Soft Flesh Pressing the Leaning Tree

Episode 4:
There are many gin and tonics. We are sloppy. We hatch identify schemes and knock on the fish tank at the ugly algae sucker. There is much laughter and the agrarians are starring at us. Hamsini makes me happy. I would like to marry her someday. I would like our photograph to appear in the New York Times with the other beautiful, interesting people who attended the finest schools. Her family and I have never met. They are hoping for a Hindu son-in-law, I think. Her family hails from Pittsburgh. Her father is an optometrist. Her mother is a retired math teacher.

Should we track down Charlie Dalton? How would this be accomplished? We ask the waitress if she knows a man named Charlie Dalton. She does not. We sidle up to the bartender, Ben. He does not know this Charlie. We ask for a Vashon telephone book. After another gin and tonic, the telephone book appears seemingly from nowhere. There is, apparently, no Charles Dalton residing on Vashon Island. There is no Dalton clan living way up Shingle Mill Creek.

Before leaving Vashon, under a gravid moon, I make love to Hamsini as her soft flesh presses into a steeply leaning madrone tree.

I whisper to Hamsini, "We shall spend the money one dollar a day for the next year in honor of Charlie Ray Dalton."

She trembles. "Whatever," she says.

The first dollar has been spent already. Pocketed in the form of a tip to Ben and a waitress named Magdalena.