Read an Excerpt

I confess that sometimes I forget what she looks like. This upsets me. It doesn’t last for long, though, and lately I’ve developed a trick. I anchor myself in her freckles, those lovely freckles that covered her cheeks, and then I see her eyes, and her hair, and soon all of her comes into focus. Dr. Mitchell says this is a good sign, my forgetting. It means it’s time to move on, Anthony. You’re still a young man, he says. The funny thing is that at first they spend all this time having you remember everything. Go over every detail and then suddenly they don’t want to talk about it anymore. They want you to think about the future. They’ll tell you they believe in memory but the truth is they don’t. They want you to erase all that now. It’s such a big world out there, Anthony, they say. It could all be yours again. It could all be yours.

I was born in Galilee, Rhode Island, that small spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. My father used to say our house faced Portugal, which is where he was from. My mother, too, though they met in Galilee. My father’s name was Rodrigo and he was a fisherman. My mother’s name was Berta and for years she cooked at a small college in Westerly. I was an only child. There was one who came after me, a little sister, Marta, but she lived for less than a week. I was two when that happened so I don’t remember it. But I know it had a strong effect on both my parents. They told me later that I spent most of her one week of life just staring at her in her crib. Every year we celebrated her birthday as if she had been a normal sister, someone I had known.
We lived in a small bungalow in a neighborhood of small bungalows built by fishermen for fishermen. Houses painted bright colors but built on cinderblocks with small fenced-in yards. Almost everyone who lived in Galilee made their living from the sea and in our neighborhood everyone was also Portuguese. My earliest memories are all about the ocean. We had only a small sandy yard and so the harbor and the commercial wharves, the beaches and the inlets, the tidal streams and rivers, were my playground. My father fished on commercial boats and was often gone for as long as a month at a time during the season. My mother rose early to cook breakfast for college students. My best friend, Victor Perez, who lived one street away, and I were our own keepers. As small boys we swam in the tidal river on warm days, leaping off the bridge that crossed it. We fished off the rocky beach and by seven I could gut a fish by myself. We were from poor families and were expected to work, so we did what we could. We delivered newspapers and shoveled snow in the winter. We washed down decks of boats. Stacked wood. Dug clams out of the tidal flats and brought them in buckets down to Teagan’s seafood. And when my father was in between trips, he’d bring the two of us out at night on his small skiff to fish for blues and stripers. He’d lean against the gunwale and roll his own cigarettes and teach us everything he knew about fishing. He liked to talk and he liked to tell stories. My father was tall and handsome with thick hair and a prominent mustache. He had a quick temper but also a quick wit and he was my hero. Victor’s too, I think. Victor’s father drank and Victor spent as little time as he could at home. He was always at my house and I considered him a brother. As did my parents. And those times on the skiff are some of my most treasured memories. I wanted to be a man like my father. Roll my own cigarettes and wear my jeans tucked into mud boots. Have strong veiny forearms and a good mustache. Piercing brown eyes. Tell stories like he did.