Getting Away

I just spent an hour standing a few feet away from the ocean eating fish caught this afternoon and grilled in a kettle as I watched smoke twist up into a black sky filled with stars. It was warm; my shoulders were bare. We had conch fritters, too, and cold beer in sweaty bottles, and the night swelled with the mingled sounds of reggae blasting from a boom box and the laughter and conversation of about fifty people, black and white: from a little boy about Lily's age to a man who looked about eighty. A handful of couples danced in the street as we ate. A woman in a tight belted dress turned away from us, and we noticed she was wearing a leather back-pack shaped like a jack-o-lantern. Caitlin and Ben rummaged for bills and I went back to the bar for more fritters. I leaned on the driftwood bar, standing deliberately in the cloud of smoke from the fish kettle, and watched the waves hit the shoreline, tiny waves that left a line of froth and then backed away, reluctantly, only to roll right back in. I saw the way the little white church with light blue shutters glowed in the moonlight; the moon was one sliver away from full. I noticed the wooden sign at one end of the bar: Da Friday Night Fish Fry, it read. But it's Thursday, I said, without thinking, to the woman about my age who stood on the other side of the bar turning the fritters with a metal spoon with holes to drain out the oil, turning them one by one, removing them to a large pan behind her, dropping in more dollops of batter. Good Friday, baby, she said, without looking up from the oil. I looked over at Caitlin and Ben, saw Caitlin watching a woman in white pants dancing with a much younger man, possibly still a teenager, in front of a paint-peeling pick-up, saw Ben looking out at the ocean, at a boat on the horizon, saw them say something to each other, then laugh. A small boy ran by, shrieking, joyfully, and a woman holding a pink drink in a plastic cup stumbled past me mumbling 'scuse me as she edged into all of us waiting there, for the fritters. I went back to the huge wooden spool that served as a table, and we ate the fritters with toothpicks, in silence, the kind of silence in which you know that you and the people you are with are each feeling perfect contentment, which is not redundant, because not all contentment is perfect, some of it is just smooth. When we were done, we put our trash in another kettle, by the side of the road, and walked to the edge of the water to see how cold it was. I took off my sandals, and then put my sandy feet back in them; it's just right, Caitlin said, meaning the temperature. It was time to go home, not because we had to, but because there was nothing else we could do to make the night any better.