Chapter 1

You know how I got interested in the weather? My father was a sailor, my grandfather was a submariner, and my last name is Beaufort. Of course, both my ancestors were nicknamed Windy, but my first name is Gale, so yeah, no need to extrapolate on that. My mother had had a lot of miscarriages, and I had older siblings, so I was technically number nine. I didn’t like being raised in such a big family. We weren’t always very nice to each other. Some of these siblings were halves or steps, and I wasn’t sure I even cared who was which for a long time. Dad got mean in his old age. Both he and his own father drank a lot and several of my siblings did, also. Until my mother went to Al-Anon, our home was pure hell. I was already fourteen years old, by then, and had my own problems.

At fourteen, I discovered I was gay. Now, that was a secret I had no intention of letting anyone know. We already had the elephant in the living room that nobody talked about, and Dad was way too soused to go to AA. Grandpa has lost his marbles by then—alcohol induced psychosis, maybe—something like that, and my mother was just sick of the whole lot of us. Those of us who didn’t drink were screwed up as well in other ways. Except for my only younger sibling, Abigail, who was—I’m going to say it—retarded. You all know the euphemisms. Until I was eleven or so, I did not. And after then, I started walking her to her school, which was right near my combined junior and senior high, because nobody else in the family was reliable enough to take her and bring her home.

After high school, I joined the Navy and stayed in for nine years. At the age of twenty-seven, I went home. I had sort of known it, but there wasn’t much of it there anymore. Nobody had really written, and I hated them for it. All those people in my family, and you know who wrote me? Abigail’s teacher, Dave Crowley.

The town I lived in was near the coast, a small town in Connecticut that had never quite made the transition, somehow, to New York City commuter base. In many ways, it still lived in the fifties. My old house was still there, but it was abandoned, decrepit. I parked out front and went in anyway. I was pissed off enough that, if it fell in on me, I wouldn’t care.

It looked like fire, rain, and parties had had their way with it. There was an old cat sitting on the one piece of furniture left, a saggy old chair that looked familiar. So, did the cat, actually. They fit together. I had to guess it was a good mouser, or a neighbor had been feeding it. I went upstairs and all the windows were blown out or broken. My old room still had a poster on the wall, one of my grandfather posed on his submarine, made from an old photo of the sub as it had come in through the Hood Canal Bridge on the other side of the country.

It was rotten and water-stained, but it made a pain in my heart to see it. He was gone now, my father, too. Dave had written and sent me the obituaries. We’d kept up our correspondence, me in desperation, I guess, and to know how my sister was doing, as well. I was meeting him for supper, later. I wanted to thank him, and I wondered if I’d recognize him at all.

When I went back downstairs, there was an old man in the kitchen. It was my neighbor, John Potts. He must have been in his eighties, by now. “One good blow and this will all fall down, which isn’t a bad thing,” he mused. Reaching out to shake my hand, he said, “Welcome back. Thank you for your service, son.”

I wanted to say thank you for yours, to this old veteran who had seen foreign countries at their worst. I was too moved to speak, however. He’d also seen my family at their worst, a war in miniature.

He looked uncomfortable and then cleared his throat. “I don’t know if anyone told you, but your sister Abigail, she was here last week. That place she lives now, they taught them kids, well I think of them as kids, how to take the buses and everything, and she found her way here. I heard noises and came over and found her, sitting in that chair, playing with that cat. I think the cat belongs to some other neighbor. I don’t know.”

We both looked at the cat. “Oh, my God,” I breathed.