Lucinda leaned in closer to her father so she could hear whatever important message he wanted to convey before Sharon and Ben returned from the market. He asked if she remembered his story about being capsized at sea, and how the great sea turtle, Hercules, saved righted his boat and nudged him back to shore. Lucinda smiled, nodded, and asked how she could forget a story like that.
Tom took Lucinda by the hand and said, “I know you probably think your mother and I are crazy. All that business about talking turtles and hundred-year blessings.” Lucinda laughed, shrugged, and said it made for a good story either way. Tom bristled at the word “story,” but didn’t fault his daughter for doubting such a strange tale. He said that after that day, he’d seen no evidence of Hercules existing again. He half wondered if it was all in his mind. When Lucinda reminded him that Goldie spoke of having conversations throughout the years with the great turtle, while out on the water, they both smiled, recognizing that Goldie might not be the best gauge for sanity.
Once, when Goldie was about to turn forty, she fell asleep in the sun and was sunburned to a crisp, swearing a mermaid was the one to wake her up and tell her to go home and put Noxema on her entire body to avoid skin cancer. Morty paid her a visit and told Tom she’d suffered from heat stroke and dehydration, and that, naturally, they could chalk the mermaid business up to hallucinations. Another time, she’d spent nine-hundred-dollars on psychic readings to find a long-lost sister she swore she’d been separated from at birth.
All in all, Goldie was sane, if a little erratic. Lucinda, Sharon, and Ben all considered her a good mother, but kept boundaries in place when it came to sharing personal information or asking life advice. “I’ve sometimes wondered,” Tom said, taking a sip of iced tea, “if I’d imagined the whole Hercules thing. Like, maybe it was a large boat that pushed me back to shore. I did take in a lot of water while I was floundering around trying not to get eaten by a shark.”
“Why wouldn’t Mom have told you the story wasn’t real, though?”
“You know your mother. She likes a little sparkle in her stories. Especially something about a legendary island creature that very few people have ever seen—if any. She thinks it makes her special.”
“She’s special all right.”
“Hey.”
“Oh Dad, relax! You know I love her more than my vintage Pyrex collection.”
“Huh?”
Lucinda threw her head back and laughed, which immediately made her feel guilty. How could she laugh when her father was dying? Tom squeezed her hand and said the important thing for her to know was whether the Hercules story was real or imagined, the one thing that kept him treading water that day was the idea of meeting his baby. He smoothed Lucinda’s hair and said, “You’re the best thing I ever did, Lucinda.” She smiled, and tears filled her eyes.
“Don’t let Ben or Sharon hear you say that. They’ll draw blood.”
“I like to think Hercules is real, but either way, when he offered me the chance to be blessed with a hundred-year life or give it away, I gave it to you and your mother. I won’t be around to see if you really get that blessing, but I sure hope you do.”
Ben peeled into the driveway and unloaded the trunk of his car. He and Sharon carried in four large paper grocery bags full of gourmet cheese, wine, spareribs, ice cream…all foods that Goldie knew Tom wouldn’t touch. As Lucinda and Sharon started preparing dinner, Goldie took Tom up to bed to rest before the meal. He asked her to tell him a little more of the story—the story of how they started out so many years earlier. She smiled, adjusted his pillow, and picked up where she left off.
Goldie’s labor was simple—too simple. Not only didn’t she make it to the hospital, but she also barely made it back to the house before the baby was born. Tom wanted to name her after his grandmother, Melinda, and Goldie wanted to name her after Lucille Ball, so they agreed on Lucinda. “Lucinda May,” Goldie said, kissing the baby’s head, “because she made just made it in under the wire on the last day of the month!”
Everything about Lucinda was easy. She walked at eight months, talked in full sentences by her first birthday, and never gave her parents a hard time. When they told her no, she obeyed. When they asked for help picking up toys, she gladly pitched in. Plus, she was funny, which Goldie said was because of her namesake, Lucille Ball. In fact, Lucinda was so easy that Tom and Goldie decided to have a houseful of children. “We’ll make our own football team,” Tom said, picking Goldie up and spinning her around when Morty confirmed the second pregnancy.
At eight months pregnant, Goldie fell off a stepladder while trying to kill a bat in the kitchen when she didn’t want to wake Tom. He’d had his wisdom teeth removed earlier in the day and things weren’t going smoothly with the recovery, so she wanted to let him sleep when he could. The baby died instantly, and she had to deliver him naturally, all the while knowing he’d never cry, never play soccer, never walk across a graduation stage and receive a diploma. They named him Richard and took one picture of Goldie holding him before the nurses took him away.
A year later, Goldie delivered Mitchell. He was the polar opposite of his big sister. He was fussy, prone to mischief, and seemed to have a year-round cold, which produced a constant nasal drip. When he was killed in a freak accident at age three, Tom and Goldie thought they’d never put the pieces together again. Goldie was put on anti-depressants and Tom shut the business down as long as he could, searching for answers in the bottom of a whiskey bottle. Finally, some relief came when Sharon was born two years later. She was a delightful baby, Lucinda becoming her surrogate mother.
By the time Sharon was born, Goldie was off the medicine, and she and Tom rebranded the business, calling it The Pink Octopus. They played up on the fun of the name, selling refrigerator magnets to the tourists and having an enormous pink octopus statue out front where guests could take pictures. For a while, they were selling t-shirts, too, but stopped when the other tee-shirt shops on the island became too numerous to compete with.
There were two more losses to come. First, a miscarriage early on, and then a stillborn baby with beautiful red hair. Clara. The doctors had no rhyme or reason for it. “Sometimes these things just happen,” Dr. Clayton told Goldie. “Nature’s way of working things out, I guess.” Goldie didn’t want a picture of this baby. It would only be another reminder of how awful life could be.
Finally, Ben came into the world when Lucinda was ten and Sharon, five, putting almost exactly five years between each of the Perry children. With Tom finally getting his son, Goldie had Dr. Clayton tie her tubes right there on the delivery table without even asking her husband. She figured six pregnancies, and three children were as much as she could be expected to endure. Tom understood and didn’t cause a stink when he learned the news.
The years flew by, just like Tom and Goldie’s elders had warned they would. There were homemade Halloween costumes, playground scuffles, braces, spring dances, football practices, and one child or another needing talked off the ledge when they’d gotten dumped or failed a test. Before they knew it, Tom was celebrating his fiftieth birthday and their once bustling nest was empty. For a while, rather than relish the alone time, Tom and Goldie found themselves in the familiar trap their middle-aged friends did when all the kids went to college. They’d sit across the dinner table and feel like strangers.
When one of Tom’s bowling partners had a heart attack, the league was short a player. He begged Goldie to join their team, but she protested, saying she’d never even held a bowling ball. “Not to mention, I can’t imagine wearing stinky shoes other people’s feet have been in. Yuck!” Tom solved the problem by bringing a brand-new pair home for her a week later.
It turned out, Goldie was a natural bowler, helping the Crazy Rollers win ten championships before disbanding when three of the league members were caught in a messy love triangle and quit. But all in all, bowling was the catalyst for bringing Tom and Goldie back together after the kids left. They often admitted they were closer than ever when it was just the two of them again. They still saw the kids often, except for their firstborn, who married a pinhead—as Tom referred to Peter—and moved to Connecticut.
Goldie heard a commotion in the kitchen and told Tom she better go make sure the kids weren’t killing each other down there. “Did I do all right telling our story, darling?” she asked Tom. He nodded but said that there was one part she left out. When Goldie cocked her head, Tom said, “After dinner. I’ll tell you the part you missed, then.” She smiled, kissed his cheek, and told him she’d be back when the food was ready.
Tom watched his wife walk away and felt his eyes brimming with tears. She still had a lithe frame and graceful walk, even in her sixties. He hoped she really would live to be a hundred but shuttered to imagine another man in his bed. The very bed he was in at the moment. Still, he knew it wasn’t fair to expect her to spend the next thirty or forty years alone after he died. No matter how he looked at things, they felt crummy. Unfair, like so much of life, seemed to be, even for good men who were faithful to their wives, paid their taxes, and bowled a 220.
Tom took a sip of water from a glass on the nightstand. A sharp pain that started in his gut radiated all the way up into his neck and nearly took his breath away. Then, for a couple of minutes, the entire room went black. He couldn’t see a thing. He grabbed the bedding on either side of him and closed his eyes. Each time he opened them, he was still blind. Finally, after a few tries, his sight returned, but blurry. Tom knew what was happening. The end was approaching. He’d wondered sometimes, over the years, what that would feel like. He’d heard stories of someone being visited by a dead relative or an angel. Another person smelling lemons when there were none in sight. Someone else seeing a light. He wondered what it would be like for him.
From what he could tell, there were no lemon scents or pretty winged creatures. It was more of a feeling. A feeling that he was “not long for this earth,” as he’d heard it referred in the past when someone was circling the drain. Once, Dr. Phil said that when his father was dying, he asked him how he was doing. His reply was, “Well, I won’t be buying any green bananas.” Tom chuckled through the tears streaming down his face, alone in his bedroom. No green bananas.