Anne Korkeakivi - Shining Sea

“Better make that a double,” she tells him, retying her bathrobe.

The plan is to meet for lunch today after Francis’s morning meeting. Francis has written a bunch of songs. A record label in Los Angeles wants to produce them.

Three years ago, on a quiet Monday morning, the phone rang. Mom, Francis said on the other end of the line, as though he hadn’t dropped off the face of the earth for ten years. As though she hadn’t even known most of those years whether he was alive or dead. We’ve just gotten a phone hooked up. I’m glad you are still at the same number. How are you?

She didn’t drop the phone. She didn’t cry out: Francis! Francis! Francis!

Francis, she said, as calmly as she could, as though the past ten years weren’t rushing in a torrent through her head and heart. Where are you?

I’m in County Clare, Ireland, he said. In a little stone cottage.

Are you living there? she asked.

He didn’t answer for a moment. Yes. I’m living here now.

And then there was a silence.

It was like being in the room with a mouse: any sudden movement, any sharp sound, and it might bolt. She racked her brains for what she could safely say next.

Sissy just graduated from college, and Kenny has just begun. And Ronnie is traveling.

So you are alone .

Oh, no, she said, although she did feel very alone suddenly. Ronnie will be back soon. It’s just a short business trip.

Ronnie hands her a Styrofoam cup. The coffee is lukewarm, hurriedly made by some poor soul frightened to be in the kitchen but even more scared of losing his or her job. Someone has brought out a transistor radio, and guests are gathering in a tight cluster to listen, bare shoulder to bathrobe, the sudden intimacy of disaster.

“We could just drive over to Venice and check,” she says. “Patty Ann’s.”

A hotel employee approaches the group around the radio, saying something slowly and earnestly. Their circle breaks open, and guests begin to reenter the hotel. She discreetly pours the remainder of her coffee on the lawn.

Ronnie sighs. “Let’s get some clothes on first, okay?”

It’s an even shorter drive than usual from Santa Monica down to Venice Beach. Although now nominally rush hour, the traffic on both Ocean Avenue and Main Street is light. The world feels strangely still. They find Patty Ann out on the porch of her rickety wooden house, a stone’s throw from the water. Her latest husband, Glenn, sits on a step beside her in a sleeveless undershirt, the tattoo on his upper right arm a flat bluish green in the morning sun: LO QUE SEA NECESARIO.

Sean sits on a crate by the door. He gets up and goes into the house.

“Sean, come back out and say hello to your grandma,” Patty Ann calls. She reaches for Glenn’s cigarette, takes a drag. “Hi, Mom. You all shook up?”

Glenn stands up and extends his hand. “Good morning, Mrs. McC., Mr. McC.”

“Good morning, Glenn.”

Glenn is three and a half years younger than Patty Ann, and Patty Ann met him at an AA meeting. But he, at least, seems to have stuck by the program. Most important, he treats Patty Ann decently. In comparison to Lee and certainly to Patty Ann’s last husband, Troy, Glenn is a prince.

Troy was the worst of the worst. He left Patty Ann with two broken ribs.

She only wishes Glenn had a steady income. Patty Ann says he’s begun training to be a stonemason, that being a sculptor makes him a natural for the work and soon he’ll be “making a mint.” But who trains to be a stonemason at thirty-seven? That’s the one — and only —thing anyone could say for Troy. He did pay the bills.

“Where are the other boys? Did the schools open?” she says, stooping to kiss Patty Ann on the cheek. Up close, Patty Ann smells stale and sweet and smoky, like last evening spilled over into this morning.

“Isaiah’s with the SOB this week.” That’s Patty Ann’s code name for Troy. No one is allowed to speak his real name. In front of Patty Ann and Troy’s one son, it’s “your dad”—which makes her feel bad for Isaiah, as though somehow he’s at fault for how awful his father was. What’s the hurry? she told Patty Ann, but Patty Ann could hardly wait for her divorce from Lee to come through to get hitched to Troy, scared to be on her own with two small children and no job. Or maybe just angry — after all, Patty Ann gave up her future so Lee wouldn’t be drafted.

It took less than three years for Patty Ann to get a divorce this second time. Troy told the judge that Patty Ann got those broken ribs falling down drunk. For whatever reason, the judge believed him, and though Isaiah was barely more than a baby, the court granted him joint custody. She knows Patty Ann was telling the truth, though.

At least Patty Ann waited another eight years before getting married a third time.

“And Lucas?”

Patty Ann shrugs. “Around.”

“How was it over in Santa Monica?” Glenn asks.

Ronnie shakes his head. “It was a big one.”

“But we’re fine,” she says. “Less tossed than salad. We didn’t see any damage on our way over here, either.”

“There was smoke rising downtown,” Ronnie says.

Glenn nods. “Fires.”

Ronnie looks the house over. “Did you close the gas main?” It’s one of those wooden homes from the beginning of the century, three stories but with a low roof and fronted by a brick, wood, and paving-stone porch, shadowed by an overgrown sapote tree on one side and a coral tree on the other. The first time they visited, an evening shortly after Patty Ann and Glenn moved in, they heard what sounded frighteningly like gunshots down the road.

Oh, there’s the gangs in Venice Beach, Patty Ann said . But we don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us.

“Of course we turned it off,” Patty Ann says now, sharply.

She can see Sean inside the living room. She steps around Patty Ann and Glenn and goes inside. She and Sean get along fine — it just takes him a while to get used to seeing her again. At nineteen, he’s full-grown — dark-haired, round-faced, and freckled, like her side of the family — but in many ways still a little boy. For years, she tried to get Patty Ann to let her take him to see a specialist. For what? Patty Ann would say. So they can treat him like the counselor did at school? Sean’s fine. Sean’s just Sean. Secretly, she wonders whether Patty Ann refused to let her pursue it out of fear it would give her cause to take Sean, as she took Kenny.

Except she didn’t take Kenny. That’s just a myth Patty Ann has tried to introduce into the family history. Patty Ann gave Kenny to her.

She wouldn’t mind taking Lucas now, though. Even with Ronnie’s retirement coming up. She’s been thinking she and Ronnie might start traveling together — all these years he’s gone off on business trips on his own while she stayed back in Scottsdale — but family is family, and Lucas is her grandson. Not only does he look just like Lee, at fourteen he’s also showing signs of having inherited his father’s slippery personality. No good can come from the way Patty Ann lets him wander.

A purple bedspread covers Michael’s old armchair, but when she sits down in it, the sensation is still familiar. Many a night after she lost him she would sit in it, once all the kids were in bed, trying to feel him. She fell asleep in it more than once, exhausted from the weight of it all.

She’ll visit Luke and Michael tomorrow. Maybe Francis will want to come with her. She won’t propose it, though. She’ll let him bring it up.

“So, Sean, how’s work?”