Relentless

Milo and Lassie are fine. When the house blew, we were on the road.”
    “What road?”
    “The open road, traveling.”
    “You were home. Yesterday.”
    “Now we’re on the road doing book research. If anyone in the media calls you, don’t talk to him. Refer him to my publisher’s publicity department. I gave them a statement.”
    Beyond the window, in the dying breeze, queen palms trembled asif in delicious anticipation of rain. The moored boats rocked gently in the harbor’s tamed swells. So lovely yet in some way … troubling.
    “What about Penny?” Hud asked.
    “I gave her publisher a statement, too.”
    “How’s her agent?”
    “Alma wasn’t in the house when it blew, Hud. She’s in New York.”
    “I mean the trauma. To Penny. Losing a house. Makes a woman think. For Penny, a turning point. Maybe it’s time. For change.”
    Although he was in his seventh marriage, this might have been the first occasion in his life when Hud Jacklight tried to imagine what a woman thought about anything.
    I punctured his swelling hope: “Penny thinks losing a house is enough change for a while.”
    “She said that?”
    “In exactly those words.”
    “Well, I’m here. All I’m saying. I’m here.”
    “That’s comforting to know, Hud.”
    High in the steadily blackening sky, a silent convulsion broke the string in an infinite necklace, and fat pearls fell through the day, bouncing on the slate patio, dimpling the water in the harbor, rattling gulls off the seawall to sheltered roosts.
    “There’s a bright side,” Hud said. “To the house. Now that you’re not dead.”
    “What would that be?”
    “Human-interest angle. House blowing up. Loss. All the memories. Mementos. Gone. Oprah will want you. Every show will. Big sympathy thing. Gonna boost book sales.”
    The man working on the deck of the sloop hurried below as the raindrops shrank in size and settled into a steady drizzle.
    He had been doing routine maintenance. Nothing more.
    “Hud, I don’t want people buying my book because they pity me.”
    “Why not?”
    “For one thing, pride.”
    In anticipation of rain, harbor traffic had been diminishing. Now only a few craft were motoring to port along the waterways.
    “Tough world, Cubaroo. Competitive. Dog-eat-dog. No writer can afford pride.”
    The weight of the rain had quelled the light breeze. All was still and silvered.
    Hud continued: “Besides. It’s a sin. Pride. Too proud to do
Oprah
. You know these things. Isn’t it a sin?”
    “If it’s vanity, yes. If it’s conceit, arrogance, yes, a sin. If it’s self-esteem, maybe, probably. If it’s self-respect, no.”
    “Kind of complex,” said Hud.
    “Everything is.”
    With the advent of the rain, the view of the harbor should have been even more relaxing. Rain washes the world clean, and the world needs cleansing. Yet as the drizzle added luster to most surfaces, my disquiet grew.
    “Alma lost a client,” Hud said. “Last week. Major client.”
    “Who was that?”
    “Gwyneth Oppenheim.”
    “Hud, she didn’t fire Alma. She died of cancer at eighty-six.”
    “Still not good. Losing clients. A bad sign.”
    My disquiet was probably residual emotion from being startled by the blue heron. Being Jacklighted didn’t help.
    I told him that Penny needed my assistance with something, not with her agent but with another matter, and I terminated the call.
    Returning the cell phone to my pocket, studying the harbor as I moved, I left the living room for the dining room, and I paused at the windows there. The overhang kept the glass dry and clear.
    The raw teak planks of the pier floor, gangway, and boat slip haddarkened in the downpour from deep gray almost to black. The teak handrails were lacquered; wet with rain, they appeared to be jacketed in ice.
    Stars folded into stripes, and from the limp red point of the neighbor’s sodden flag, a thin stream of water unraveled to their pier deck.
    Three large dark shapes undulated through the nearer channel, disappearing into the water only to reappear: a trio of sea lions.
    Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.
    Complexity implies meaning. We are afraid of meaning.
    I moved into the family room and stood behind the sofa on which