"Family's family."
"And if I'd gone against your brother—what?"
Louie shrugged. He didn't know what would have happened or what he would have done. "I just felt I oughta be there."
Ziggy shook his head. "Louie, you're a piece a work."
Angelina's uncle smiled inwardly, took it as a compliment. Which it was. The kind of thing that people only said to someone that they'd really noticed, to someone whose being there, or not, made a difference in the world.
* * *
Later, as the sinking moon was going from yellow to orange and painting a russet stripe across the flat waters of the Florida Straits, Ziggy and Angelina walked without touching along the trucked-in sand that imperfectly covered the nubbly rock of Smathers Beach. There were no waves; the ocean made the softest hiss as a line of foam, thinner than the head on beer, dissolved between the stones.
Ziggy was shaking his head, impressed, amused. He said, "You bowled him over?"
"I didn't plan it," Angelina said. "Didn't have time. He stood up very fast. But then there was a hesitation, he sort of swayed, his eyes went out of focus."
"Like faint?" said Ziggy.
"Light-headed, whatever. Blood pressure. Arms just hanging."
"So you decided—"
"I didn't decide," she corrected. "I just found myself springing toward him, shoulder down."
They walked, coral pieces crunched under their feet. Ziggy said, "And the gun?"
"I guess I just dropped it, found it later underneath the bed. I hated having it, it felt disgusting in my lap."
"So you hit him with your shoulder—"
"Shoulder, head, everything," said Angelina. "Hard as I could. His hands never came up. He fell back across the bed. I landed on top of him, bounced off, and then I got really terrified."
"That he'd hurt you?"
"That I hurt him. He didn't move. His eyes were closed. I thought ... I didn't know what to think. Stroke? Heart attack? An awful idea grabbed hold of me: What if he died and the last thing he carried into death was this feeling that I hated him? It made me start to cry. From one second to the next I was crying like I haven't cried in years and years. I touched his hair, his face. I thought, all growing up I had this lie, he was the greatest daddy in the world, he was perfect, and nothing got around that lie, I couldn't see anything wrong with him. Then when I saw it I got so mad that I couldn't see he was still my father, couldn't see I loved him anyway. Now finally I felt it all at once, all sides of it together."
Ziggy said, "And then he came around?"
Angelina nodded, soft red moonlight played across her skin as her face turned up then down. "Was only out a few seconds, I guess. Maybe fainted. Maybe I just knocked the wind out. I was stroking his cheek and his eyes popped open."
"He try to leave again?"
"No," said Angelina. "The fight was out of him. Out of both of us, I guess. Call it a draw. We just sat and talked and cried until the cops showed up."
Ziggy was silent, respectful of a daughter talking alone with her father. They walked, felt the peaceful heaviness of footsteps over sand, the odd relief of knowing you could not go very fast or very far. The he said, "The cops, there's nothing they can do to him this time."
"Thank you for that," said Angelina.
There was nothing pointed in the way she said it but the words made Ziggy wince, the eyebrows pulled together along his remade forehead. He said, "Jesus, don't thank me."
She said nothing. The russet line of moonlight on the water tracked them as they strolled.
He went on, "There's something I have to tell you, Angelina, I've never come right out and said it. What happened with me and your father, what I did, I've always been ashamed of it."
Looking down at softly gleaming sand she said, "My father did bad things. He got punished for them. They call that justice, right?"
"Yeah, but what I did, it wasn't about justice, it wasn't about believing in the law or any crap like that. I just tried to make things easy for myself."
She didn't answer, just watched her feet churn through the beach.
"And the fear," he said, "the looking over your shoulder all the time—it's not only fear of the guy you sent away. It's shame. That's what keeps your skin feeling wrong, makes your face seem unfamiliar. Shame."
They walked. A south breeze carried smells of iodine and spice; on the land side palm fronds rustled dryly, the sound was like maracas. Angelina said,
"I'm glad you told me that. You feel better, telling mer
Ziggy's hand came up against his chest, he rubbed himself like he was checking for wounds. "Yeah," he said, sounding a little bit surprised. "I do."