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think that, Sherry?” I said. “He was a good cop from what I’ve heard. A holdup. A routine traffic stop. You know the statistics. It wasn’t like he was cowboying.”
    She took another two strokes before answering.
    “I’m not saying he wasn’t careful, or that he was naïve, really. But he had a certain trust in people, especially kids.”
    When Jimmy had closed in on the runner trying to scale a ten-foot wall at the end of the alley, he realized it was just a kid, a skinny-armed eighth-grader wearing sneakers too big for his feet. He relaxed. His weapon was still holstered and he was giving the boy one of those “come here, kid” gestures, his fingers bent, palm up like he’d caught him sneaking candy from a bowl. That’s when the child pulled a 9mm from his baggy shorts and fired a round into Sherry’s husband’s heart. Freak tragedy. Never should have happened. It’s something you never forget if you’re the loved one left behind. All that crap about closure and moving on doesn’t remove the memory cells that live in a human brain. I’d seen Jimmy return in Sherry’s eyes a few times since we’d been together and I was still at a loss for how to react. Maybe she was thinking of him, what she was missing. Maybe she was thinking of what it would be like to be with someone who was the opposite of him. So I stayed quiet. Let her enjoy it, or shake off the vision on her own. Some things we handle alone.
    I nodded when she looked back at me. The grin was back in her eyes and for the next hour we talked about our favorite bakeries, about Tuscany cannoli and key lime pie and why nobody in the country can make a Philly cheesesteak sandwich the way they do in the city because of the bread from Amoroso’s. We were on to the delights of fresh stone crabs straight off the boat at the docks in Chokoloskee when we suddenly broke out of the high grass and slid out onto several acres of open water and the change caused Sherry to stop midsentence. On flat water the sunlight was pinging off the reflected blue of the sky and for a moment the scene was like a still life painting, the colors too perfect, the lack of movement too unreal. Sprigs of marsh grass spiked up from the sheet of glass before us and I actually watched the small ripple of wake from our bow move out for ten yards ahead of us until its offensive disruption was absorbed. For a full two minutes, neither of us spoke, maybe afraid to break the spell.
    “Humans don’t belong here, Max,” Sherry whispered from the bow and I let the statement stand until a breeze rose from the west and rustled the grass and nipped at the water and life moved back in. I knew that once you got over the immense feeling of the place you could focus down and see the scarlet skimmers working the water surface and if you closely inspected the sawgrass you’d find the apple snails working the stalks. Then up in the sky we watched the dark body of a low- flying snail kite swoop in from the south and utter a low grunt as she went into one of the grass outcroppings.
    “All we would do is fill it in and build suburbs on it,” I said, and it may have been the last environmental statement I would make throughout the trip.
    Spotting an outcropping of tall grass that cast a slab of shade on the water, we paddled over and broke out some lunch. While we ate I tried to point out some of the vegetation and insects that lived here and we counted three alligators that showed themselves in the distance, exposing only their snouts and the humped orbs of their eyes as they cruised across some open water. They made no attempt to come our way, which seemed to ease Sherry’s distress a bit. Then I made the mistake of bringing up the story of rangers from Everglades National Park who last month came upon the aftermath of a fight between a thirteen-foot-long Burmese python and a six-foot gator out here. The snake, probably released by some owner because it was getting too damn big, had tried to