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asked if I could hang out with him. He looked at the other guys and grudgingly, he said yes. They were awkward with me there and didn’t say much and one by one they peeled away and left us.
    “Climb out there and untie us,” Bill said. “How’d you get over here?” He started the motor and got us moving.
    “Doug drove me. Took me to a party. We got separated.”
    “Oh.”
    “Did I mess up your party?” I asked.
    “No, don’t worry about it.” I listened to the familiar thumping of the Evinrude and began to relax. The water of the bay seemed so peaceful to me. I looked at the sky.

    Lisa and I drove over to the Capitol Grill and found a booth under an elk’s head. “Why do you like to eat here?” I asked her.
    “I don’t know, something about all these boys making decisions.” She sipped her tea. “Okay, I’ve got one for you. You’re in a boat and your motor cuts out, but you’re in shallow water, but you’re wearing two-hundred-dollar trousers, but your ride to the airport is just about to drive away from the beach. Why is this a legal issue?”
    I shook my head.
    “Because it’s a matter of Row versus Wade.” She smiled a smile I hadn’t seen in many years. “Lame, eh?”
    “Did you make that up?”
    “I stay up late, what can I say.” Lisa looked about the room, then back at me. “It’s good to see you, little brother.”
    “Thanks. It’s good to see you, too. You know, I’m really proud of you. Dad would be proud of you as well. That clinic.”
    “It’s not very glamorous.”
    “I don’t know what that has to do with anything.” I noticed a man at the bar staring at us. “Do you know him?” I asked.
    Lisa turned to see and the man looked away. “Nope. Why?”
    “He just seemed interested in you for some reason.”
    “That would be nice.”
    “I’m sorry about what happened with Barry. I always thought he was a joke.”
    “You said as much way back when.” Lisa laughed. “Remember how mad I got at you?”
    The waiter came and took our orders. He smiled at Lisa as he put away his pad. “How’s it going, Doc?”
    “Fine, Chick, what about with you? Chick, this is my brother, Monk. He’s visiting from California.”
    I shook the man’s hand. “Chick.” I watched him walk away and smiled at my sister. “He likes you.”
    “Maybe, but I think he used to date Bill.”
    “Oh.” We sat there thinking about Bill for a while until I felt I’d thought about him long enough and said, “I had a rather nice conversation with one of your patients. I didn’t get her name. She had a little boy with her and blue nails.”
    “I know who you’re talking about. That’s Tamika Jones. Tamika Jones actually has two children. The little boy with her today is named Mystery.”
    “Mystery?”
    “That’s right. And her daughter’s name is Fantasy.”
    “Mystery and Fantasy.”
    “Named after their fathers. One was a mystery and the other a fantasy.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “I wish.”
    “I make up shit for a living and I couldn’t have come up with that.” The man from the bar was staring again, but when I caught him he got up, left the bar and headed for the door. “Sometimes I feel like I’m so removed from everything, like I don’t even know how to talk to people.”
    “You don’t,” Lisa said. “You never have. It’s not a bad thing. You’re just different.”
    “Different from whom?”
    “Don’t get defensive. It’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s a good thing. I’ve always wanted to be like you.”

    It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case