"I'm sorry I said it for you," she said at last.
"I know."
"I'm not sorry I'm angry at him."
"Good," said Gussie. "You're allowed to be. I'm angry at him. I've been angry at him since the first Bush administration. I don't think either of us has to stop being angry to sit at a table. I think that was my mistake. I thought you had to pick one."
Coralie took her phone out of her back pocket, looked at it, and then, deliberately, put it face down on the wicker table and left it there.
"Are you going to forgive him?" she said.
Gussie considered the question honestly, the way she would have considered a claim, with all the photographs laid out.
"I'm going to have breakfast with him," she said. "Tomorrow. He says he makes a decent omelet now, which is a lie, he never made a decent anything. But I'm going to eat it. Let's start there. I'm sixty-nine. I don't have the time to decide the whole thing at once anymore, and I don't think I'd want to if I did."
That night they grilled the crab, along with a dozen others Tadeo and Zinnia had caught off the dock in the late afternoon, and corn, and some hamburgers for the people who did not trust crab, and they ate on the screened porch of the Pelican at a long table with a vinyl cloth printed with lighthouses. Lysander came over on the boardwalk at seven, slowly, and climbed the twenty-two stairs with Ramsay on one side of him, at his speed. He sat at the far end of the table, between Tadeo and Sunita. Gussie sat at the other end, between Zinnia and Coralie. There were seven chairs. Nobody said anything about it. Halfway through the corn, Lysander told a story about a pontoon boat in Kentucky that Gussie had heard from the other side, and Ramsay put his head down on the table and groaned, and Gussie said, "That is not how it happened," and told it her way, and Lysander said, "That is exactly how it happened, Gus, you just left out the part where you were steering," and everyone at the table turned to look at her, and she said, with dignity, "I was not steering. I was advising," and Zinnia laughed so hard she got corn up her nose.
Coralie did not speak to her father all through dinner. But when he got up to go, at nine, and started down the twenty-two stairs, she got up too, without a word, and went down on his other side, so that it was Ramsay on his left and Coralie on his right, and Gussie stood at the screen and watched the three of them go down, one step and then a pause and then another step, slowly, at his speed.
She went up to the crow's nest at ten.