“Is the reverse gear broken?”
Russell climbed out of the hatch. The neck muscle twitched again, and Russell sighed. “Not broken,” he said. “Just wore out.”
Eliza eyed the oil can. “How often do you put oil in it?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Every day?”
“Eliza. It’s not your problem. Don’t worry about it.” Now the gear responded, the motor started, and they were off.
Over the noise of the motor, Eliza shouted, “It’s not safe to run your boat with a broken reverse gear, Russell.” She felt bossy saying that, but it was true.
“I know that, Eliza. It’s not broken. It’s wore out.”
She thought, worn, chastised herself for thinking that, and said, “But it might break soon.”
“Might.”
“So…”
“I just don’t happen to have fifteen grand to get it fixed right now, okay, Eliza? I’ll probably have to wait until the end of the season.” If he said anything after that, the wind and the motor took the words.
Fifteen grand? Eliza was taken aback. A lot of money. She said, “Maybe I—” Then she stopped: could she offer Russell fifteen grand to fix his reverse gear? Of course not. Would he take it? No question, he wouldn’t. So she stopped, and she let the ocean spray swallow the words she hadn’t said, and she waited.
Russell throttled down as they got close to the harbor and turned back to her and said, “Guy came to me a couple of days ago, said he had just bought ten traps and was looking for advice on where to set ’em.”
“Yeah?” said Eliza. “Who was that?” She retrieved a dropped herring from the deck and tossed it into the bait box. A few seagulls circled, waiting for action. Off in the distance she could see another boat approaching.
“Guy from out of town, think he was from down your way. A southerner.”
She snorted. “Yeah.” Only in Little Harbor would someone from Massachusetts be considered a “southerner.” “So what’d you tell him?”
“I gave him the best advice I have for someone like that.”
They neared the co-op, where they would turn in the lobsters and fuel up and pick up the next day’s bait.
“Which is?”
“Which is. Sell the traps, use the money to buy some lobsters.”
She should have known it—that was one of the oldest punch lines in the book, a joke as old as the lobsters themselves.
“Holy cow,” she said. “All this time I’ve been gone, nobody’s thought of any new jokes?”
“Nope,” said Russell. “No need to, when the old ones’ll do.” He took a deep breath and smiled, and Eliza smiled back.
20
LITTLE HARBOR, MAINE
Eliza
It was after they’d turned in the catch and tied up the boat and taken the skiff to the wharf that Eliza realized she’d forgotten her phone at her father’s house that morning. She hadn’t noticed it earlier because even if she’d had it she would have been too nervous to take it out on the boat. Eliza was notorious for inflicting water damage on her electronics and the electronics of those around her. She purchased every extra protection plan Apple had to offer.
Now, though, she noticed the phone’s absence. She hadn’t talked to the girls all day, she hadn’t checked in with Rob, she hadn’t seen which pathetic stray dogs Evie had fallen in love with or what Zoe was up to on social media or what Eliza’s own four hundred and sixty-two Facebook friends had been doing on this faultless summer day. They were probably swimming and sailing and mentioning casually that their children were growing up to either rule or change the world; on Facebook, Eliza’s friends were often certain that their offspring were going to do one or the other. Statistically speaking, though, well, most of them weren’t, were they?
(Privately Eliza thought Evie might beat the statistics, but she would never declare that via social media. Much better to let it all come out as a surprise in a decade or two.)
She borrowed Russell’s phone to call Rob. She dialed the number while Russell went off to talk to some of the other fishermen. She’d forgotten about that, that easy camaraderie of men and women just off the water, the way they talked about the day’s catch and the weather that had just blown through and the weather that was coming up next. It was different from how she and the other women of Barton were around each other. Or maybe it wasn’t different at all, maybe it was the exact same sort of relationship, just in a different context.
She saw Josh, the boyfriend of Mary from the café, skirting the outside of Russell’s circle without joining in. Something unsettling about that guy, something shady about his body language. And also. He looked too old for Mary, what was he, twenty-five, twenty-eight? If Eliza had known Mary well enough, if she had had less on her own plate, she would have sat her down and said, “Run, Mary, run!”
Maybe she’d do it anyway.
Rob answered after the second ring, even though Russell’s number wasn’t associated with a contact on Rob’s phone. As a general rule, Eliza ignored numbers that weren’t associated with a contact on her own phone, but that just showed you that Rob was more trusting about the world than she was.
“Hey!” she said. “It’s me, don’t be fooled by the number, I left my phone back at the house.”
“Hey,” said Rob. His voice was strained. “I left you about a hundred messages today.”
“I didn’t get them. Like I said, I left my phone back at the house.”
“Left it and went where?” His words sounded like someone had taken a pair of scissors to them and snipped.
“Whoa, Rob.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. “But we needed you today. We’ve been trying to call, the girls have been sending messages, we even tried your dad’s house, no answer, you had us all scared to death—”
“My dad had a doctor’s appointment. Val took him. That’s why there was no answer, he had to get his stitches removed.” This conversation was not distantly related to the conversation she’d been anticipating. She said, “What’s going on, why do you sound like that? Did something happen?”
“Of course it did.”
“What? Rob, what?” Oh dear God, her children, something had happened to her children! Her heart thumped and careened. All day she’d spent out on a lobster boat, avoiding the lines that could trip you up and the hydraulic hauler that could cut the tips of your fingers clean off (it had happened!), thinking about high school, when the real danger was back in Barton.