Three months pregnant and unmarried, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my father, whom I hadn't gotten along with for fifteen years. Because I hadn't yet told him that I was pregnant, we were drinking tea in relative peace, looking out at the ocean, a mottled gray and unusually warm for that time of year.

He hadn't asked me why I'd come. At six-thirty in the morning he'd opened the porch door for his paper and found me sitting on the metal milkbox, sweat-stained and exhausted, the crumbs of a thousand saltines spread across my clothes. "It's me, Dad," I said, looking up.

I had just driven several hours through the dark, zig-zagging my way southeast on minor roads around the Black Horse Pike as if drawn by a broken homing device to 5025 Amanda, Sea Haven, New Jersey. I clenched the wheel and drove, the towns got smaller, the pine trees spindlier and less hardy, until toward dawn I could smell the salt, the dead crustaceans, the vibrant, rolling, variegated sea.

I parked and climbed the outdoor stairs to the open porch, which noticeably listed to the right, and felt lethargy and indecision wrap themselves around me like a pair of creeping vines. With the house between me and the ocean sunrise, I sensed my father waking with a grunt in his gray-blue bedroom, rapping the thermometer on the wall with a callused knuckle, and beginning a new day by swearing at all the idiots, losers and donkeys on the Sea Haven AM radio news. I sagged down onto the milkbox and wondered if I should have come.

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Copyright 1995 by Julie Schumacher