It's gotten cold. Grief is weird. I'm ok, and then I'm not ok. And when I'm not ok, I'm really not ok. I'm sobbing, these wheezing, keening, gulping squalls. Then they pass. Sometimes, I think, every day is taking me away from him, like a sailboat moving from the shore. Each day takes me farther away from the days when I had a father. What a father. Funny and quirky and handsome. My friends thought he was my brother. "You never told me you had a brother..." they would say. He grew up in Coconut Grove, in a house on Poinciana, built in the 1800's, with dark cypress floors, and deep shadowy galleries, and ceiling fans. He got kicked out of Coral Gables High, and so, after a substantial donation from my grandparents, was accepted to Ransom Everglades (except then, it was just Ransom. Everglades was the girl's school.) He met his best friend then, Fernando, a boarder from Cuba. Blonde. Rich. They would go to Havanna on the weekends. He would be killed in the Bay of Pigs. His family was one of many herded by Fidel into a stadium and slaughtered. There's a photo of my father, dancing on a porch with a smiling, dark-eyed, blonde girl. Fernando's sister? My father wouldn't talk about those pictures or the people in them. That's my half-hour.