of providing for the child. Me, Tina thinks, the dependent minor. But Gina cashes out the food stamps with a cooperative package-store owner, and has a convenience store where the Pakistani owner will give her cartons of cigarettes and ring it up as milk and eggs and bread at twice the listed price.
That’s the place Gina’s gotten to, on wiles and rationalizations. Tina doesn’t know past history, but she’s seen her mother mixed up with such a gallery of unfortunate men that Tina wonders how life might be if she just got a job, stopped drinking, and shut the hell up.
“Are you even listening to me?”
Tina looks at the clock. It’s a quarter past three in the morning. The bars all close at one.
“Ma, I gotta sleep.”
“Your father doesn’t give a shit about you.”
“I know. You told me already.”
“You should ask him for that money.”
“I will.”
“He’s fucked everything up. I mean like, forever.”
“Okay, okay.”
Then there’s another voice. A man.
“Gina?” he calls from what sounds to be the kitchen, a voice similarly drink-sodden. “Are there any clean glasses?”
Tina awakens again in the darkness, as if by phantom noise. The apartment is quiet. She has no idea if her mother’s still home, or come and gone. Her clock reads four thirty and she sits up in bed. She doesn’t remember a dream, but feels as if she’s been knocked roughly from sleep. Some revelation. Some intuition. She doesn’t know quite what it is. But she feels convinced, right now, that it’s time to go see her father and have it out.
It’s been so many years. She needs for him to help her, but maybe the help could be mutual. Maybe there’s something she could do for him. She’s never heard of a girl working a lobster boat. Maybe something else, though.
She dresses quickly, only rubbing a palmful of tap water on her face. Out the door pulling on her coat. It’s cold in the mornings, still. She shivers and then quickens her pace to warm herself. The streets are quiet, but from inside houses she passes, dogs hear her steps and begin the howling chorus. Turning at the bottom of the street and onto Main, she passes empty shops and a few diners open for the earliest risers and latest drinkers. Men in plaid coats sit over their coffee. As she moves, she inventories, trying to see if he’s among them. But no. She pushes on to the docks.
The boats are loading up under blued floodlights. She’s not sure which one is his. It’s a new boat, she knows, after the old one was seized. She has no idea, however, what this boat would look like.
Some fishermen come walking from the near shadows, and she asks if they know Quinn Boyle.
“He’s around here somewhere,” one says.
She walks along the seawall, sighting down the long docks. A half dozen boats are getting ready, tired men moving slowly, the endless routines. The pots, wire boxes in high-visibility yellows and oranges, stack on the afts in risen walls that seem to likewise cage in their owners.
One boat is just pulling off to open water, its engines surging as it moves to gather speed. Now she sees in the weak light that it’s him. She cannot mistake the imprint of his shape and movement, as little as she ever knew him. There he goes, out to sea, once again. Just missed. She could shout but he’d never hear it, wouldn’t probably know her now if he saw her. Then he turns his head; for that fraction he seems to lock on her from across the water. She’d like to think that, but who can say. The boat swings to the starboard and she sees the name hand-painted on the stern. Christine II. Her given name, the name no one calls her by. Her mother had christened her Tina somewhere along the way, the cute contrivance of “Gina and Tina,” like matching outfits in a yellowed Easter photo.
She watches the boat, her namesake, as it escapes out past the breakwater. She’s determined to follow it to the horizon. She has the time and even as she shivers she doesn’t waver. In time, somewhere out there in its tininess, it disappears from her sight, lost amid the broad, gray palette of the morning ocean. She stays anyway, until she guesses it has slipped across the other edge of this constricted world she knows. All she can hope now is that he has a good catch, for both of them.
10.
FOUR DAYS AFTERWARD, AND ANOTHER MORNING SUN reds Robbie’s eyelids and he clamps them more tightly, trying not to awaken. He feels the chill and tightens his arms around himself. Drifting, as on still water, he tries to descend back. But he can feel the insistence of his bladder now, each discomfort rising like a piece in an orchestra to wake him.
He opens his eyes, expecting his bedroom. In fact, he’s in his car, in the middle of an empty parking lot. The keys are in the ignition and he starts the car reflexively, pushing up the heater controls. The dashboard clock reads 5:12.
He thinks backwards two hours. Of rising from Jean’s bed in her condo, telling her he had to go. He was still thinking of that awkwardness with Dawn, of her seeing them out and obviously together, and the unexpected hurt in Dawn’s face. It complicated the night he was having with Jean, who had asked and been told about M., had been asked and had told about her own ex, and had been cheery and chatty until she said to him, “That’s not your ex-wife right over there, is it?” And he looked across the restaurant and there was Dawn, locked in on them from a table with her two girlfriends, who seemed to be trying to draw her back into the conversation.
“That one’s hard to explain,” he’d said, to which she said, “I hate it when there’s a hard-to-explain one.”
He could have thumbnailed Dawn as a high-strung ex-girlfriend, and he supposed she is, by most definitions. He felt, though, as if his time with Dawn was a long chain of insistence and surrender, when he thought he might settle into something that was just what it was, with no expectations, a state he then found endlessly impossible. He had thought of Dawn as a Friday-night date while she was trying to get him to meet her family. He had finally begun to think of himself as resolutely single, or more accurately alone, when she was already talking about themselves as a couple. He kept trying to slow her down, to position her to explain. Finally, when it was impossible, he told her so, and she’d tearily decamped to Florida.
So why was he feeling so guilty, sitting with Jean at a cheap Italian restaurant? The date had seemed train-wrecked with Dawn’s presence, but they’d eaten and had drinks, and when Jean invited him back to her place, he didn’t see the harm in it.
As the car’s heater warms him now, he thinks backward six hours. He’d met Jean for the date at Jack’s, as he’d waited for Quinn. But even before she arrived, he was telling himself that Quinn really didn’t need him anymore. Getting Jean out on a weeknight seemed a good first effort; it made the wait feel different.
And he thinks a few hours before that, when he’d checked his phone and had seen no one had called. Quinn didn’t have the money for a satellite phone for the boat, only an archaic ship-shore radio; he did have a cheap cell phone he could use when he got close enough to land. The first call always went to the wholesaler, to meet him with the refrigerator truck to unload; the second call was to Robbie, to give him an ETA of the bar time. No calls came, and he put it out of his mind as he followed Jean home in his car.
He thinks of how they made love, very gently, and
