old with a bayonet and two good eyes. We didn't need computer chips to tell us where the mud was."
"Your day was nineteen sixty-eight, Dad," I murmured, kissing the top of his gray head. "Computers are cheaper than nineteen-year-olds."
"Not better," he muttered, but his hand reached up and patted my cheek—the cheek that had borne his son’s handprint in the ballroom of the Willard one year ago.
The skin was smooth now. No mark. No shadow.
"You going out on the boat today?" Arthur asked, looking out toward the dock where Jack’s twenty-four-foot Boston Whaler was tied to the pilings, bobbing gently in the incoming tide.
"Jack wants to run her up to Mission Bay," I said. "Check the crab pots."
Arthur folded his paper, took off his reading glasses, and set them on the table.
"Take the old compass," he said, nodding toward the brass case sitting beside his orange juice. "The digital navigation on that boat... it’s got too many buttons. A man needs to know where north is... without asking a battery."
"I will, Dad."
Jack walked up the ramp carrying a plate with two eggs and three slices of bacon, which he set on the table beside Dad’s paper.
"Eat your breakfast, Colonel," Jack said. "Or I’m feeding it to the wrens in the garage."
"You touch my bacon, Mercer," Arthur said, reaching for his fork, "and I’ll have you court-martialed before noon."
Jack laughed, stepped back to the railing, and caught my eye.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't have to.
The sun had cleared the roof of the Hotel del Coronado now, flooding the bay with a broad, blinding track of gold that stretched all the way from the beach to the channel buoy.
May you like
Across the water, the horn of an incoming cargo ship sounded—one long, deep, resonant blast that echoed against the white cliffs of Point Loma, signaling that the channel was open, the hazards were marked, and the harbor was safe.
Arthur Whitmore looked up from his plate, listened to the horn fade into the morning air, and took a deep, clean breath that sounded like nothing at all.
