Sea Creatures Read Online Free PDF Page A

or one like it, had been out there for years, a vague possibility brought up every so often by Graham’s old friend Larry Birnbaum, who was tenured at Rosenstiel. Not until Graham faced extinction at Northwestern and we’d been shunned in Round Lake had the idea grown legs. Graham had a Ph.D. from McGill in marine physics and a master’s degree in computer science, and it was because of the latter degree that he’d been rushed through Rosenstiel’s hiring process and dropped onto this team, which had lost a key member to Scripps in San Diego. I knew of Rosenstiel, though I’d never been enrolled at the University of Miami. In high school, I’d had a boyfriend who took classes there, and on Thursdays and Fridays, if you parked on the sandy street outside Rosenstiel and walked down a corridor lined with stuffed sharks baring their menacing teeth, you’d find yourself in a tiny bar that served beer on tap and had one of the best sunset views in South Florida.
    But the truth was—and we’d stopped acknowledging this after the decision was made—Graham had never much liked my hometown. This had wounded my pride at the start of our marriage, especially since I’d adopted his hometown—moreover, his entire region of the country—as my own. Miami was too hot, too crowded, too bicycle-unfriendly. There were no gentle green hills, no farmsteads, no midwesterners (there were tons of them up the coast, especially on the Gulf, but in Miami the midwesterner remained a breed apart). He felt like the city had a lot going on but nothing to do . During a visit, my father’s shows might be the only things to lure him out of the air-conditioning. He liked the idea of a multicultural city but was intimidated by the chore of learning a new language. On this point, he made a complete reversal the day after we arrived. He bought language tapes and started spending his night hours listening to them on bulbous headphones. He even subscribed—ambitious, I thought, but that was his way—to El Nuevo Herald , using Lidia’s address.
    I no longer had a job beyond taking care of Frankie, and I found that with Lidia around, this was less than all-consuming. It’s a testament to the pull of family that although we’d never before lived in the same city, Frankie treated Lidia and my father—we all called them Mimi and Papi —like he treated me and Graham, with no suspicion or shyness and with a powerful sense of entitlement to their adoration. He assumed that, inasmuch as he was a prince, they were among his minions.
    So I found myself partly absorbed by nesting—organizing, sprucing, and, frustratingly, getting rid of things we’d transported from Illinois but now had no room for—and partly adrift. My business had disintegrated a year earlier, but still I had the feeling during idle hours that I’d forgotten some vital phone call or meeting. I found myself spending a lot of time in Lidia’s backyard, setting up obstacle courses for Frankie with the sprinklers and the patio furniture, using a stopwatch to time him as he ran laps. Lidia’s next-door neighbor, Mr. Genovese, dotted his lawn with meticulously pruned fruit trees and topiary shrubs, each a different shape or animal—cylinder, rectangle, oval, rabbit, squirrel, manatee—and though I had little landscaping experience, this inspired me to do a little upkeep in Lidia’s overgrown bushes. I took to rooting through her unwieldy begonias and ferns with a pair of old clippers while my father and Frankie tossed a beach ball and paddled around on floats in the pool.
    It was after Lidia found me in her hedges the third time—I’d been overzealous, and things were looking bare and asymmetrical—that she mentioned her plan. “There’s a job for you, if you want it,” she said.
    I wiped my hands on my shorts. She stood between me and the sun, her rusted brown hair