THE BOAT COMES IN
Dance to your daddy, my little laddie
Dance to your daddy, my little man
You shall have a fish and you shall have a fin
You shall have a codling when the boat comes in
You shall have a haddock boiled in a pan
Dance to your daddy my little man
~“When the Boat Comes In,” traditional Northeast English folksong
I got the call from my wife when I was in the middle of a meeting at PharmaCom about a new drug that showed promise for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers weren’t ready to turn me and the rest of the writing unit loose on news releases until test results were more definitive, but they did want us to do some articles hinting at breakthroughs to come.
My phone was on vibrate, so I could have postponed responding until after the meeting, but I knew Annie would never call while I was at work without a good reason. I excused myself with a gesture and took the call in the hallway outside the conference room.
“I’m really sorry to screw up your day,” Annie said, “but your dad just totaled his new Corolla.
“Jesus,” I said. “Is he all right?”
“He’s okay, miraculously. We’re at Benson Emergency.”
“I’m on my way.”
“No rush. Really, he’s fine. He’s more concerned about his car. And they cut off his spring jacket in the ambulance.”
“The green one he bought the last time he was in Newcastle?”
“He’s pissed.”
“No doubt.” My sense of urgency diminished somewhat. “How did it happen?”
“He was on his way to get an oil change, and he’d stopped his car at a red light to make a left turn. When the light turned green, the driver behind him must have been in a hurry and honked his horn. John stepped on the accelerator and steered into the path of an oncoming car.”
“I’ll wind things up here as soon as I can,” I said.
“How’s it look for the Alzheimer’s drug?”
“I forget.”
“Bad joke,” Annie said.
The irony wasn’t lost on either of us, though my father certainly gave no signs of losing mental acuity.
“The cop on the scene wasn’t even going to give John a ticket,” Annie said. “I told him I wished he would. So he did. And John told me he should maybe quit driving.”
“Thanks, babe,” I said. “You may have saved some stranger’s life, never mind Dad’s.”
* * * *
On the way home from the hospital John said, “I feel fine, you know. Champion. Arm’s black and blue. But maybe I can go back to driving once t’car gets fixed.” His tone was querulous, in the Geordie accent he’d never quite lost despite having left Newcastle five decades earlier. “Why’d they have to take scissors to my good jacket?”
“The car’s a write-off, Dad.” I glanced in my rearview mirror long enough to catch Annie’s eye-roll from the back seat. “I’ll be glad to handle the insurance settlement.”
Annie chimed in. “Going back to driving doesn’t make sense, John. Just imagine if there’d been children in the other car.”
John took a few seconds to think about this, then said, “How am I meant to get around?”
I held up a hand. “We’ll drive you wherever you need to go.”
John lived in an apartment complex three miles from our downtown condo. He’d been unwilling to move out of the flat, which was really too big for him, after my mother’s death three years earlier. Not because of any sentimentality about my mother Eloise, I knew, but because he valued control. The complex catered to elderly residents, but John Fairbrother didn’t like being subject to the timetable of its shuttle service, or for that matter any other kind of authority.
His driving involved not much more than trips to the supermarket, doctor’s appointments, and weekend visits to our place to watch the Tigers or Lions, and of course the occasional Newcastle United Magpies game on one of the streaming services he’d never think of paying for. Nonetheless, our life was going to get more complicated. But what else could we do?
* * * *
Initially, we timed shopping trips for weekends when I was available or weekdays when Annie had no classes or office hours. Annie taught anthropology at the university, so she could spend a fair amount of time in her home office, so even before the accident she’d frequently been stuck with John’s problems while I was at work.
Dad would trundle around the market with his own cart and rendezvous with Annie or me at the checkout counter. Annie preferred the days when I could join them and help carry in the groceries. John preferred to shop on Wednesday, Senior Discount Day. After a while, though, he decided to give us a shopping list and stayed in his apartment to read or watch television.
“I don’t know why they charge me for all these shows,” he’d say about his bare-bones cable package. “All I watch are the three, what d’ye call ‘em, networks. Never bother with all those strange channels.”
Except when you come to visit us, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I wish you’d get out more. Going shopping is good exercise.”
“Annie does the needful,” John would respond. End of discussion.
So Annie would dutifully take the penciled lists, written in Dad’s meticulous old-fashioned cursive, bring back the groceries and carry them in, then show him the receipt so he could write her a check, just as meticulous but in ink.
“I get the feeling he’s hoping every time I’ll forget to ask him to pay up.” Annie shook her head ruefully. “Fat chance, after schlepping all the groceries in.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help more often,” I said with a frisson of guilt.
“Nothing for it,” she said. “You’re tied up all day. And I’m an academic, so I don’t really work for a living.” This last remark was our running joke about Annie’s colleagues, almost all of whom insisted they worked an eighty-hour week.
“At least his lists are easy to read,” I said.
Annie laughed. “They can be cryptic, though. His list the other day included muffins. ‘What kind?’ I asked. He almost did a double-take, then said, ‘English, of course.’”
I laughed, too. “I’d like to see him get into that with one of the employees at the market.”
* * * *
I would drive over to the apartment complex on weekends and bring John back to watch sports. On the fifteen-minute trip John would keep up a running analysis of other drivers’ shortcomings.
“Look at that oud wife,” he said on one occasion. “Divena ken enough to signal a change of lane.”
I glanced at the other car as it slowed to make a right turn. “Dad,” I said. “That old woman is probably younger than I am.”
But I knew Dad’s self-image was of the ballroom-dancing Lothario he’d been sixty years ago in England and for several decades afterward when he and Eloise had immigrated to the States with their young son: me. Not that I had ever known my father to stray, or even betray much interest in sex, though one day a couple of months before the traffic accident John had alluded to another “oud wife” in the apartment across the hall who kept inviting him in for coffee.
John had snorted. “I think she’s just ettlin to get lucky.”
I managed to suppress any smart-assed remark. His self-image clearly hadn’t altered with the years.
On his visits to our condo, he and I would eat snacks, washed down with beer and an occasional shot of single-malt scotch. Though I’d take a scotch with my father now and again, I never drank the beer, which I stocked especially for John. Avoiding the carbs was one of my own concessions to aging, even though John always eyed my diet soft drinks with disapproval.
“This is champion beer,” he said one day, and it was, made at a local micro-brewery. It’s no’ Broon,” he added, referring to his beloved Newcastle Brown Ale, “but it’s no’ bad.”
“It’s readily available,” I pointed out. “We get it at the grocery store. You could, too.”
John grunted. “If I bought it, I’d just drink it.” The beer he bought for himself was Miller Lite, a step up from ditchwater. But it came cheap, in a case of thirty cans, the extra six tinted orange to emphasize the savings. And his scotch was J & B. No tempting malt whisky for him, except on weekends.
“This cheese is good and all,” John said of our favorite Irish cheddar.
“We get that at the market, too,” I said. This brought on another ambiguous grunt.
Annie would usually head off to Macy’s while John and I watched the Tigers, the Lions, the Red Wings, now and then the Pistons, and whenever possible the Magpies. Then she’d return, often sneaking her purchases into the house so John wouldn’t realize my second wife was such an extravagant woman. My first wife, Rhonda, had shared his frugality. He had taken a long time to get over my falling in love with Annie; she had forgiven him his coldness more easily than some of the grievances I hung onto. And that was why I loved her.
“He likes the way we live,” Annie said one day after I had taken John back to his apartment. “And he can afford everything we can. He just can’t summon the will to do it.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “He never spends an extra dime on himself. Or anyone else.”
Annie laughed. “He just can’t bring himself to loosen up and enjoy himself unless he’s here.”
“I guess it’s not going to happen now,” I said. “Not at his age. Not after a lifetime buying me Christmas presents at second-hand shops and keeping Mum on an allowance.”
Annie shook her head. “And charging you room and board all the way through college.”
* * * *
“John is so lucky to have Dr. Diefendorfer,” Annie said some months later after taking him for an exam, none of which could be described now as routine. “With his congestive heart failure and phlebitis he’d likely never have had the last few years to enjoy if Dr. D hadn’t been so vigilant about tuning him up.”
“I hope Dad’s all right at the moment,” I said. “He was in a big rush to get to the restroom.”
We’d just arrived at Food Waltz, a newly trendy restaurant where we were treating Dad to brunch after a visit to the young doctor who’d been our own family physician for ten years, and who—we were happy to note—was enough younger than all of us to make his being around for the foreseeable future a reasonable bet.
Dr. D’s latest diagnosis was that John’s pacemaker was working nicely, and that his apparently grapefruit-sized prostate wouldn’t be an issue at his age. “More men his age die with prostate cancer than from it,” Dr. D had told us. Of more concern was John’s general mobility, exacerbated by phlebitis that would be more dangerous to operate on than leave alone, and by his gradually diminishing kidney function.
“Ready to order?” A rail-thin young waiter with Kohl-lined eyes smiled down at us, pad and pencil poised.
“We’re waiting for our guest,” Annie said. “He should be back shortly.”
“No problem. I’ll be back soon, too.” The kid grinned, turned on the heels of his earth-friendly shoes, and walked off.
“Nice that we’re not causing a problem,” Annie said. Food Waltz was located conveniently, but was not one of our favorite places, even though it was hugely popular among farm-to-table enthusiasts.
“The only problem around here is pronouncing ‘scone’ properly,” I said and got up. “I’m going to check on Dad.”
I made my way past murals of babies nestled under cabbage leaves and fields full of other primary-colored vignettes that celebrated organic farming. No pesky pesticides. Nor pesky pests. When I got into the antiseptic-smelling men’s room, it gave no sign of occupation save for one stall with a closed door. “Dad?” I said.
“Edward?” John’s voice sounded oddly tremulous from the closed stall.
I approached the door. “It’s me, Dad. Are you okay?”
“Edward,” John said again, as if fixing it in his mind. He went on reluctantly. “I’ve messed myself. I’ve peed myself. I couldn’t get in here on time.”
My pulse quickened. This was the beginning of something, I realized. “How about your trousers?” I asked.
“They’re okay. Damp. But my underwear’s soaked.” John spoke each word like the admission of an atrocity.
“Push the underwear under the door, Dad.” I got a sheaf of recycled paper towels from a dispenser. “I’ll get rid of it.”
“I could wash them,” John said in a firmer tone, his concern for thrift a lurch toward normalcy. “No need to throw away a good pair of briefs. Maybe you can find a plastic bag.”
“Not here, Dad.” I wrapped John’s sodden tightie-whities in paper towels and dumped them in a waste container. Adult diapers, I thought. We’d need to add them to the next shopping list.
The rest of brunch was somber. Not even the chance to correct the waiter’s pronunciation of “scone” could cheer John. “I’ve told yon fellow before,” he said. “Skahn, not skohne. Then he corrects me. They’re not really scones, anyway. More like shortcake, full of fruit and covered in icing.”
Annie and I exchanged looks. I’d tell her later about the toilet crisis, though I knew her always-sensitive nose had registered the faint whiff of urine.
If you like this sample of A Chance in This World, order it now, ahead of press time, and have it shipped to your door when it’s published in December/January.
Arnold Johnston’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. Arnie’s recent books of poetry are In and Out: Love Poems (2025), The Infernal Now (2022), and Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been (2020). His two novels are Swept Away (2021) and The Witching Voice, A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns (2009). His plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife Deborah Ann Percy, have won over 300 productions, readings, awards, and publications across the country and internationally. Arnie taught for many years at Western Michigan University, where he co-founded the creative writing program and founded the playwriting program.