Sea Creatures Read Online Free PDF

glowing a little around the edges, as if on fire. “What kind of job?”
    â€œYou need something to do. Take Frankie along.”
    Lidia, who kept busy every moment, paying work or no, was retired after having been a flight attendant for Pan Am for twenty-five years and working at a bank for another fifteen.
    I vacillated. I could tell Lidia I could run my own life, thank you very much, or I could take the outstretched hand and whatever it offered. Lidia had never been anything but kind to me.
    â€œAll right,” I said.
    â€œIt’s maybe a little odd.”
    â€œJust tell me.”
    â€œIt’s a personal assistant thing,” she said. “You have a problem carrying water?”
    â€œWhose personal assistant?”
    She pursed her lips. It seemed that she’d concocted a whole plan without any notion of how to convey it. “You’ll take my boat,” she said.
    â€œYour boat? Where am I going?” I said.
    â€œStiltsville,” she said. Then my father called from the backyard, using the voice that meant he needed all of her attention immediately, and she backed away. Before she was out of sight, she said, “If you’re up for it, you can start Monday.”
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    WINE LOOSENED LIDIA’S TONGUE. LATER that night, in the creaky chaise lounges we’d pulled from her garage onto the Lullaby ’s roof deck, with Frankie asleep in his little bunk and Graham and my father out at a gig, she described the situation.
    â€œErrand girl?” I said, after she started to explain.
    â€œYou’re too proud? At the most, it’s a few hours a day, three days a week.”
    What she told me was this: her old friend Vivian Hicks, who had Alzheimer’s and lived in a rest home in Kissimmee, had asked her during a lucid spell more than a year earlier to find someone reliable to take care of her husband. There was already a young man doing her husband’s shopping and running supplies out to the stilt house, but Vivian didn’t trust him.
    Vivian didn’t have lucid spells anymore. “She was always forgetting that he wasn’t her husband anymore, really,” said Lidia, waving a hand to acknowledge a longer story that she wasn’t going to tell. “She would think he was still living in their house, but he’s been at Stiltsville for— dios mio —ten years or so.”
    â€œThe hermit,” I said. I thought of my mother’s second-wind parties all those years before, where Vivian had always shown up alone. Once, my mother had mentioned that Vivian’s husband had left her to live full-time at their stilt house. People, including my mother, started referring to him as the hermit . This was as much of the story as I recalled. “Vivian was a friend of my mother’s.”
    â€œOf course,” she said. “They all know each other.”
    I knew what she meant. There were circles of women in South Florida, and my mother, having grown up in the area herself, was at least distantly attached to several of these circles. If you didn’t know someone well, you at least knew her by name. My mother’s reputation in these circles was good—this was my understanding, formed over decades—but my father’s was considerably less so. There’s a segment of society that easily forgives a working mother her modest income—how much could my mother have made as the keeper of Dr. Fuller’s calendar and inventory?—but does not do the same for a working father. To many, my father, with his traveling and late-sleeping and unclassifiable income sources, was a decidedly unenviable husband. I’m sure there were times, especially in the later years, when my mother agreed.
    â€œI did find someone right after she asked me to,” said Lidia. “The son of a friend of a friend. But he quit a few months ago.” I gave her a look, and she added, “Not for any awful reason, I