MY STEPFATHER BROKE DOWN MY DOOR AT 2 A.M. — UNTIL ONE TAP UNDER MY KITCHEN TABLE TURNED HIS RAGE INTO TERROR

Chapter 25

My thirtieth birthday was in December, and it was the least dramatic day of that whole year, which I consider a personal triumph.

Norfolk was cold and bright. I woke up in my own apartment, in my own bed, behind a door with a new frame and a second deadbolt I had installed myself with a drill I bought with my own money. The fern had three new fronds.

The trust transferred into my control that week, and I want to be careful about how I write this part, because there are two ways to write it and one of them is a lie.

The amount of money was enough to change the direction of a life. Not enough to end one. Enough that the arithmetic of every decision I had made since I was seventeen — where to work, whether to take the extra shift, whether I could afford to live near the base — all of it suddenly had more room around it than it had ever had before.

The first thing I did was pay off my student loans. All of them. I sat at my kitchen table and did it in eleven minutes, and then I sat there for another twenty minutes feeling nothing at all, and then I went to work.

The second thing I did was put the rest into an account I do not touch, in a conservative allocation Paul set up for me over the phone in about nine minutes, because he had been doing this for twenty years and had opinions.

The third thing I did was the request.

I bought a boat.

Not a yacht. I want to be very clear about this. I bought a twenty-two-foot sloop with a 1978 hull that had been sitting on a trailer at a marina outside Portsmouth for eleven months, with a cracked gelcoat on the deck and a mainsail that was original and one winch that needed rebuilding, and I paid about what a used car costs and I have never once regretted it.

Paul called it financially questionable.

I took that as confirmation.

I named her CHOICE, painted on the stern in white letters, and when my mother saw it she stood on the dock and read it twice and said, “That’s subtle,” and I said, “I was considering EMOTIONAL GROWTH but it was too long for the transom,” and she laughed until she had to sit down on a bollard.

We sat on the dock that afternoon with two coffees. It was forty-one degrees with the wind off the water and we were both in coats, and the masts down the row rocked against a sky the color of a nickel.

She reached into her bag eventually and handed me a small package wrapped in brown paper.

Inside was the wooden airplane.

She had painted it blue.

I turned it over in my hands. The paint job was thorough and slightly clumsy, with a drip on the underside of one wing, which is how you can tell a person painted it by hand and did not sand between coats.

“You were supposed to let me choose the color,” I said.

“You chose blue when you were seven.”

“You remember that?”

“You told your father blue was the color of places you hadn’t been yet.” She held her coffee with both hands and looked out at the water. “He told me that sentence about nine times in one week. It drove me insane.”

I looked at the little airplane.

I have had it on a shelf in three different apartments since then, and every time I move, it goes in my carry-on.