ShoulderSeason

Ten minutes to sunset the scope comes out. Legs kicked wide on the patio rail, eyepiece wiped with a shirt hem, the horizon found and lost and found again. Down the coast the surf keeps its noise to itself. We are watching for a green light that lasts less than a second, and we have a week.

The house is the family’s; I was the boy here once, same rocks, same rail. What May sent this year: a marine layer parked offshore with no plans to leave, and a gray line where the sun was supposed to perform.

The days learned a shape. Nine holes before the wind came up, fish tacos at the place with the plastic chairs, the long afternoon giving the rocks back to the birds. Kelp ribbons on the tide line. Pelicans working the swell in single file.

On the course the layer flattened everything to one soft light, and the ocean sat to the left of every hole like an open question. The card stayed in the bag. We played toward the horizon and watched it the whole way in.

Mornings he went ahead of us to the point and claimed the one rock the waves couldn’t reach. He waved once, then forgot us completely. Captain of a small, cold country all morning.

He is four. He will not always come stand at the rail with me.

The layer didn’t move. The boy took his watch inside, forehead to the glass, the beach going on without him below.

The last evening we gave it every minute. The sun flattened to a bar of light and went under the layer without a word. A week of looking; no green.

We closed the house the next morning the way it has been closed a hundred times: chairs in, shutters latched, the key where the family leaves it. The scope rode home still packed. Over the street the papel picado kept snapping in the wind, the same as every year, the same as next.