“The bank called last week looking for you. . . . I took the number down.” He reached into his pocket, held out a piece of paper.
I took it, shoved it in my back pocket, and mumbled thanks, avoiding his eyes as I walked around him to the door.
“Wait a minute,” he said, stepping back, blocking my exit.
I looked at him, let my face do the talking. He put up his hands.
“Just hear me out,” he said.
“It’s freezing in here, so it better be important.”
“You never get cold,” he said accusingly.
“I look like shit, and I’m cold when I never get cold. Is that it?”
“Look. What I’ve been thinking is that . . . it makes sense . . .”
“No,” I told him, knowing where this was going.
His eyes snapped up. “At least give me the goddamn respect of hearing me out.”
“I’ve been hearing you out for the last year,” I said. “You don’t need my help in here, and I don’t need your help out there. We cut fifty-fifty. You sell and I catch. The way it’s always been. What you’re talking about is charity. Give me the goddamn respect of calling it what it is.”
He threw up his hands. “What I’m talking about is a friend helping out a friend who’s down on his luck. We wouldn’t be standing in this fucking building if it wasn’t for you. And I’m in here cashing my paycheck sitting in a warm room while you’re out there killing yourself.”
“I’m out there because I want to be. How many times do we have to go around about this? I’d slit my throat if I did what you do all day.”
I pushed past him, opened the freezer door, and walked to where Kat was standing above the lobster bin, holding one in each hand.
“Look, Dad,” she said, “they’re twins.”
“Let’s go, Kat.”
“Ten more minutes. Please?” she asked.
“Five,” I warned. “Meet me outside.”
On the deck, the sun wrapped around me like a blanket. I leaned against the building and breathed, squinting against the pressure in my chest.
Boon came out of the shop and stood in front of me, his shadow blocking the sun. I felt a shiver run through me, even though the thermometer mounted on the wall read almost eighty-five degrees.
“You’re an accident waiting to happen right now,” Boon said calmly. “You don’t have an ounce of fat on you, and you’re hauling traps like we’re just starting up. You pulled in the same catch last week as the Frazier brothers, and there’s two of them and a stern man. The same stern man that you fired, by the way. Still haven’t explained that one to me.”
“Nothing to explain. My boat. My stern man. I wanted him off. You’re the one that hired him.”
“I hired him because I wanted to give you some help after . . . what happened. Not to mention, he’s the hardest-working guy around.”
“And he never shuts up. Talked all day about nonsense.”
“You fired him for talking? Was he allowed to take a piss, or did you dock his pay for that too?”
“Look, Boon. Let me do my job and you do yours. It’s worked that way for years.”
“What’s worked for years isn’t just hard work; it’s smart work. This . . . here . . . is not smart work.”
He was getting worked up. Boon style. Face red, eyes blazing. Ready to blow. I stayed calm. We’d done this enough times to know what happened when we both let go.
“Let me worry about it. It’s not your problem,” I said.
He leaned forward. “Now, I’m going to talk and you’re going to shut up and listen. The guy I own a business with—a business that a lot of people depend on to make a living—is either going to hurt himself or hurt somebody else out there. You think that’s not my problem? I hired that stern man because somebody should be out there with you. You’re stressed, you’re tired, and you’re weak. Do you know what I’d call that? You know what any betting man would call that? A trifecta for disaster.” He glared at me. “And that’s not a race you want to win, Kelly. That’s not a race you even want to run.”
He was in my face, trying to keep his voice down. From the side-glances of the people on the deck, he wasn’t succeeding.
“That was me talking to you as a friend,” he said, looking around, lowering his voice when he noticed the eyes on us. “Now I’m talking to you as your business partner. Cut back your time out there, or I’ll do it for you. We’re running a business here. You’re not a one-man show calling the shots. You fuck up out there, you’re taking more than just yourself down. You hear me?”
The veins on the side of his neck bulged. He was meddling, as usual.
But he was right. Everything on the water was earned. Mostly your reputation. If I was careless and somebody got hurt, it was not only bad for business. It was the end of our business.
I gave him a nod. He stepped back and shook his head at me. A look on his face said he wasn’t sure how much more of this he could do.
I couldn’t explain any of it to him. How being out there, hauling trap after trap, hour after hour, made the day go by. And the next one. And the next one. Until the days made weeks, and the weeks made months.
I couldn’t explain that’s how my life made sense now.
“Answer me one question, and then I’ll let it go,” he said, calmer now.
I met his eyes, waited.
“Is it the Salt House?” he asked. “This business with the bank?”
I nodded, swallowing a gulp of shame. I hadn’t been late on a payment in my life. Sure, maybe when I was younger and we were just getting the business off the ground, I’d been overdue on an electric bill or a phone bill. But that was because I spent most of my time on the water and was barely on land to take care of things.
Not because I didn’t have the money.
Hope and I had always done okay. More than okay, in my eyes. We didn’t take fancy vacations or drive new cars—mine was an old Ford, Hope’s a 2008 SUV, safe enough to get the kids here and there, but no car payment. Neither of us were big spenders—although the number of shoes in Hope’s closet baffled me—we always had enough extra money after the necessities for the good stuff: lessons, instruments and summer camps for the girls, a membership to the boat-club pool, one weekend each season that Hope and I snuck away by ourselves, and a couple of trips every year for Hope and the girls to visit her mother in Florida.
And then came the past year.
The extra mortgage, just enough to update the Salt House, coupled with Hope not working was enough to deplete our savings, leave us living paycheck to paycheck. Now we were coming up short. I’d covered the June payment, put the check in the mail yesterday, but it was already two weeks late, and I didn’t even want to think about July.
I shut my eyes, opened them, and heard Boon’s voice. When I focused, he was talking animatedly, his hands punctuating the air. I tuned in midsentence.
“. . . let me help finish it. We can bang it out in a couple of weeks. Have you in there in no time.”