If we could celebrate your birthday together this year, I’d come into the house after closing down my store for the day.

You’d be sitting in front of the TV in the armchair on the right, the one that Mom had re-upholstered in some Eastern-inspired toile print that none of us liked, the chair you died in. You’d be watching Chopped Junior or the Great British Baking Show, and it would be an episode I knew you had already seen. I’d say “Happy Birthday!” and give you a kiss on the cheek, and you’d give me your thump-on-the-back hug.

“Should we do some martinis?” you would say as I made my way into the kitchen. I would pick around the mold on the outside of the blue cheese, cutting the good bits into slivers before tamping them into six pitted green olives. I’d put your glass in the ice chest because it is your birthday and this martini ought to be my best. Out would come the magnum bottle of Chopin you always kept in the freezer door and the jars of tipsy cocktail onions and plump caper berries.

You would ask me about the store, and make suggestions for garnering more business, like an Instagram fashion show. I would wonder if you really understood how Instagram worked, but my response would be noncommittal. “Not a bad idea!” My hands would stick to the frost on the outside of the martini shaker as I shook it in my best bartender impression. I’d slam the lip of the lid down against the granite countertop edge in an attempt to dislodge it, prompting a disapproving glance from Mom over her readers as she perched on a barstool working on a Sudoku or needlepoint.

I would fill yours to the very top and bring it over. “Ooh, lovely!” you would say, as if you were surprised by its arrival, like a free drink had been sent to you across the bar.

I would sit down next to you and put my socked feet up on the coffee table. We would sip our martinis as the kid on Chopped realized he’d forgotten to turn the ice cream maker on.

You would tell me that you’d been thinking, and that we really needed to kick things up a notch this year. It was always this time of year that the big idea gears starting turning in your head. You would call me between patients with revelations. “I think if we started training now, we could have a serious shot at getting you into professional boxing!” I had never boxed a day in my life, save the day after Christmas when you took us to the park with a trunk full of sparring gear and Lucas made me cry and you accidentally gave Jacob a nosebleed.

But today, just after Daylight Saving, it would have been about fishing. “We’ve got to get into the tautog this year, Bob knows where to get them, we just gotta make sure we’ve got four, five, of our best rod/reel combos ready to go.”

I would nod, not thrilled about chasing tautog, but happy to humor you anytime you were on a kick. I knew it meant I’d be spending a day in the garage combing through tackle boxes, prying apart tangled treble hooks and discarding bucktails turned orange with rust, while you sat on the Coleman cooler that you had written YETI on with a sharpie. Your palpable excitement would forge cracks in the wall of my dissent.

Amid the brainstorming you’d remember you had a pie in the oven — key lime — and hadn’t set a timer. I’d glide across the kitchen tiles in my socks to check. “Needs more time” I’d say, settling back in my chair and fishing a stuffed olive from my martini. “You ought to swing by Coop’s and see if he won’t take you out back for some fly casting,” you’d say. I would agree, even though I didn’t have the nerve to swing by alone and ask a favor of a legend.

“When does the boat go in?” I would ask, keeping the ideas going while I grabbed your present from my purse. This year it would be a bluetooth smartphone fishing tracker, even though our boat GPS already allows us to drop pins and name locations. Fishing gadgets are my go-to gift to you. We both know they’re really only a gesture. They are my unspoken pledge: mornings are meant for spending on the water with you and I will get up at 5:30 a.m. no matter how many Katama in the Afternoons I drank at the Covington last night.

“How cool!” you would say as you turned the gift over in your hands, reading the packaging. I know I’d probably find it still in its box many years later. But I would beam and point out that you could add pictures to the posts, a good way for us to look back and see where they were biting on what date year over year.

It would be an assumption that we’d have more time together, another fishing season, more birthdays, time to see the kids from Chopped Junior grow up and appear on a junior champions showdown episode.

We would drain our martinis, you would look at me and say, “What’s wrong with this martini?” And I’d say “There’s nothing in it,” as I got up to make another round.

Grace Romanowsky lives in Edgartown.