“What?” I asked, walking past him to the freezer.
I opened the door, flicked the light switch, and walked into the cold air. The bait container was on the bottom shelf, and I knelt to grab it, my legs burning from the small motion. When I stood, Boon was in the doorway.
“Hope called on Saturday. Said you were sick.”
“It’s just a cold. Flu or something.”
“She said you’d say that. She also said she knew you’d be here this morning even if you weren’t better. She asked me to speak to you.”
“Well, consider me spoken to.” I popped the lid off the container to make sure I had the right one, and I heard him clear his throat.
“Where were you on Friday night?”
“Boon. I don’t have time for this. I’m dealing with enough shit as it is.”
“So I hear,” he said, flat voiced.
I pressed the lid back on the container, and a sharp pain shot up my arm from the split knuckle that I’d wrapped before I left the house.
“What happened?” he asked, his eyes on the bandage.
“I cut it.”
“On what?”
“I don’t know. The engine.”
He waited as if he expected me to elaborate. When I didn’t, he massaged his temple with his finger. “I ran into Eddy when I got here on Saturday. He was asking for you. Said some weird shit was happening down by your boat Friday night.”
I felt my jaw tighten when he said this, and tried to keep my face from showing it.
“Said some girl with her shirt half off came running up the dock, right near your boat.” His voice was low, halting. I couldn’t tell if it was because it was early and he was still waking up or because he didn’t want to be having this conversation in the first place.
I raised my hand to stop him. “Don’t worry about it. It was a misunderstanding.”
He lifted his eyebrows at me. “Before he left, he went to your boat and there was blood on the deck. Not just a little. A pool of it.”
The cold air of the freezer gave his voice an edge, even though he was speaking in a tone I’d heard him use with Kat or Jess when he was explaining something they didn’t understand. I pressed the palm of my hand into my eye socket, pushed against the heaviness that had settled in my head.
“I said it was a misunderstanding.”
“Well, help me understand the misunderstanding,” he said, his voice tight.
“It’s the none-of-your-business type of misunderstanding.”
Boon tossed the clipboard he was holding on the shelf, and it skidded across the steel bars. He turned and kicked the door of the freezer so hard, it bounced off the wall. When he turned, his face was bright red.
“What the fuck is going on?” he growled.
I didn’t want to talk about the other night with Boon, for more reasons than I had fingers and toes. It was my problem, and it was my problem to fix.
“Nothing you need to be involved in,” I told him.
“Let me make that call. Your head’s up your ass lately.”
He was quiet, waiting for me to speak. He stared at me for a long moment, then shook his head back and forth.
“You think screwing another woman is going to help? Is that it?” he asked.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I looked down at my watch, frowning at the time.
“A woman gets off your boat in the middle of the morning with her damn tits hanging out, and you want to tell me you’re playing Parcheesi with her?”
He was in my face now, and I felt something rise up inside me, all the yelling and words from the other night swirling inside my head and making me dizzy. The fact that he thought I’d cheat on Hope hit me somewhere deep inside, somewhere I hadn’t expected. I wanted to slam him up against the shelves and make him eat his words. I wanted to beat the words back into his mouth, to smash the thought from his head that I was the kind of man who would cheat on his wife and kids.
“Is that what you think? You think I was fooling around with the woman on my boat?”
“No, I don’t,” he said quietly. “But now I have your attention. So talk to me about what’s going on.”
“There’s nothing going on. How many different ways can I say it?”
“You can say it six ways from Sunday, and I’m telling you don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I put the word out on Saturday that I was looking to find out what happened on your boat. And you know who called me? Keith Miller.” He waited for my reaction, tilted his head at me.
“Keith said you two met out on the water a while ago, and he was worried because you didn’t seem good. He wouldn’t say how that went down, given that you work out of different harbors and neither of you are exactly friendly. Which tells me something right there,” he said accusingly.
I kept my expression blank, trying to push that day out of my head. How I’d chased Keith’s boat and told him I was cutting Finn’s traps. I felt the back of my neck turn hot, embarrassed by the memory of it.
“You know what else he said?” Boon continued. “He said you might be messing with Finn again. Did you know he’s back in town? That he’s got his boat in one of the slips? Did you know that?”
I could tell from the way he asked that he knew the answer. I nodded, and he attempted a grin, but it just looked like he was baring his teeth at me.
“Yeah. I thought you might.” He chuckled. A sweat broke out on his forehead, even though the air in the freezer was frigid.
“So is he part of the nothing that’s going on here? The none-of-my-business type of misunderstanding?” He reached out and yanked my arm up, holding my bandaged hand in the air. “You cut your hand on the engine? Give me a fucking break. Go take a look at your boat. The blood’s gone, but the stain is still there. Unless that engine was running in the middle of your deck, and you walked in here cut up in ribbons, that blood didn’t come from this.”
I pulled my arm from his grip. “I’m going to say it one more time, Boon. Leave it alone.” I couldn’t involve Boon in this. Cutting those traps had been my fight. My mistake. Not his.
“You know, I may not be their real uncle.” His finger pointed to the door, gesturing I assumed to the picture of the girls in the hallway. “But you’re a fucking brother to me. You know what this year’s been like? Having to watch the people I call family fall into a million pieces and there’s nothing I can do about it?”