Richard gasped as the shimmering shoal of smelt broke the surface of the water just ahead of his kayak. A seal arced up among them, mouth agape, and snatched a fish before descending back into the water. Then the shoal was gone.

I’m an orphan, Richard thought, an actual orphan.

“Did you see that?” Katherine, one of the two clients Richard was guiding, said.

Richard turned, “Yes,” he said, thinking of his mother when she was at the peak of her career.

“Awesome,” Rus, Katherine’s husband said, from the stern of the double sea-kayak he and Katherine were paddling.

“Were they mackerel?” Rus asked.

“Smelt,” Richard said, hearing his mother’s laugh in his head and then remembering the last time he saw his father before he too died.

“It’s so beautiful out here,” Katherine said as they paddled towards the just submerged sand bar that connected the two small pine covered islands that lay ahead of them.

The tide was ebbing and Richard picked up the pace so they could cross the sandbar while there was still enough water to clear it.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s always different but always beautiful.” Life, he thought, you just never knew.

“That was something,” he added, “that seal. So close.”

“Yes,” Katherine said, “I love Maine.”

Two funerals in three months, Richard thought and six trips across the Atlantic in seven months.

“Where are you from in England?” Catherine asked.

“The south,” Richard said, “Sussex. A little village at the foot of The Downs.” And now, he thought, his parents’ house was empty. It had taken him five days to clear and clean it.

“The Downs?” Katherine asked.

“The rolling hills just inland from the sea,” Richard said, remembering the warm early evening when he’d scattered his parents’ ashes on top of The Downs, the village he’d grown up in nestled below.

“Oh,” Katherine said, “I do love those country villages.”

“It really hasn’t changed there since I was a kid,” Richard said.

“I think we’re going to make it,” Rus said, as both kayaks passed over the sandbar with inches to spare.

“Yes,” Richard said.

“Another ten minutes and we wouldn’t have made it,” Richard said, thinking about how odd it was to deliver the two eulogies, standing at the lecturn in the chapel, a coffin to the right, sitting on rollers, half concealed by a parted red curtain.

“It’s almost like a vagina,” his ex-sister-in-law had whispered to him, “like he’s going back in.”

“No,” Rus said.

“Osprey,” Richard said, pointing with his paddle towards the tip of Nautilus Island where the bird was swopping gracefully in the breeze.

“I saw it,” Katherine said.

“Perfect,” Rus added.

“Yes,” Richard said, wondering how it was that after his father’s funeral, the depression he had been suffering from since his mother’s death had quite suddenly disappeared, and he felt like himself again.

“What a great day,” Katherine said, as they watched the osprey circle again before it flew round the pine-covered tip of Nautilus Island.

“Sure is,” Rus said.

After the debriefing on the dock by the kayak racks, they walked up the ramp to the pier and back to the shed where Richard stowed the paddles and hung the life jackets out to air.

“That was spectacular,” Rus said. Katherine was beaming. “Yes,” she said, “thank you so much.”

“A pleasure,” Richard said.

He watched as they walked off together towards the parking lot, holding hands. He saw Katherine turn towards Rus and say something. Rus laughed. It was his birthday, Katherine had told him, and they’d just dropped their daughter of at Colby for her first semester.

“Good people,” Richard thought to himself as he unrolled the notes Rus had pressed into his hand before they left. There were two twenty-dollar bills. Richard smiled.

Rus and Katherine were out of sight now.

The sea sparkled in the warm breeze and Richard watched a small fleet of sailboats racing on the other side of the bay, their hulls tipped in the wind, their white sails firmly hauled in.

I’m an orphan, he thought.