By Jeff Hampton
(Note: This is an excerpt from Aransas Morning, a new novel about friendship, love and redemption on the Texas coast. Another excerpt, And There Was Light, is included in the Christmas collection, When the Light Returned to Main Street. Both books are available at the Books page on this website. An excerpt from Aransas Evening, a forthcoming sequel to Aransas Morning, is included among my Short Stories and titled The Shoes.)
Allie sat down on a piling and tried to get her thoughts straight. She’d never known a father and when she asked about that her mother just brushed it off casually: “He was just a guy I knew once, just a fling, no big deal.” Allie heard some mention of a “fisherman” a few times when her mother was talking to girlfriends, but without a name or sense of emotion in the reference, Allie didn’t dig any deeper.
But now as she looked across the boat at this gruff, grizzled, gray-haired man with her mother’s name painted across the stern of his boat, it was starting to make sense – why he was standing in Walmart in a town where he didn’t live, and why he dropped to the floor as soon as he turned and saw her. It wasn’t such an odd reaction after all, and had she known who he was, she might have fainted too. After all, that’s what she felt like doing now.
Seeing Allie sitting in a state of bewilderment, Sam tied off the bow line and sat down beside her. As Bo clanked around on the boat behind them, Sam asked, “you okay?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. Then, after a pause: “Is it true?”
“Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”
“Why now?”
“You’ll have to ask him. It’s like I said this morning . . . we thought we knew Bo, but it turns out we don’t.”
After another pause that might have been soothing if it wasn’t for Bo making a racket on the boat, Allie spoke again: “So, what do I do now?”
“Only you can decide that. But I suspect the two of you need to talk, and you need to do that in private.”
Sam stood up and pointed to the green awning that could be seen beyond the forest of boat masts. “I’ll be just over there at Shelly’s. You come on over whenever you want to. We’ll make sure you get a ride back to Freeport.”
Allie watched Sam walk away and for a moment she forgot about Bo, intrigued by this other quiet, gentle man. Why couldn’t he be my father, she thought, and then she shook her head at how ridiculous that was. She didn’t even really want or need a father, and now that she apparently had one, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with him.
When Bo turned from his work and saw Allie sitting alone, he had the same thoughts: What do I do now? He had nothing to offer this girl that would in any way make amends for abandoning her and Cassandra so many years ago. Like Allie, he shook his head at the ridiculousness of the situation, and especially the fact that he’d gone in search of her when he had no plan or consideration of the consequences.
Bo sat down on the toolbox with a loud groan. Allie turned quickly, thinking Bo might be in trouble again, and for the longest moment father and daughter just stared at each other from fifty feet away. She blinked and he blinked. She brushed a stray hair off of her face and he coughed a little, but their eyes remained locked until Allie broke the trance.
“Why did you bring me here?”
Bo shrugged, not quite understanding the question.
“Why am I here? What is this about . . .” She stood up and began walking toward him, the questions coming one after another, not waiting for an answer. “Who are you? Why did you come looking for me? What did you expect to find?” And when she was right on top of him, “what do you want from me!?”
She stood staring down at him, her nostrils flaring.
Bo’s eyes watered a little. “God . . . you look just like her.”
Allie sat down beside him, exactly where she had been sitting as they churned up the coast from Freeport, but now with a knowledge of him that she didn’t have earlier and emotions that felt strange and foreign.
“Well?” she asked again, “what is this about?”
Bo looked down at his sunburned, leathery hands, the only part of his entire being that really held the answers to her questions. Hands that had gripped tools and worked on motors, pulled in nets and been sliced up by shells and broken glass. Hands that had smelled of fish and oil and cheap cologne. Hands that had once held a woman so gently, and then one night had unlatched a gate and carried a duffle bag into the darkness.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just wanted to see her one more time, to see if maybe she’d had a good life . . . a life that I couldn’t give her.”
Allie now found herself in the odd position of having to speak for someone else, but as she thought about that she smiled because she knew what her mother would want her to say.
“She had a good life, but it wasn’t because you left her. She knows – I know – that you meant well, but she didn’t need anything different from you or from anyone else to make her life good. She had a good life because that’s who she was.”
Bo nodded. “She was good. There’s no doubting that. And that’s . . .” Bo hung his head for a moment, rubbing his dirty hands together as if that would change things.
“And that’s what?” Allie asked.
“That’s why I left. I thought as sweet and kind as she was, she could do better with someone else.”
There was silence for a moment. Bo straightened up and looked around, noticing that the pier was unusually quiet. “What day is it?”
“Sunday.”
“Oh, that explains why there’s nobody around. Your mother always went to church on Sundays. I’d sleep in, but she’d get up and go. Said it helped everything make sense to her. I never really understood that.”
“She never gave me that choice,” Allie said. “She’d take me kicking and screaming sometimes, but she said I was too young to decide for myself. When I got older, she let me do what I wanted.”
“What’d ya do?”
“I went with her. She was the light of my life.” Allie tossed her hair back, letting the sun bathe her face.
“Where was she going when the storm hit?” Bo asked.
“She was taking groceries to a lady from the church who couldn’t get out. I tried to talk her out of it but she wouldn’t listen. She said we needed ice cream anyway.”
Bo chuckled.
“What?” Allie asked.
“She was strong willed . . . and she always had to have her ice cream. I’m glad that didn’t change.”
“Yes, but it likely killed her.” Allie stood up and brushed off her pants.
“Maybe so, but she was just being who she was, and she wasn’t afraid of nothing.”
“And what were you afraid of, Mr. Savoy? Or should I call you . . . Dad?”
Bo stood up too and fumbled for his pockets. “Everything.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Providing for her, being steady . . . and that, what you just called me . . . I just didn’t think I could be who she wanted me to be, or what you both would need. I mean . . . . look at me.” He stretched his arms out as if to enlarge his deficiencies.
“Honestly, did she ever ask you to be someone or something other than who you were?”
“Well no, but . . . .” He stopped. There was no explaining what even he didn’t understand.
“So . . . Bo . . . that’s what I’ll call you for now . . . what do we do?”
“I guess we work on getting you home.”
At the Dream Bean, Shelly, Sam and Dave were sitting at a table, making small talk about what might be happening just a short distance away when the door opened and Bo and Allie walked in. They all stood as if on cue and waited for some indication of what to do next.
“We need to get this girl home,” Bo said.
“I don’t want to go home, not just yet anyway.” Allie crossed her arms. She’d made her decision on the short walk over. The others all looked at each other.
“Well, you can’t stay with me. You’ve seen I got no room on the boat,” Bo said.
“I’ve just got the trailer,” Sam piped in.
“And I’m in a hotel room,” Dave added.
They all looked at Shelly, but Allie interjected. “I’m not asking for anything from any of you.” Everyone relaxed their posture a little. “I came here because I wanted to and I can get a motel room.”
There was a brief silence, and then Shelly spoke. “Nonsense. I have a spare room. You can have it as long as you like.”
“Well, then, that seems to be settled,” said Dave.
THE END
Copyright © 2018 by Jeff Hampton