America Rising (47 page)

I was feeling so chipper I even looked up Marilyn Kravitz. She’d fallen and broken her hip and was confined to her condo so I brought her over some Thai food and sushi and listened to her rave about what kind of crazy people ate raw fish, that they must have been dropped on their heads as children and on and on and on. In spite of myself I found it all rather endearing. She still packed that .38 police special, still talked like a gangsta and called me “dawg.” So I called her “ho” and we bumped fists and laughed ourselves silly.

In late October there was a brief hurricane scare. A Cat One ramped up to a Cat Two in the Florida Straits. It brushed Key West and curved up into the Gulf but then just fell apart and did little more than piss rain all over Texas. I figured they could use it.

The days and weeks flew by and all of a sudden the stores were full of holiday decorations and little drummer boys rum-pum-pum-pumming with the incessant rhythm of mosquitoes biting in July. I had a good life, much to be thankful for: friends, health, enough money, a home in a place I loved. But I still felt bad about Robert and was resigned to never seeing him again. I missed Carolyn terribly and AnnaLynn was still a question mark and so I trudged through the holiday cheer enveloped in a cloud of melancholy.

Then it was Christmas.

It was still my favorite holiday and I was determined to make the best of it. I hung my latest painting on my living room wall and thought it looked pretty damn good. I gave myself a present of a new kayak and paddled it through the mangroves, marveling anew at the Keys’ brilliant-blue skies and seventy-five-degree temperature when the rest of the country was huddling around heaters in the snow. I watched some football, grilled a couple of slipper lobsters a friend had caught the day before, cracked my last bottle of white Burgundy and savored them to Miles Davis’s muted trumpet on
In a Silent Way
. That was my idea of Christmas music.

It was a good day but the melancholy was starting to overtake me again so I climbed into the Miata, slapped the top down and zipped over to Pilot House. All the usual holiday orphans would be there, and I figured their companionship—not to mention a few beers—would be enough to scrub away the gloom. The place was humming when I got there, standing room only, mostly locals with a handful of slumming tourists. I eased through the crush of bodies towards the bar, stopping every few feet to say hi to friends, do the holiday thing, chat and catch up, growing thirstier by the minute but feeling better too.

I finally got close enough to see a break in the crowd at the end of the bar and pushed my way to it. Then I stopped, my heart dropping in my chest, that familiar flush returning to my face. There, at the very last seat, was what I never expected to see again. Robert Ford.

Even from a distance I could see the past months had aged him. His hair was a little grayer, the crow’s feet at his eyes a little deeper, his lean body even leaner. But he still had that aura about him, that blend of toughness and kindness and simple humanity that made him the only person I wanted with me on that terrible cold winter day when I released Carolyn’s ashes onto the gray-blue waters of the Atlantic. And even tipsy strangers still knew better than to take the seat next to him.

I started, hesitated, then moved forward. But he’d already sensed my presence. He turned to me and I saw it in his eyes. Warmth, understanding, forgiveness. Absolution. Raw emotion poured over me.

“Robert, I’m so sor—” I began. But he waved me off, nodded at the empty seat, gave me a winking grin and said, “Buy you a beer?”

I was grinning like an idiot. I sat next to him, put my elbows on the bar and said, “Absolutely.”

Thanks first and foremost to my wife Suzanne, the best friend, editor and support system any writer (and husband) could have.

Thanks to Andy and Diane, who never stopped believing.

Thanks to Jill Grosjean, my agent and my friend.

Thanks to Angelica Soderlund for the cover design, and to many others whose names will go unmentioned. Your contributions to this book, however, do not go unappreciated.

Tom Paine is the pen name of a South Florida writer and journalist who still has the audacity to hope for change.