Troubled Sea Read Free

into buying the beach house, but Bud rarely stayed there. When he was at Caracol, he preferred living on his yacht. Who wouldn’t ?
    Hetta shook her head, refusing to have her beautiful day tainted with worrisome thoughts of Bud’s blonde faux pas. She picked up the pace, arms pumping. A seagull yawped and settled on shore to watch her.
    “Pipe down, you rat with wings,” Hetta growled. The gull yammered and stared. “And wipe that grin off your beak. So what if I look like that battery bunny? I work hard to stay only twenty pounds overweight.”
    The gull, unimpressed, squawked, flew ahead, landed, waited, and then hopscotched ahead again.
    Hetta, on the alert for sea treasures offered up by the storm, spotted a particularly nice golden cockle, slowed to scoop it up, inspected it on the move and stowed it in her dive bag.
    “Like I need another shell,” she told the gull. After her walks, Hetta’s bag usually bulged with empty oil bottles, beer cans and plastic bags, as well as shells, sea fans, sun bleached starfish and sea urchin remains. Once she even found an entire dolphin skeleton, which now hung from a lakeside scrub oak in front of her father’s Texas Hill Country home. The skeletal remains never failed to provoke comment, and Hetta’s dad was not above leading Yankee tourists down the garden path about its origins.
    Hetta smiled, thinking of her daddy’s trophy tree and her own Texan roots. “I sure fooled that bunch of naysayers, bird.” For most of her life her family politely referred to Hetta as a bachelorette, a term far more diplomatic than “old maid.”
    Eschewing the Southern Belle tradition, she opted instead to follow her father’s  steel toed bootsteps into the heavy construction industry. Hetta followed her own worldwide career while her cousins, sister and friends chalked up marriages, children, homes, and then divorces, child custody battles, and new spouses, ad nauseam. Hetta Coffey remained single, viewed as an eccentric by some, a spirited adventurer by others, and a bossy old maid by many. Hetta liked to think of herself as assertive and independent.
    Hetta had worked in several countries, traveled to even more, and due to several inauspicious love affairs had all but given up on meeting a suitable companion, much less a husband.
    Seven years before, when her dog died, she decided to simplify her life. No longer needing a yard for her beloved yellow lab, she sold her house and bought a boat. Had she had any idea how much more trouble a boat could be than a house, or how incredibly expensive it was to maintain, Hetta might not have made such a drastic move. But that boat changed her life. At thirty-seven—an age, she read in a women's magazine, when she was more likely to be assassinated by a terrorist than find a man—she met Robert “Jenks” Jenkins.
    Jenks was forty-five, divorced for twenty years. Following his Viking ancestors to sea at eighteen, he retired from the United States Navy, had a second career in the fire protection industry, and traveled and worked in several countries. After the failure of his marriage and then a long-term, long-distance affaire d’coeur that slowly dwindled, he had no intention of finding a permanent companion, suitable or not.
    Then, over a smoky Bay Area yacht club bar packed with Liar’s Dice players, Jenks’s blue eyes met Hetta’s brown ones. It was love at first sight.
    “Well, not quite,” Hetta told the seagull. “Old Jenks made a run for his life.”
    Much to the amusement and amazement of her family and friends, short plump Hetta went after the long lean Jenks with the dogged determination of a Redbone hound. When finally treed, Jenks surrendered his bachelorhood for domestic bliss. If one could call living on a boat all that domestic.
    Hetta and Jenks sold both their boats, pooled their resources and were married aboard their newly acquired forty-two foot powerboat, HiJenks . Hetta’s only regret was that her mother didn't