“Have you ever seen anything like this before, Da?” Marcus asked.
“Never,” his father said. He’d been as stubborn and strong as ever through his diagnosis and cancer treatment, but now there were undercurrents of defeat in his cracking voice. He picked up one segment to look at it and it fell apart in his hand. “Look at that. It’s garbage. It’s as though something gnawed through parts of it and cut other sections with a knife. Garbage,” he repeated, letting it fall back to the wooden planks with a slithering thump.
“Could a shark have gotten tangled up in it somehow?” Marcus asked, thinking of the one he and Beka had come up against just a couple of days before. The thought of her made his chest hurt and his head ache. It hadn’t been that long since he’d seen her, but it seemed like without her presence his spirit was as shredded as this net. Ridiculous. Intolerable. But there it was.
“I don’t see how a shark could do this,” his father said, standing up slowly. “But I can’t think of any other explanation either.” He gazed down at the mess, the lines in his face carved by years in the sun and the wind seeming to grow deeper as Marcus watched.
“I can’t afford a new net,” his da admitted reluctantly. “The fishing has been that bad this year. There’s no money for a replacement.” His eyes skittered over the ship, taking in all the places where he’d skimped on repairs or touch-ups. Marcus had been working on a few of the smaller ones when no one was around, but the ship still looked a lot less polished and trim than it had when he was growing up. As far as he could tell, his father hadn’t noticed any of the improvements; all the old man saw was the imperfections. He’d always been that way.
“Maybe I’m too old for this,” Marcus Senior said, his gnarled hands twisting around each other. “Maybe I should just give it up.”
“Is that what you want?” Marcus asked quietly. His father had always loved the sea more than anything. More than his mother, which is probably why she left. More than his children, although ironically, Marcus’s brother had loved the ocean almost as much as their father had, a connection that had bonded them together until the day that ocean killed him. Marcus had always imagined that the old man would die at the wheel of his boat one day, happy in the arms of his watery mistress.
His father shrugged, what was left of his former vibrancy draining away as Marcus watched. “I don’t see that I have any choice.”
“I can help,” Marcus said. “I want to help.” He was stunned to discover it was even true. “I’ve got plenty of money saved up from when I was in the Marines. Nothing to spend it on in the desert, after all. Let me buy you a new net.”
His father shook his head. “My boat. My problem. I don’t need your help.”
Marcus could feel the rage rising up like bile in his throat, choking and fiery, as if he’d swallowed some circus performer’s flaming baton.
“You never change, do you?” he said, the words forcing themselves out through his clenched teeth. “You would never listen to anyone else. You’d sure as hell never listen to me. I told you that Kyle was too young to be working the boat. I told you that the new guy you’d signed on was a stoned-out flake who was going to get someone hurt. But you couldn’t find anyone else willing to work for you, because you’d alienated every damned sailor in the port with your lousy temper and bad attitude, and so you let him stay anyway, and Kyle died. Because heaven forbid you actually ever listen to a word I said.”
His father’s face turned red, and then white, but Marcus couldn’t seem to stop himself from shouting. “Now I come halfway across the world to help you when you’re sick, and you’ll let me haul in fish with the hired help, but you won’t let me actually do anything to make this easier on you. I could fix up the boat, but you won’t let me. I could buy you a new net, but then you’d have to admit you needed me for something, and you’d rather go broke and give it all up than take anything from me.”
He kicked the net, causing more bits and pieces to subside into ruin. “Did you really think I didn’t realize you were broke? The harbormaster came to me days ago, asking for his back docking fees.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t pay them,” his da shouted back. “Them’s my debts, and I’ll pay them myself.”
“How?” Marcus asked. “Beka’s not coming back to give you any more bags of salvaged coins. Your net is in shreds. How do you expect to pay your debts if you can’t fish?”
“Beka’s not coming back?” his father said, looking shocked, and surprisingly unhappy. “What did you do, boy?”
Marcus felt a sudden desire to revert to childhood and stamp his feet on the worn deck. “What makes you think it was me that did something? Did it not occur to you that maybe your precious Beka was the one at fault?”