Baja Florida Read Free Page B

Which can be considerable. My mise en place is better described as me really messing up the place.
    So when we were done with dinner, I got out of the way and headed down to the boat house with Shula. She was strapped in a baby sling, a papoose-style contraption that let her ride on my chest so she could face out and see everything I saw.
    Time was when I would spot a father hauling his child around in a baby sling and think: No way on God’s good earth will you ever catch me wearing one of those things.
    Then Shula came along. And I got soft in the head.
    My office, such as it was, occupied the first floor of the boat house. I stepped inside, flipped on the light, looked around: Sofa, desk, refrigerator, rods and reels, cast nets, tackle boxes, outboard motor propellers, gas cans, motor oil, nautical charts, a couple of crab traps, scuba tanks, assorted flotsam and jetsam that I couldn’t remember exactly how it got there or what I needed it for.
    There wasn’t any work that really needed doing in my office, but it gave me a sense of accomplishment to visit it occasionally, put in an appearance, let it know who was the boss.
    Before long, I’d have company on the two floors above me. I wasn’t sure exactly how many people would be making the move to the new Orb Communications headquarters. As many as twenty perhaps. Editors, an art director, and a couple of designers. Some accounting people, the circulation director, and an IT guy. Barbara ran a pretty bare-bones operation. The ad reps were scattered all over the place and telecom-muted mostly. Barbara farmed out the HR work.
    Compared to the rest of the magazine business, which was in a fiery tailspin, Barbara’s publications were holding their own. The flagship, Tropics, was a few pages thinner than in previous years, but circulation was steady and a loyal core of advertisers remained on board. Barbara had steered the company more in the direction of custom publishing for niche audiences. Quarterly in-room magazines for boutique hotel chains. Slick biannual publications for some high-end resorts and a couple of cruise lines. A few months before Shula’s birth, she had made a trip back to London, met with some old college friends now in high places, and landed lucrative contracts for publishing the annual reports of several international corporations. She called it bottom-feeding, but it bulked up the cash flow. And there was enough hope in the future to constitute a capital investment in a new office atop the boat house.
    Not all the staff was happy about leaving Winter Park. For those who’d be moving to Minorca Beach, Barbara was helping absorb the relocation costs. And for those who would be making the haul back and forth, she was leasing a couple of vehicles for carpooling and giving plenty of flex time. She was good to her people.
    I was good to my people, too. I told him he had put in a long, hard day and it was time to knock off for the night.
    â€œThanks, boss,” I said.
    Then I flipped off the office light, locked the door.
    I walked Shula and me out on the dock and sat us down at the end, feet dangling over the water.
    Shula cooed and made her little-girl, gurgly sounds. What ever she was saying, it was brilliant.
    I cooed back and made gurgly sounds of my own. Yeah, totally soft in the head.
    I sipped from the glass of rum I’d brought from the house. Flor de Caña. From Nicaragua. The twelve-year-old old stuff. My go-to brand of late. I sampled some more.
    Drinking while daddying. Call the authorities.
    The big lights that hung out over the end of the dock illuminated the water and I could spot shrimp after shrimp working their way in the falling tide. My Oak Hill Sock was close at hand. It’s a tight-mesh dip net on a twelve-foot aluminum pole. The net funnels at the end and hangs down like a long tube sock. The shrimp stay put in there so you don’t have to empty the net every time you catch one.
    It was a