Free The Plover: A Novel by Brian Doyle

should both get tattoos, and I said tattoos are stupid waaay beyond the usual stupid, paying people to punch holes in your body is nuts, but she insisted, although she wanted both of us to get is fearr bás ná náire, death before shame, but that’s nuts, so I got this one, misneach .
    Meaning?
    Stay afloat. Don’t drown. Don’t quit. Stay with the boat.
    Lot of meanings for one word.
    Big word.
    Let’s go over charts and navigation, Dec. I feel like I am not really helping much as a crewman. Wouldn’t it be best if I steered and you could fix things?
    Yeh. We can take turns. I think we can make Tungaru in three days if the weather stays clean. We can refit there and make some decisions.
    Like?
    Piko, what are you going to do with the pip? You can’t stay out here forever.
    Says the guy who is going to stay out here forever.
    C’mon. She needs nurses and stuff. How are you going to pay for that? You want to go back to Makana? Oregon? You got to get a job somewhere, counting whale peckers or whatever it was you did.
    Actually I studied oceanic dead zones. Hypoxia. Low oxygen in the water.
    I’m serious, man. You got to work and the pip needs a crew.
    I’ll figure it, Dec. Thanks.
    You’re blowing me off here, Piko.
    I’m not, Dec. I hear you, man. It’s just that I don’t know what to do yet. It’s just me and Pipa and I don’t quite know how to work it. I leaned on Elly more than I knew. She was the glue. She wouldn’t let them put Pipa in the cripple house. I wanted to let them do it, Dec. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I fought as hard as anyone in the first couple years but then every time I saw Pipa it burned me for who she could have been and never will be. The kid we had died on the road by the bus stop. That kid is dead. I couldn’t take it anymore. That sounds scummy but it got real dark for me. I never told anyone. Elly knew. Pipa knew too. I think it burns her inside somewhere that I was the scummy dad who would have said yes to the cripple house and probably hardly visited her there. I used to think I was a good guy, Dec. I was a good guy before something hard came along to test me and I failed totally. Then Elly got sick and she got smaller and smaller and you could see through her and she died holding Pipa in her arms, Pipa making that bird sound and me sobbing like a baby. Pipa kept making that bird sound for weeks afterwards and it drove me insane, Dec. I had to hide in the shed outside sometimes because she would just lie there chirping and mewling and I knew she was crying for her mama and not for me. I never told anyone any of this and it burns me even telling you but I am so lost at sea that being lost at sea for real is not so bad. I don’t know where to go. I want to be the best dad ever and I was the worst. So what happens next, I don’t know. Maybe it’s on your charts. Sorry I popped a gasket here. I miss Elly. I miss Pipa. I guess I miss the me I thought I was but wasn’t. What’s an azimuth?
    *   *   *
    Pipa knew. She remembered how her dad stopped rocking her in his arms every night, stopped sitting in the beanbag chair making up stories about foxes, stopped washing her slowly in the afternoon with old soft towels. He didn’t stop all at once; he just did one less gentle thing a day. He continued to do the hard things, the dutiful things, the awkward things, but the thousand tiny quiet other things—the unconscious braiding of her hair while they watched basketball, the eggs flipped for exactly thirteen seconds as they had together determined was exactly the exact right number of seconds to get eggs exactly over easy, the notes left for her at the breakfast table, notes written on whatever he could find, sometimes oak galls, sometimes maple leaves, once the carapace of an enormous beetle—those things slid away silently, one per day. She knew. She watched the little gentle things he used to do leave the house, padding away into the moist forest, the branches shivering