Fiction: Our Destination(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

“So we agree,” Billy clarified, “to think about finding a second home, for the purpose of spending times of fair weather in one, foul weather in the other. Are we, so far, of one mind?”
    “Yes,” Paula agreed.
    “Then it seems to me our next step is to narrow down possible locations.”
    “Yes.”
    “What would be your ideal place? Do you have in mind, already, a city, a town, some general area that has appealed to your imagination and your desire, about which you have never told me?”
    She thinks, and then, “No, not really.”
    “Not really. Okay,” says Billy. “That sounds like there is someplace, or at least some vague glimmer of a dream. Take your time. Remember, we are merely planning, at this point, or dreaming.”
    Paula directed Billy to go first, then. “Do you have a longed-for place?” she asked.
    “Oh, yes, but it’s not at all practical. And I’ve mentioned it to you many times over the years.”

Her blank look answered him

    Her blank look answered him.
    “When you ask me what I want for my birthday, what do I say, every year?”
    “Tahiti!” she brightened.
    “Yes, but.”
    “But you have narrowed the search down to a beach somewhere.”
    “Not really,” Billy muttered, to himself, mostly.
    That distant uncle of Paula’s, straight out of Dickens, had left the couple a small fortune upon his sad demise. A small one, but not a Tahiti-sized stake to make part-time residence possible.
    They had spent many hours dreaming, laughing, and seriously deliberating what to do with the money that finally had come to them after decades of, you know, not much, other than Billy’s searing pain of the poor provider and Paula’s own struggle to forgive him.
    One deciding factor would obviously be weather. On another night, Billy leaned back, chuckling at the reminiscence that emerged in his interior monologue. He knew it would bore his wife, but he wanted to pronounce it aloud for the first time.
    “You’ll get a kick outta this,” he began, hoping without believing in the efficacy of that rhetorical device. “I was addressing a class in Knoxville one January, snow all over, outside. They didn’t close the school. Snow was par for the course about eight months out of each year. So I aired my nostalgia, and at the same time, taught these pretty kids some helpful real-life almanac-type lore, saying, ‘In El Paso, a cold day in December drops down to 60 degrees.’ And they all laughed. They thought I was joking! ‘Why would I lie about that,’ I asked them, but nobody answered. They did not know how, and neither would I have known how. Yet I had not asked a rhetorical question, but I carried on.
    “’And in February, 80-degree days return, mercifully.’ Universal laughter once more. I had described a world too fantastical for them to believe.”
    Paula cut in. “What year was this?”
    “Early ’90s. Of the previous millennium.”
    “So, still a bit too soon for them to verify your trustworthiness by consulting their iPhones.”
    “Admirable acumen, my lover!”

Was she mocking his assonance?

    “Again. As always,” she answered, leaving him to wonder if she were mocking his assonance.
    “Don’t interrupt. Where was I?”
    “You had just concluded relation of a memory of import to you, alone.”
    “How charming of you to remind me. Thank you! How charming of me to delight myself with that particular recollection, as it serves majestically as the number-one reason why we must winter in Old El Paso. Eighty-degree days in February, I repeat, for emphasis.”
    “And I would contend that the omnipresence of tacos reigns as the number-one reason. But more importantly, who wants desert? Gimme ocean. I love the Outer Banks! My love.”
    “As do I, my beloved queen. But in winter? I thought we were considering winter quarters, just now.”
    “Were we? I must have failed to note some organizational principle you laid down. I’m so sorry,” she laughed, but then considered, and continued: “Yeah, but after Labor Day, the place is a ghost town.”
    “Yeah, but it’s a ghost beach town. You hate people!”
    “Yeah, but I don’t want to freeze in a cold ocean,” Paula maintained.
    “Who wants to swim in an ocean? There are still plenty of sharks and riptides after Labor Day.”
    “Yeah, but most of the restaurants shut down. Your precious fried shrimps will vanish.”
    “We’ll just fry our own. No, dear, the only reason I would wish to stay there in the off-season is to write. In solitude. Even the calming pounding of surf becomes more calming, all up and down the seaboard.”
    She smiled. “So you’re saying it’s okay with you if I go somewhere else.”
    “Like butterflies, madwomen and Elton John are free to fly. But property rentals in the OBX drop steeply off after summer ends, as do costs of renting seagoing vessels and crews for deep-sea fishing and not-so-deep-sea but closer in to the shore.”
    “Now, that’s something I could go for, something I’ve always sorta wanted to do.”
    “I know! You’ve mentioned it a time or three.”

She sounded surprised

    “I have?” She sounded surprised. “And somehow, you inferred I wanted to go out fishing with you?”
    “Hahaha! You can pay for your own vessel and your own team of young golden blond hairy boys in flip-flops who will gladly hold your rod for you and even pop the tops on your beers for you and drink them with you.”
    “And who’s gonna hold your rod for you?”
    “I’ll hold my own rod, thank you. But I might hire a girl to bring me cigars and my beers, whilst I Hemingway my day away. I should hire one blonde and one brunette.”
    He noticed her pretending nonchalance and not answering right away, so he continued. “Of course, I fear drowning at sea. And hurricanes. Seasoned Floridians sit them out. Hell, I’ve sat out tornadoes and tropical-windy rainstorms, praying to them to pass away from me and go up into Kentucky, just because I feared one of the mighty four oaks surrounding my little house would fall on me and I’d be stabbed by a branch, but not fatally, but the snow and sleet would fall in on me and I’d be unable to call for help or to crawl toward the kitchen for my stash of booze, and I’d have to just lie there and die there, pinned by my Balzac to the bed with nothing to read, and they’d find me there—the neighbors, police, my brothers, maybe somebody from the newspaper—and my whole sixty years would amount only to that and nothing more than that. Killed by a stick to the heart.”
    “Nothing more than that?” Paula exuberated. “Poor babycakes! Surely you realize that would be just a stupendous way to go!”
    “Yes, I do realize that! I just don’t care for the wet, freezing part, and I’d always hoped to survive a shipwreck in the middle of the ocean, to swim till I was exhausted, and when I gave up on life and slipped down into the depths, a dolphin would carry me in to the nearest shore, but at the last second, we’d both be devoured piecemeal by a tiny ignominious shark.”
    “Okay, William,” she said, rising. “Hang on right there, now that you are gone, fish food. I’ve got something.”
    Some minutes later, she returned from the kitchen, a silver salver with two vessels of crystal aloft in one hand, and in the other, an unpopped vessel of pink bubbly.

“I’ve been meaning to say something to you”

    “I’ve got something I have been meaning to say to you. Get this, will you, please?” She handed him the bottle of Dom Rose.
    She waited while he uncorked and poured. She noted a tremble on his pouring hand. She rose again and crossed to where he sat on the couch and sat so close their knees touched.
    They clinked, sipped, deeply.
    “To what do we toast?” he asked, looking happily into her eyes, which were weeping.
    “Baby?” He pulled her in close.
    “To say to you for a long time. Too long.”
    “If you say cancer, I will kick your ass!”
    “I’ve always lacked your gift of expression, but I’ve always wanted to let you know, but never been able to say it, but it came out in meanness or in physical violence.”
    “Say what, my only love?”
    “Shut up,” she barked, hitting him and continuing, “Penisbreath. Let me say this while I’m still willing.”
    But silence came, and her eyes filled with meaning.
    Billy said he’d always known. “Well, not always. And in truth, I’ve never known.”
    “But long suspected.”
    “Long suspected, yes. My dearest angel.”
    A long silence, shattered suddenly by an almost electrical-storm scuffle of wool on wool, sweater against sofa upholstery, legs in a race to entangle each other, and an eruption:
    “Stop! Put on.”
    “Cary and Grace!”
    “Yes. Yes!”
    In a still midnight, a full winter’s moon spread her silver thread like a light blanket over two sleeping lovers entwined, feeling the love they felt in their hearts at 16 and felt still.

Copyright © 2023 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.