“Cass! No.”
“The restaurant?” I frowned.
“Yeah. Guy was making out he was a SEAL. Bragging, you know. Had a bunch of people with him, girls.”
“And he wasn’t?”
“Wasn’t what?”
“A SEAL.”
“Oh. Yeah, no.”
“How did you know?”
Dad looked at me. “He was bragging.”
I waited, just looking back at him.
“You see the shit we saw, you do the shit we did, you don’t brag about it.”
“So what did you do?”
“I said, ‘What team were you in, team twelve?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,’ and then I told him to get out of my restaurant. There are only ten SEAL teams. Guy didn’t want to lose face in front of his friends—so it got a little physical.”
“And you got a black eye.”
“Less than him.”
This I believed. “You in trouble?”
“Come on, Cass. Half the guys in the place are police.”
I had no comeback to this. “You want an ice pack?” I asked. “I’m going to the library, but I can grab one for you before I go.”
Dad shook his head. “School’s nearly out. You need a job,” he said. “You can’t be hanging around in the library all summer.”
“I don’t just hang out there.”
“Yeah, you hang out in the apartment above the garage too.”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah, Cass. About that …”
You know the cliché “I had a sinking feeling”? It’s a cliché for a reason, because you do feel like you’re sinking, down into the ground. “What?” I asked.
“I’m renting it. A couple of kids from up north. Lifeguard and a concessions’ stock boy.”
“No,” I said.
“What do you mean, no?” He took a step forward.
“No, no, no.”
“Cass, you’re shaking.”
I didn’t know that. Panic had cut all the connections between my mind and my body. I kept opening my mouth, but nothing was coming out except for no. I was like a goldfish spewing the word no instead of bubbles.
“Jesus, Cass, stop it, you’re scaring me.”
I took a deep breath. “I need the apartment.”
“So do I. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a recession, and someone’s snatching women, which isn’t exactly the world’s greatest tourist advertisement. People aren’t lining up for bottles of Chianti at the restaurant. The boardwalk is almost empty.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“Maybe. But it’s not like it was. And the overheads have not gone down.”
“School’s not out yet.”
“Cass.”
“I’ll get a job.”
“Good. We need all the money we can get.”
“So you can buy more insects?”
His eyes went cold. “Come work at the restaurant. The customers like you. They ask about you.”
I couldn’t believe he was suggesting it. “You know I can’t do that.”
He deflated a little. “Yeah, yeah. Something else then. Two Piers has jobs going. You could work one of the stands—hand out plush toys to kids who get a ring on the bottle. Or run one of the rides. Maybe take your old basketball-game job. You know they’d let you have it.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“And get out of the apartment. It’s not good for you, all this staying inside.”
“But I’m safe there.”
“You’re safe here in the house. I’m here.”
I stared at him a moment too long, and I saw the skin of his face flush, the shame rising, with its anger chaser.
“*****, Cass, I wouldn’t hurt you.”
Again, I didn’t reply quickly enough, and I saw the red spreading.
“I get angry sometimes, I know that, but I’m trying to—”
He stopped.
Threw the box across the room—it was stapled wood; it exploded when it hit the wall, pieces raining down on the computer monitor. A millipede landed, twitching, on the keyboard. It scuttled across the letters, as if typing a Mayday message.
“You’re out of the apartment by the end of the week,” he said. “And you get a ********* job or you’re working at the restaurant, even if I have to drag you there.”
I should back up and explain the whole Navy SEAL thing: Dad was a SEAL twice, so it was doubly important to him. The first time was when he was young—he fought in the first Gulf War, was stationed on a destroyer in the Persian Gulf. When I was small, he used to tell me stories about the dolphins they worked with, which would patrol the ships, trained to look for mines. As a kid, my whole image of the Gulf War was like a SeaWorld show. I just imagined guys like my dad playing with dolphins, in warm, glittering seas out of the Arabian Nights.