It was only after seeing her belongings set firmly on the threshold that she began to have second thoughts. She’d grown used to living in Olympus. To the beach outside their door, to seeing the same people year in and year out. She loved their house, and even the Sawtooth had become a place where she felt that she belonged. She was supposed to be working a lunch shift, right at that very moment.
She considered calling in sick. The summer tourists had all left town and once that happened the Sawtooth was usually half-empty. But there was a paycheck waiting for her in Gunderson’s office. If she hurried, she could get there and back in half an hour on her bicycle. So she pulled on a sweater and left Hawley a note, then rode her bike downtown and chained it to the fence. She opened the door to the Sawtooth and the first person she saw was Mary Titus.
Marshall’s mother was wiping down a table near the back. Loo watched her replace the silverware and set the napkins. In her apron she looked less triumphant than she had wearing her orange robe. None of the fishermen would eat in her section. They were all crowded around the bar.
“Where’s Agnes?” Loo asked.
“She started having contractions, so Gunderson drove her to the hospital,” said Mary Titus. “I’m filling in.”
“Did anyone call her boyfriend?”
“Brian?” Mary Titus plucked a fork from a bouquet of silverware clutched in her fist. “He walked out on her two months ago.”
Loo glanced at Agnes’s section of the restaurant. It made her uncomfortable to know that she’d been too caught up in her own misery to notice anyone else’s. In all the weeks and months they had worked together, Agnes had been carrying her own troubles. And she had never missed a shift. The child she was delivering now—all alone, her feet in the stirrups—would share a birthday with Loo. I will send him a card, Loo thought. I will mail him one every year.
“You better get to work,” said Mary Titus. “Nobody here wants me to serve them.”
“I can’t stay,” said Loo. “I just came to pick up a check.”
Mary Titus folded a napkin and slipped it under a fork. “You’ll have to wait, then.”
The crowd at the bar was full of fishermen out of work. They were all waiting for the ban on the Banks to be lifted. Joe Strand and Pauly Fisk were there, too, and they waved Loo over.
“The principal just called,” said Fisk. “He’s on his way back with cigars.”
“It’s a boy,” said Strand.
“I know,” said Loo.
Fisk sipped his beer. He looked at all the empty tables. “We gotta find a way to break up Gunderson and that damn tree-hugger.”
“He likes her,” said Loo.
“Maybe your dad can help,” said Strand. “He’s good at breaking things.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Loo.
“You think?” he said, rubbing his jaw.
“Ah, don’t be mad,” said Fisk. “He was just doing what any father would do, scaring your fella a little. Teaching him and his mom what principles mean.” Fisk tapped the visor of his Hong Kong hat, then pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun.
“That wasn’t him.”
“Sure,” said Strand. “But tell Hawley we owe him, just the same.” And then he raised his own finger-gun and pretended to shoot Mary Titus.
“That’s not funny,” said Loo, but it got big laughs from the rest of the bar, and soon others were pointing more fake weapons and finger-pistols. They hid behind menus and pints of beer. They added sound effects. Bang! Boom! Ping! You missed her! Ten points! Twenty! Fisk picked up an imaginary submachine gun and strafed Mary’s section like he was Rambo.
While target practice went on, Mary Titus continued setting tables. But when she finished folding the last napkin she snatched a carafe of hot water off the burner and threatened to pour it over Fisk’s head. Loo stepped between them. She took Mary’s arm.
“Let’s head out back,” she said.
“Troglodytes!” Mary screamed.
“We need to talk. Come on.”
“I’m taking this with me.”
“Suit yourself,” said Loo.
The woman threw a withering look at the bar and filed through the kitchen and into the walk-in freezer. The door sealed shut behind them, blocking out all the noise from the cooks and the customers. Then it was just the two women facing each other, their breath creating a thick fog between slabs of meat.
“Don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Mary Titus said.
“I’m not,” said Loo.
“Thank God.” Marshall’s mother lowered the carafe. The throat of the pitcher was still steaming.
Loo glanced around the tight room. There was no place left to go.
“Your petition for the sanctuary,” she said. “It’s fake.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Marshall didn’t submit the paperwork. I did.”
Mary Titus’s cheeks flushed, as if she had been the one to tell a secret instead of Loo.
“You’re lying,” she said.
“Do you really think that many people suddenly cared about a fish? I forged the names. All five thousand of them.”
Mary Titus clung to the shelf that held the butter. It looked like she was going to be sick, but now that Loo had started, the truth kept coming, words tumbling one after another from her mouth.
“Marshall shot up your front door. For the publicity. And that’s why he’s out on that boat right now. Trying to make this happen for you, in case the petition’s thrown out.” Loo cleared her throat. “I just thought you should know that it wasn’t any of those fishermen who put a bullet in your house. And it wasn’t my father, either.”
“You,” said Mary Titus. Her fingers went tight on the carafe of hot water. “You. You. You.”
There were bubbles against the glass. Loo could see them rising, could see the steam and the heat heading her way and even the blistering burns that would tear into her skin and the scars that would follow—as if this had all happened before. She knew the water was coming even before it began to come and so she stepped to the side, and instead of scalding her face, the hot liquid splashed directly onto the floor. They both stared at the bright spot on the tile, a circle in the middle of the grime, as if a witch had just been doused and melted away, leaving behind nothing but a cloud of steam and heat.
The freezer door opened.
“What the hell is going on in here?” said Principal Gunderson. “We just lost five tables.”
“We need a minute,” said Loo.
“George.” Mary Titus was staring at her arm holding the carafe as if it wasn’t her arm at all.