After his mom noticed a strange mole on her shoulder the nightmare nightmare as ferocious as it was rapid began Doctors diagnosed the mole as a symptom of stage 3 breast cancer and gave her three months to live and sure enough she sickened and died sixty-two days later That was two years ago and Timothy hated that verb ever since life was more than what doctors gave their patients He couldn’t help but think that if his mother had never gone to the doctor she never would have gotten sick No his dad insisted It’s not anyone’s fault Which helped exactly nothing Having someone to blame might have been a blessing but all Timothy could do was retreat Gradually the Murphy Men grew further apart until late one Wednesday night when Timothy having fallen asleep on the sunporch couch a hardcover tome splayed out on his chest was shaken awake What are you reading It was a question his dad had never asked before Timothy held up the volume he’d borrowed from the school library The book wasn’t his usual science fiction fare The title was Two Years Before the Mast Hey the shirtmaker said struck by inspiration you want to go to the shore When How about now The roads’ll be empty so there won’t be any traffic We’ll find a motel get some sleep and then have a whole day together tomorrow But it’s a school day I dunno Looks like a shore day to me Play hooky Tom shook his head Not play This is serious He grinned 6
You mean it Last one packed is a broken egg What the heck did that mean How could a person be a broken broken egg Another one of the worst things about being Timothy Murphy was that there was so much to ponder But he hustled to avoid broken-eggness or was it eggitude and fell asleep in the car before they reached the shore All he remembered of their arrival at the oddly named Snowcrest Motel was his father practically practically carrying him to their room The next day however after a leisurely breakfast of waffles with enough syrup to drown Britney Spears he had blessing after blessing Father and son started on the boardwalk but all they could see out in the ocean beyond the roller coasters and skee-ball booths and candy apple stands were two paunchy cabin cruisers and a few distant container ships bound for Port Elizabeth Not much quaint sailing on the Atlantic that day Refusing to give up they gravitated to the bay side of the spit of land that separated a score of resort communities from the Jersey mainland There in the protected enclosure half a dozen small sailboats glided across the surface of the water Look Timothy pointed to a tall two-master Nice Tom nodded then said But hey what about that one by the bridge Yikes And hey is that a boat or an iceberg What about her Too big Ostentatious A little broad in the beam I think Yeah but Oh Oh Eventually they found the marina that housed these boats when they weren’t out on the bay They walked onto the gently 7
bobbing docks getting right up close to the boats Each one was an object of beauty in its own way The day was close to heaven Not every weekend but any weekend that his dad could slip away from his business they drove out to explore another marina in the region They checked out Stamford in Connecticut and City Island in the Bronx and Amagansett on Long Island and half a dozen spots on the Jersey Shore gradually becoming more expert in their appreciation during the only pleasant hours they’d had since the evil diagnosis While other fathers and sons bonded over the Yankees infield or the Rolling Stones the Murphy Men compared the merits of a fiberglass Pearson ketch to an all-wood Catalina sloop They agreed that size was not the measure of value It was hard to define but certain boats simply had good lines Like women Tom said Mom The best In general it was best to forget what you could the good more so than the bad because it hurt more to dwell on what was missing than to deal with life sucking That went for a mother who would never return as well as a father who was suddenly invisible As swiftly as Tom had gotten interested in sailboats he abandoned ship For several weeks he seemed to disappear into his computer doing some sort of obscure research too busy to pay attention What Hmm Let me get back to you Yet when Tom suggested another trip this time to Newport Rhode Island for a boat show Timothy hopped Maybe probably he’d get hurt again but he couldn’t resist In the car he squirmed and enthused I’ve heard that New port is the best harbor in the country 8
Yep and this show is supposed to be the best for sailboats Better than the New York convention center Too many motors there Yep They spent the first day getting the lay of the land A gigantic gigantic hangar on the edge of the harbor contained dozens of boats displayed by Chris-Craft and the other big manufacturers while hundreds of boats on sale by individual owners were moored in the harbor a mile from the convention center Tom and Timothy wandered appreciatively licking at ice cream cones until they arrived at the farthest most remote dock in the marina and there sat the most beautiful boat that Timothy had ever seen It wasn’t the biggest in fact it may have been smaller than anything besides the most functional dinghy but it was small like a diamond bobbing on the lapping waves in the shadow of several crude behemoths Tom explained It’s a Herreshoff 12½ Built in 1926 it’s one of only three hundred and sixty-four of this dimension from the original original manufacturer Rebuilt in 1953 that’s when they added the brass trim and an engine to make it easy to get in and out of the harbor Overhauled again in the 1980s with the latest radio and radar communications communications As far as I can tell it’s the finest sailboat ever made I mean on an inch-by-inch basis He was right It was perfect Well almost Strangely the boat had no name A wash of fresh white paint covered a rectangular plate mounted on the stern So asked Tom Timothy didn’t understand what his father was asking So what So what do you think I I think it’s great A real jewel 9
