Synopsis

After his wife’s betrayal, Mark jumps on the first flight out, heading for Central America. He soon joins Aaron, a South African dive master, and Kendal, a quirky fellow American.

But their friendships get more complicated by the day.

Kendal finds Mark’s needy misery a welcome diversion from her problems. Her husband, Charlie, is thirty years her senior and dying, and Kendal has sought solace in the arms of Charlie’s best friend, Aaron.

Charlie may be dying, but he’s not blind, and his tickle of suspicion becomes an unbearable scratch. He’s always been Kendal’s protector, and now he must struggle with his illness and the risks of finding out the truth.

Funny, heartwarming, and tragic, this poignant story is ultimately about love, survival, and redemption as Mark, Kendal, and Aaron navigate the rough seas of life.

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Excerpt

He remembered the first time the poignant pleasure of Belize had struck him, hard and almost senseless. It was during the bus ride from the airport, zipping along the Hummingbird Highway as if buses defied almost every law of physics, his black plastic bag of cold Belikins chattering and sweating between his feet, one cool bottle of the beer held firmly in his hand. The bus was hot and stuffy; the steamy air blasting in from the windows did little to dispel the general odor of crowded, overheated humans—the combination of sweat and urine and beer, mingled with the occasional scent of an orange someone sliced open or a floral whiff wafting through the windows.

He’d watched with amazement as the flat countryside, scattered with brush and palmettos, began to change and thicken with greenery and then began to seethe up into soft hills. Then, quite suddenly, they were in the dense drama of the jungle-covered Maya Mountains. Astoundingly breathtaking views flashed by his window: jungle hillsides, tall fans of ferns, huge palms, yellow flowers highlighting the canopy, row after row of orange trees, one tiny village or small farm after the other. The beer—three empty bottles clanking with five remaining—now safely pulsating through his bloodstream helped to enhance the feeling of awe. And then the quick flashing glimpses of the small piles of debris, the half-finished structures, concrete blocks stretching toward the sky; rusty abandoned cars; the exaggerated hip bones of horses staked to eat the slight offerings of grass by the road; a naked, forgotten doll, its arms twisted in a broken sort of way; a white dog so thin that it almost staggered gratefully into the path of the bus.

He was slapped by the beauty and the ugliness and how the two blended into one another in a soft sigh. He tilted his head back and drew in a long cool drink of the Belikin; and when his gaze returned to the window, he saw the crushed school bus nearly reclaimed by the jungle, a pretty vine with large purple flowers snaking through the broken windows, its tires pointing skyward in a small valley. But before he could truly process it, the image was gone. His own bus rose up, and it seemed to leave the pavement. He looked forward, and they were hurtling toward the green lushness of a mountain, and he closed his eyes involuntarily, unwilling to entertain the visual of his impending death.

It was fitting that it should end this way—a fiery crash in the jungle—and how many years would it take for someone to view what remained and not feel some sort of sadness? How many years until all that was left was a tangle of green? But when he was forced to reopen his eyes, the bus was skittering around a curve then cruising effortlessly up another mountain, and he put his head down and vomited neatly into his bag of beer. He set the bag back between his feet and felt the warmth mingling with the cold as it seeped through the plastic and settled around his sandals.  He had, of course, survived the bus ride. His intention had been to settle in Placencia, remembering it as a laid-back, sleepy fishing village with cute, colorful buildings and beautiful beaches. The memories were soft and quixotic. Cathy stretched out on the beach—her long, dark hair splayed upon the sand, tiny beads of sweat between her breasts—pouring cold beer onto her stomach, and the salty, bitter sensation of sucking it from her navel. The night they’d skinny-dipped—the wet sea slipping between their legs, the unseen creatures slithering in the dark waters, freaking each other out—fleeing the sea and running naked and screaming across the sand back to their cabana, their wet slimy bodies coming together with frenzied glee, laughing hysterically in each other’s arms. Then the overpowering need to be in her—pushing her to the bed, her body dotted with tiny pieces of seaweed, a fine dusting of sand between her thighs, her arms reaching out and pulling him down. It had been the most intense orgasm he’d ever had.

His best sex, already behind him?

But Mark never made it back to Placencia. When the bus stopped for a quick rest in Dangriga, he’d thankfully staggered from it, relished the stillness of the earth and the sound of the sea. Then he just simply did not reboard. Hours later, he was laughing, drinking coconut rum, and smoking weed with some locals on the beach. There was a vague memory of a crazy ride in the back of a pickup and then the more painful memory of waking up spooning his luggage, his face nestled into the coarse white sand, his shoulder already burned in the weak morning sun.

“Hey! Man!” he’d called while freeing grains of sand from his ear canal. “Where am I?”

The warm laughter from the tall, dark man who strolled toward his fishing boat reached his ears over the gentle pulse of the waves. “Hopkins, mon. You’re in Hopkins.”

And that’s where he’d settled—in the strange and beautiful Garifuna village, abundant with warm laughter and as welcoming as a soft bed.

About the Author

Karen Winters Schwartz wrote her first truly good story at age seven. Forty-five years later her professional writing career finally began in 2010, when the first of three widely praised novels, Where Are the Cocoa Puffs?, Reis’s Pieces, and The Chocolate Debacle were published by Goodman Beck Publishing. Red Adept Publishing released Legend of the Lost Ass in 2020, and her latest novel The Vast Clear Blue in 2023. Both are richly emotional stories about love and relationships and take place in the exotic setting of Belize.

Educated at The Ohio State University, Karen and her husband moved to the Central New York Finger Lakes region where they raised two daughters and shared a career in optometry. She now splits her time between Arizona, a small village in Belize, and traveling the earth in search of the many creatures with whom she has the honor of sharing this world.

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