He lifted the binoculars, focused the lenses and could just make out her red foul weather jacket, bright against the tiny white triangle of the sail. She headed away from land, away from him, towards the horizon. The ocean was calm and the sunshine cast a path of shimmering diamonds between them, reminding him of the jewelry he knew she left behind.
His fortune was made many times over in the dot com bubble by fortuitously cashing out and missing the crash by just a few months. He’d become an angel investor in an organization that housed and trained homeless youth, where he met her when she was barely 18. They married on her 21st birthday and he bought her everything money could buy, but the truly pleased smiles didn’t dim the haunted look in her eyes. She never talked about her past, except for the fact that her parents had died when she was very young and she bounced through the foster system, never owning more than could fit in a backpack.
Amy was early and sat stiffly on the couch. It was her first time seeing a therapist and she wondered if she should lay down.
I took teeny bites of the protein bar as I watched the screen showing my husband’s vital signs. Different colored graphs scrolled by on a continuous roller coaster but no alarms were ringing so I figured things must be stable. His eyes were closed and his breathing was even. I folded the empty wrapper into a small square and put it in my pocket.
“Watch your step!” Wendy shouted, jerking him to the side.
It had been a week of “lasts.” Her last term paper, her last shift at the coffee shop, her last Taco Tuesday at Don Jose’s. She heard the toilet flush and realized that this would be the last time Zoe would slip under the covers next to her in their bed.
“Nana, why doesn’t daddy like mommy anymore?”
Merry awoke just as the first red bursts of dawn streaked through the shutters and across her white bedspread. It reminded her of blood splatter and she watched the gory hue turn to a bruise of blue and purple and finally the pure, clean brightness of a new day, disappearing into the covers. She felt a shift in the universe and tears pricked her eyes.
When a man gets to a certain age, it is time for him to set out on his own, or at least that is what he tried to tell himself as he readied his boat for the journey. He had been sailing these seas with his father since the day he could walk, he knew them better than he knew the land. Of course, where he was going, he would eventually leave his home waters, and that is where the test of his strength and abilities would come in. 
I’d awoken with a sore throat and a fever, so mother made me stay home. Daddy went to work and my sister left without me to walk the short distance to school with the kids from the block. I spent the morning on the couch bundled up in blankets, engrossed in one of the “Little House on the Prairie” books and sipping ginger ale through a straw from a nearby TV tray. Mother went about her daily housewife routine of making beds, starting a load of laundry, arranging the front window drape pleats, and raking the shag carpet.
It was spring of 1982 and I was months from high school graduation. On the horizon was a summer serving as crew on a 101 ft schooner and the beginning of college in the fall. It was also a dull and dreary day sitting in the teeny boatyard office of the marine electrician where I worked as an assistant after school.
