Water from My Heart by Charles Martin Page B

the flats, but the top three blue marlin world records were caught in the deep waters within spitting distance of the beach. Sport fishermen catch everything in between. By boat, it’s an hour and twenty-minute trip from Miami. Less if your boat is well equipped. Its culture is everything Miami is not and wishes it was—an island. The Bahamians are beautiful, laid-back, and the British influence exists in more than just accent. The north-south island is little more than three miles long, and at its widest point, it might be a quarter mile wide. There are essentially two parallel roads, there are about as many bars as homes, and if there happens to be a funeral, the streets will shut down along with much of the town. In its heyday, it was one of the sport fish capitals of the world. Hemingway frequented here. As did Zane Grey. Multiple movie stars. The water is turquoise, the beach is white, the women are bronzed, and the breeze always blows. Early in its history, the island of Bimini was populated by a colony of freed slaves. Many of the modern-day residents are direct descendants.
    I fit right in.
    I landed on the island, took a deep breath, and knew that I’d found the antidote to Pickering and Sons. I slung my backpack across my back, slid on my flip-flops, and pulled my Costas down over my eyes. After finding a hotel room “by the month,” I began strolling the streets. A few blocks later, I stumbled upon Legal Grounds, the local coffee shop.
    Jake Riggins graduated Miami Law two decades earlier. After an unsatisfactory decade practicing law, Jake, late forties, thumbed his nose at South Florida and took up residence on the eastern coast of Bimini, where he put his law degree to use making coffee and defending the occasional drug runner with enough money to bring him out of retirement.
    Legal Grounds was a home run and exactly what I needed. Jake did coffee and he did it right. He started with good coffee—he had a thing for Tanzanian and South African but mixed in some Central American as well—ground it with a burr grinder, boiled water, let the boil run off, bloomed the coffee, and then slowly poured the water over the grounds to release the flavor. Perfection every time. Jake’s nickname was “Picasso,” and when it came to coffee, he was.
    After a few weeks of sun, Jake’s coffee, and a cool island breeze aided by not a single care in the world, I found my rhythm in Bimini. A month in and I bought a hurricane shack on the northwest corner of the island for a few thousand dollars. It sat up on a small bluff beneath some huge trees, and the sunsets from my porch were, hands down, the best on the island. I had to renovate pretty much the entire thing, including the walls and roof, but I was in no hurry. Six months in and I was actually sleeping in a bed with a roof over my head and four strong walls surrounding me. In my bedroom, I had an AC unit, although I seldom turned it on. The breeze across my bedroom was plenty. I would not say that I had a plan or a goal. Not in the traditional sense of “knowing where I wanted to go in life.” I didn’t. I just knew what I didn’t want to be.
    I wasn’t running to, I was running from.
    Working to get my house in order made me a regular at the hardware and lumber store, where I kept bumping into an old Bahamian man with gnarled hands, sun-weathered skin, white hair, wide straw hat, deep wrinkles, and a smile that just wouldn’t quit. You know that thing that some old men have that makes everybody want to just sit and be quiet with them? He had it. He must have been eighty years old, but most every day we shared a “Mornin’” in the lumberyard or while staring at stainless steel screws in the fasteners aisle. Occasionally, he’d hold up a price tag and squint. “Forgot my reading glasses.” I’d quote him a price, he’d nod, and then about once a week, I’d bump into him at Jake’s, where he enjoyed a coffee while rolling his cigarette.
    One morning