The Coach Years: A Love Story
"Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”
Dear readers,
I began writing this story a few years ago, and I’m sharing an updated version now in memoriam of my maternal grandmother, who left this world last month. It’s also to honor my grandfather, who left us years ago—far too soon.
It’s a long, slow read, so take a seat and settle in.
There are three clocks in my grandmother’s kitchen, and each of them tells a different time.
Here on the shores of the Indian River, where geckos dart and hibiscus bloom, the turn of the world is marked not by minutes, but by moments. Toes on a cool square of grass, the arrival of a great white egret, a wild wind moving its hands through your hair—each juncture as immeasurable as drops in the ocean.
The seasons are the only reason her house knows change at all. Winter brings the snowbirds, who don pastel polos and gold chain necklaces and comb their white hair back in the rear view mirror. They amble into the bar on the wharf to clink frosty coronas and dance until the Jimmy Buffett tribute ends, then tuck their wallets away with sun spotted hands and yawn.
On the first of May the seniors fly off suddenly, leaving the locals to swim through the slow drip of summer alone. The dogs pant in the yard out back, squinting into the day until the sun lurches westward and the sherbet sky explodes and the trout in the river blink in the twilight water. By August, when even the mornings burn thick before sunrise, the idea of a breeze is a luxury we’re no longer sure we deserve.
September with its sweat and swelter lugs uncertainty along. Through the static on the shortwave radio a voice says “evacuate” and “category 3.” Then it’s time to go into the garage to dust off the shutters and find the instructions for armoring the house, which are penciled in Grandpa’s neat uppercase type.
There are two options when a hurricane is coming: stay or go. Sheila, my grandma, embodies a particular brand of stubbornness which allows her to endure the uncomfortable, a trait she likely inherited from her marathon-dancing, Irish immigrant ancestors—so staying is the obvious choice.
One time she and Grandpa did leave; loaded up and drove to Tampa for a few calm sunsets on the gulf. But the trade winds swerved left and chased them across the blade-flat stretch of Florida all the way to Ybor City.
Now, with Grandma’s breathing machine and the ghosts of Grandpa’s things all around, to remain at home is a ritual that cannot be broken.
The small room in the middle of the house is built from six-inch cinder block walls, making it the safest place to be when the storm hits. From this cube of safety you can peer up through the spiral staircase and see the bones of the house trembling in the roar.
When the power clicks off and the hum of the house dims to quiet, all you can hear is the drum of the rain and the moaning teeter of that which should not budge. Cabbage palms in the yard arch their slender backs beneath the press of the wind until the eye passes through. It all goes slick calm. Strips of sunlight stream through the clouds and the naive birds begin to squawk with gladness. But then it is dark again and the maw reopens and this time, almost all of the dock is swallowed.
The worst was 2004, when Frances, Jeanne, and Wilma all took their turns flicking off roofs and sinking schooners like beasts with nowhere to be. After the third hurricane that year, the soil was so swamped that the roots lost their grip and the trees slumped over themselves, facing the newly-formed lakes on the lawn and shadowing the tadpoles teeming within.
Eventually, though, the clouds part for good; the fronds are plucked from the yard and the shades are unscrewed and propped up so the briny air can blow out the staleness in the house that’s been shut for days.
The generator and the flow well stand in for electricity, which often does not return for weeks. Boards that curled up in the storm are nailed back down to the dock, though the whole of it yaws underfoot. All along the two-lane road where the land slopes into the brackish water, the washed-out pavement leaves craters so wide you have to drive over lawns to get to town. Turned-up silt from the ancient riverbed clouds the water with brown but the neighbors still cast reels in the murk, trying their luck in the aftermath.
When the magnolias awaken and the tangerines fall with a thud, everyone lets out the breath they’ve been holding since the man on the radio said “brace yourself.”
The house has made it through another year. From deep in the Savannas, where the boars and rattlesnakes ebb through the reeds, a great gust stretches east. When I visit, I lie in the twin bed upstairs with the window open, falling asleep to the hush of swaying palms and the rhythm of the river licking the shoreline.
When the moon rises high in a far-off place and the strangeness of the world siphons my sleep, this is the sound I long for.
***
My grandmother sits in her favorite kitchen chair and lights menthols with a quivering hand. Her shuffle is slowing down. She forgets what pills to take or if she fed the dogs, who sit by their bowls and gaze up at her with watery eyes. She wears ornate T-shirts with rhinestones to go to the store and pats on pink lipstick when we go to my Uncle John’s. Beyond the wrinkles that map her face like fissures in the desert, her eyes look more like the sky each year.
Instead of brunch or shopping trips or whatever other granddaughters and grandmothers do, our togetherness is marked by long periods of silence. I stand at the kitchen counter slicing berries and scooping avocados and she sits in her chair at the table, watching me. I feel her eyes on my back as I walk to the fridge, reach up into the spice cabinet, turn back to the island. Ordinary inquiries agitate the quiet.
“What is that?” Lentils.
“Whatcha lookin’ for? A big spoon.
These exchanges used to irk me—I once gave up on lunch and stomped out to the dock after she watched me unsuccessfully assemble the food processor. Things are different now. We both have softened with age and I know that this may be the only time we have together. I want us to be closer but I accept the fact that maybe neither of us know how. Besides, most of the time she’s actually staring out through the kitchen window at something that lives in her mind’s eye.
She is thinking of Gene. When I’m here, I think of Grandpa, too. On a shelf by the table there’s a sepia photograph of them from an old western studio. I can’t look at this picture without thinking of the times they visited my family at our house in New York.
Although he was my mother’s stepdad, and I only saw him once a year—those summers when he and my Grandma drove their 35-foot motor coach up from the Treasure Coast and parked it in our yard—he instilled in me a love of reading that was so profound I often wonder if, without him, I would’ve become a writer at all.
Perhaps it was that my Grandpa was the only adult I ever saw reading a book. Maybe it was those dog day afternoons when he took my sister and me to the bookstore on Main Street in Cobleskill and said to the spectacle-clad man behind the counter, “these are my granddaughters.”
I don’t recall him saying this, but my sister says that it made her feel like the most special girl in the world; that he was so proud of us simply for existing, but also for belonging to him.
We’d spend hours browsing the shelves in that old brick building with the dusty carpets and tiny back rooms, and on the long drive home I’d hold my new books in my hands and feel, for the first time, that sense of overwhelming possibility that settles in your heart when you know a new story is about to unfold.
I think it was both of these things that cultivated my love of reading and writing, plus the actual books he left behind when he and my grandmother drove back to Florida. Grandma and Grandpa Fox would stay upstate for weeks on end, but they were always gone before the days shortened, long ahead of that seasonal transformation that leaves the air crisp and the sky otherworldly.
One of the books he left behind was Puerto Vallarta Squeeze, a novel by Robert James Waller. My Grandpa left this book the last time he visited, though I never knew why. Had he finished the book? Had he hoped my brother, my sister, or me would pick it up and start reading?
All I know is that after he died, that book made me feel both comforted and distraught. What becomes of a person’s books after they die? What if the only thing that made it his was that he’d once consumed it while sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, sipping tea—and does his completion of it mean that someone else can now enjoy it?
For whatever reason, I always felt that I wasn’t allowed to read it. Instead, I read another book by Waller, The Bridges of Madison County. I read it twice, and loved it so much I painted its words on the walls of my bedroom:
“It's clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another.”
To this day, I wonder if my grandpa ever read this book too, because I knew this was how he felt about my grandmother. I made the choice to believe that she’d been brought to him, and him to her, by some divine force beyond control.
One day, I showed Grandpa an old fashioned oil lamp we used when the snow knocked out the power, and he said that there was no such thing as old fashioned, that things could only be old, like him. Then he tipped back his chin and let out a laugh that was raspy and warm.
I never got the chance to tell him that he actually was old fashioned—the way he sat in the rocking chair with a book on his lap, pausing every so often to turn a page and stroke his beard or adjust his wire-rimmed glasses. The way he stepped out of the front door and took off his straw hat to rub his bald head in the heat of the day.
But then again, I’d known him during a time that was neither old, nor old fashioned.
Those were the coach years.
***
In the seventies, Gene wore white t-shirts, short shorts, and a straw hat to shade the menacing Florida sun. He met Sheila working at LaPointe Canvas Shop in Stuart, where the two of them cut, stripped, and sewed milky canvas for seats and sails on boats in the marina. It was around this time that my mother’s sister, Therese, had her first horse. His name was Charlie Brown, and he’d been diagnosed with cancer.
When Gene heard the news that there was only one place for the horse to get treatment, and that Sheila didn’t have a truck or a trailer to transport it, he rented both from a friend and offered to drive—his way of climbing the fortress she had erected around herself. When Gene pulled up with the Ford and horse trailer that weekend, she slid her hips into the bench seat right next to him—her way of inviting him in.
They married in the backyard when Grandma was thirty-four, in the presence of her three children: Therese, John, and my mom, who was fourteen.
They took what they knew about sewing for boats and made their own business, Fox Tops, then started working in the hot sun outfitting fishing dinghies, luxury yachts, and everything in between. Their expertise won them both customers and competitions, and they carved out a name for themselves in the high-stakes world of marine upholstery.
“Everything we entered we won,” my grandma tells me.
She also says that working on the boats in the heat was miserable and that’s why they left the water and created a new business based around another, more grounded mode of transportation: vintage cars.
The first jewelry design Gene asked my mom to sketch for Goldenrods was a 32’ Ford Coupe. He picked it in part because he thought it was a popular design that would sell; but mostly, because it was his favorite. That Gene wanted to start a car-themed business wasn’t a shock to anyone—he’d been a hot-rod guy all his life.
That he wanted to sell jewelry in that business, however, wasn’t something any of his three step-children could have put their finger on, had they been asked to guess.
Yet the nature of Goldenrods’ products—pendants carved with the accurate anatomy of Model T’s and roadsters—concerned neither Sheila nor the kids.
Everything the man touched turned to gold.
***
Whether or not he always had more planned for Goldenrods is something I’ll always wonder.
All I know for sure is that when he saw the motorhome in downtown Fort Pierce, noticed the For Sale sign stuck on the windshield, he got a vision. As soon as Gene arrived home from work that day, he told Sheila he thought they should buy it.
She said, “what are we going to do with that?”
He stepped closer to her and looked into her wondering eyes and said, softly, “oh, well, I thought we might travel for awhile.”
It was a 1975 GMC palm beach motor coach, the color and size of a baleen whale.
They got the title in May of 1999 and when my grandma stepped into it for the first time she looked around at the peeling wallpaper and the sagging fabric and thought, there’s a lot of work to do.
Interior neglect aside, the coach needed a new engine, and there was one person they knew who could do it right: my dad. So Grandma taped and glued what she could, and Grandpa loaded up their cairn terrier, Rufus, and the three of them drove north on the interstate for 1,300 miles until they got to our white colonial house in rural New York State.
Grandma wasted no time giving chores to my sister and me. Mom went to work and Gene went with my dad, Ken, his repair shop in Albany. There they could outfit it with the biggest, most bad-ass motor on the market.
My brother Kenny went too, and alongside the other mechanics in the shop, the three of them spent their summer days tinkering to the tune of Willie Nelson with the garage doors peeled up like eyelids.
Working on cars together was a natural fit for Gene and Ken—my dad’s prized possession is his candy apple-colored ‘69 SS Camaro. But restoring the motorhome was hard work, and my dad always felt entitled to indulge when the labor was done. Most days, in the space between dusk and dinner, the salty stink of weed could be smelled coming from the garage or the barn or the back porch—one of the many luxuries of living in the country.
My mom says that my Grandpa must’ve partook in the fun from time to time, because she recalls one night that summer when she made chili for the family and the two of them gobbled up bowlfuls in between incessant laughter and gulps of steaming cornbread.
To see my father so carefree, and to see Grandpa alive with youth and joy—this is one of the moments I wish I would’ve known to savor.
***
The birch trees in New York had just begun to turn gold by the time the motor was finished.
This was my grandparents’ catapult into freedom—their one-way ticket to wanderlust in mid-life. They screwed on a new license plate and set out to sell memorabilia at car shows across the US. These great gatherings drew folks from every nook and cranny, many of them emerging from the underbelly of their vehicles just long enough to show them off.
Somewhere amidst all that nostalgia and chrome, Gene and Sheila were living their dream. Whether they were slicing smoked cheese in Wisconsin or watching the sunset in the Tennessee smokies, every state lent its own secrets to joy.
My grandma wouldn’t have gone on the road if it weren’t for Gene, but once she was riding shotgun—where nobody knew her name or expected anything at all—I think she could finally be herself. I think that’s why she loved him.
***
Now, in the garage where Gene and Sheila once worked, my aunt Therese unrolls massive spools to staple, button, and zipper. The sturdy fabric flows through her fingers and becomes a seat cover or a windshield, where it covers up the signs of time. She hauls the finished pieces to the Fort Pierce marina, then climbs onto fishing rigs and small vessels to continue the work Fox Tops started all those years ago.
My mother is here too; she came when my sister and brother and I grew up and my dad spiraled into the bottle and there was nowhere else to be. I think the river called her back, beckoned her with its certainty. Now she paints in the garage with country's top 100 playing, turning weathered palette slices into colorful strips of sea life and local flora. The beauty has always seemed to unravel from an untouchable place within her.
Outside, the motorhome is beached in the driveway. Sinking into the sand like a carcass—whose innards hold memories too painful to face—it is a family shrine to what once was.
I walk across the sun-bleached road barefoot, first passing the royal poinciana—the tree Therese bought and planted the year after Gene died. It took over a decade for it to bear a single red flower.
The wooden steps down to the river, which these days are shrouded by seagrapes, sag and moan beneath me. I tiptoe to the end of the dock where the whitecaps are blossoming in the river, where the shaggy pelican lands on the piling and gulps.
I wonder how many more storms the house will endure, now that my grandma is gone—gone from the place she called home for nearly fifty years.
When the rest of us leave this world in bodily form, what will become of this plot by the river, where even the dirt feels like it belongs to us?
And if it is flattened and developed and made into a mall or a mansion, will anyone know the names of the people who once lived here, or of the beauty they brought into this world?
The more I ask about the future, the more time comes unmoored, floating into the sky with the featherlight herons, just beyond reach.