Page 5 of Rhodes

"Hey, Daddy."

"There's my girl." His voice comes through roughly, and I can hear water and wind behind it. It's the particular hollowness of a man standing on a dock with the phone away from his mouth. "I'm sorry, baby. I saw you called me yesterday. I was out till dark on the north grounds and by the time I got the boat up and got home, I figured you'd be asleep."

"I wasn't asleep." I was awake at midnight staring at my ceiling, being quietly furious at Rhodes Stone, who appointed himself my lifeguard in a bar and did the math on my drink before I finished turning around. But I am not going to tell my father that, because that would require telling him I ran into him in a bar and that would open a whole other line of questioning and assumptions. "I finished my packing for the move. It's fine. How were the north grounds?"

"Thin." A long pause as a ghost of wind howls between us. "Real thin, Til."

"Salinity or the spat set?"

"Both. Everything." My father, who has never once in my life admitted a thing was too big for him, says it in two words that cover his whole year.

He clears his throat. "Anyway. Grandbank said he wants you to come home and go over all of this with him. You know he loves to bounce his ideas off of one of us who is actually studying erosion and land preservation. You need to call him."

I'm sure Grandbank was really asking how my sobriety was going, not how to plant marsh grass, but it's a sweet way to frame it.

"I'll call him tonight."

"He'd like that. You're his favorite, you know that."

"I'm his only one who'll sit still for the bucket quiz."

That gets a sound out of him that is almost a laugh. Then the silence comes back, filled only by the gusting wind.

On the water, a pelican drops out of the dusky gray-white sky and hits the surface forty feet off my bow and comes up with nothing. I watch it shake off and climb again.

"You sleeping okay?"

There it is. That's not a question about sleep. That's the question everyone in my family has learned to ask sideways, the one that means are you okay, which means are you using, which means we are all still holding our breath a little, less than a month after we put your mother in the ground and you did not fall apart the way we were braced for you to.

"I'm sleeping fine."

"Because your mama, she'd want you to talk to somebody if you needed to. Down there. Whoever you've got down there."

"I have people down here, Daddy." I do. I have Jo and I have Helen, my sponsor, and I have my weekly Tuesday meeting in a church basement where nobody knows my last name. It's the whole reason I'm fine, and it is the one part of my life my family can't picture, so it does not count to them. "I promise you I'm okay. I know it doesn't seem possible from Charleston, but New Orleans is good for me."

"I know you are." He says it too fast, the way you agree with something you are trying to make yourself believe. "I know. It's just, with Coop headed off, I got to thinking. We were talking yesterday," he pauses, not finishing the sentence.

He and I have been talking, which is my whole family's favorite sentence, the one that means a decision has already been made about me in a room I was not in.

"Talking about what?"

"About him leaving, about you moving into his place. We just want to make sure you're not by yourself while he's across the ocean, that's all. It's a lot of change at once."

The pelican goes down again. This time it comes up with a fish, and I hate it a little. "Who's the 'we' in that sentence?”

"Tilly."

"I'm asking a real question. Because from here it sounds like y'all have been on a group text about what to do with me, and I'm the last one finding out."

I hear my own voice going up and I make it come back down, because if I sound upset it proves their point. That's the trap of being the difficult one is that every reaction is evidence.

"I am not a loose end that needs tying off before Coop can feel good about his study abroad."

"Nobody said loose end."

"You didn't have to."

He sighs, and it is the sigh of a grieving man who is too tired to fight one of his youngest daughters. If I'm being completely honest with myself, it makes me feel like garbage.