Duma Key

It wasn't that Carson Jones resembled the man I'd drawn on Christmas Eve. I was prepared for that, had been since I saw the little ring twinkling prettily on Ilse's finger. What shocked me was that the photo was almost exactly the same. It was as if, instead of clipping a photo of sophora, sea lavender, or inkberry to the side of my easel, I had clipped this very photograph. He was wearing the jeans and the scuffed yellow workboots that I hadn't been able to get quite right; his darkish blond hair spilled over his ears and his forehead; he was carrying a book I knew was a Bible in one hand. Most telling of all was the Minnesota Twins tee-shirt, with the number 48 on the left breast.

"Who's number 48, and how did you happen to meet a Twins fan at Brown? I thought that was Red Sox country."

"Number 48's Torii Hunter, " she said, looking at me as if I was the world's biggest dummox. "They have a huge TV in the main student lounge, and I went in there one day last July when the Sox and Twins were playing. The place was crammed even though it was summer session, but Carson and I were the only ones with our Twins on - him with his Torii tee-shirt, me with my cap. So of course we sat together, and..." She shrugged, to show the rest was history.

"What flavor is he, religiously speaking?"

"Baptist." She looked at me a little defiantly, as though she'd said Cannibal. But as a member in good standing of The First Church of Nothing in Particular, I had no grudge against the Baptists. The only religions I don't like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God. "We've been going to services together three times a week for the last four months."

Jack pulled up, and she bent to grab the handles of her various bags. "He's going to take spring semester off to travel with this really wonderful gospel group. It's an actual tour, with a booker and everything. The group is called The Hummingbirds. You should hear him - he sings like an angel."

"I'll bet," I said.

She kissed me again, softly, on the cheek. "I'm glad I came, Daddy. Are you glad?"

"More than you could ever know," I said, and found myself wishing she'd fall madly in love with Jack. That would have solved everything... or so it seemed to me then.

x

We had nothing so grand as Christmas dinner, but there was one of Jack's Astronaut Chickens, plus cranberry dressing, salad-in-a-bag, and rice pudding. Ilse ate two helpings of everything. After we exchanged presents and exclaimed over them - everything was just what we wanted! - I took Ilse upstairs to Little Pink and showed her most of my artistic output. The drawing I'd done of her boyfriend and the picture of the woman (if it was a woman) in red were tucked away on a high shelf in my bedroom closet, and there they would stay until my daughter was gone.

I had clipped about a dozen others - mostly sunsets - to squares of cardboard and leaned them against the walls of the room. She toured them once. Stopped, then toured them again. It was night by then, my big upstairs window full of darkness. The tide was all the way out; the only way you even knew the Gulf was there was by its soft continual sighing as the waves ran up the sand and died.

"You really did these?" she said at last. She turned and looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable. It's the way one person looks at another when a serious re-evaluation is going on.

"I really did," I said. "What do you think?"

"They're good. Maybe better than good. This one-" She bent and very carefully picked up the one that showed the conch sitting on the horizon-line, with yellow-orange sunset light blazing all around it. "This is so fu... excuse me, so damn creepy."

"I think so, too," I said. "But really, it's nothing new. All it does is dress up the sunset with a little surrealism." Then, inanely, I exclaimed: "Hello, Dal !"

She put back Sunset with Conch, and picked up Sunset with Sophora.

"Who's seen these?"

"Just you and Jack. Oh, and Juanita. She calls them asustador. Something like that. Jack says it means scary."

"They're a little scary," she admitted. "But Daddy... this pencil you're using will smudge. And I think it'll fade if you don't do something to the pictures."

"What?"

"Dunno. But I think you ought to show these to someone who does know. Someone who can tell you how good they really are."

I felt flattered but also uncomfortable. Dismayed, almost. "I wouldn't know who or where to-"

"Ask Jack. Maybe he knows an art gallery that would look at them."

"Sure, just limp in off the street and say, 'I live out on Duma Key and I've got some pencil sketches - mostly of sunsets, a very unusual subject in coastal Florida - that my housekeeper says are muy asustador.'"

She put her hands on her hips and cocked her head to one side. It was how Pam looked when she had no intention of letting a thing go. When she in fact intended to throw her current argument into four-wheel drive.

"Father- "

"Oh boy, I'm in for it now."