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wouldn’t sell the boat.
    No matter what, she wouldn’t sell the boat.
    No matter what, she’d keep the boat.
    She put on the coffee. She was still wearing the same clothes she’d had on yesterday. She slipped out of them and took a shower while the coffee was brewing, but the enjoyment she usually felt when the hot water cascaded along her body was absent.
    She didn’t think she’d ever enjoy anything again.
    Out of the shower, she slipped on clean shorts and a halter top and went back to the galley for the coffee. She usually drank it with cream, but Hideo drank it black. She decided to have it black today. She sipped the hot liquid and tried to imagine what Hideo would be thinking now, with the strong black coffee in his mouth, while the distinctive aroma assaulted his nostrils. She would never use cream again.
    “ Are you okay, Mom?” Meiko’s dreamy voice drifted out from the forward cabin.
    “ Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, and she sat in the salon and cried. Images attacked her, the sparkle in Hideo’s eyes on Christmas morning, his grin as she unwrapped a huge teddy bear on her twentieth birthday so many years ago, his true belly laugh, his hair, too long for his age. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. He was so many things to her—husband, father, friend, teacher, lover and protector.
    She dozed.
    “ Mom, are you all right?” Meiko’s voice pried her awake.
    “ What time is it?” she said, rubbing her eyes.
    “ You’ve been crying?”
    “ I guess.”
    “ It’s a little after six,” Meiko said.
    “ Why don’t you go back to sleep? I’d just like to be alone for a little while.”
    “ No. I won’t leave you out here crying in the dark like nobody loves you. I love you and besides, I need you. A bad thing has happened to us and I need you near me.”
    “ Oh, baby come here.” She was so overwhelmed by her own grief that she forgot about Meiko. He was her father and they were close. She started adoring him the instant her eyes first opened, and she’d never stopped.
    Meiko sat and Julie draped an arm around her shoulder as her daughter snuggled close and together they shivered in the heat. It was going to be another hot and humid equatorial day and both women fell back into the dreamless sleep of the grief stricken.
    Julie woke again to the sound of running water. Meiko was taking a shower. She refreshed her coffee and climbed up into the cockpit. She leaned back in the seat and inhaled the sea air. She watched two frigate birds riding the thermals above the swiftly moving clouds.
    “ It’s really something, isn’t it? The way the clouds move like that?” Meiko said, coming into the cockpit with her own cup of coffee. Her blue-black hair was glistening, wet from the shower.
    “ Yes,” Julie said.
    “ It’s like film speeded up.”
    “ I guess you’re right.” Julie took a another sip of her coffee and she noticed that Meiko was drinking it black also. The air was moving overhead, but it was quiet and still below, waiting on the sun to heat the land and start the early morning breeze. The beginning of the day. Julie’s favorite time.
    “ I don’t have to leave,” Meiko said. “I could stay longer. It wouldn’t hurt if I missed a semester.”
    “ Much as I’d like having you, I don’t think it’s a good idea. I’d never forgive myself if you didn’t finish.”
    “ But you need me. You can’t sail this big old boat by yourself.”
    In spite of how she felt, Julie laughed. Ever since she could talk Meiko had been helping out. They were a team, the three of them, broken up only when Meiko had started going to college. As tempting as it was, and it was tempting, Julie knew she had to turn down her daughter’s offer.
    “ I’d really love to have you, but we don’t have to think about it for a couple of months,” Julie said. She hated the fact that she could never make up her mind. Hideo could make snap decisions. She couldn’t. She’d weigh a problem from