got a new one Brian can’t get his mind off.” Walter laughed.
“It’s on his back,” Brian said. “He held up his shirt when them girls came in.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” Henry said.
Brian leaned toward Henry. “I’m talking loud so you can hear me, old man,” he said.
“I hear you fine,” Henry shot back. “And so can everyone in the next room.”
“It’s a mermaid,” Walter said.
“What is?” Henry asked. He was studying the board. He would be playing the winner.
“The new tattoo,” Brian said. “A mermaid with the biggest jugs you ever seen.”
Clay had to laugh.
“Ah, you and your jugs,” Walter scoffed.
The conversation continued that way, three old widowers baiting and badgering each other as they had for years. It was clear they loved each other deeply, yet they never spoke of anything weightier than the shifting of the tides. Three old men who had fought and fished and lost loved ones together. Brian’s wife of half a century had died only a couple of years ago, and his eleven children and twenty-seven grandchildren were scattered around the country. Walter had been widowed for a decade. His two children badgered him regularly to move to Colorado where they lived, but he could not bring himself to leave the Outer Banks. Women were supposed to outlive men, Clay thought, but the old regulars in Shorty’s back room hadn’t gotten the word. Must be something in the salt air that kept men alive out here. It was only when Clay left their table to walk back into the main room that the realization hit him: there had actually been four widowers sitting around that chessboard.
He found Kenny waiting for him at one of the small tables, and he sat down across from his old friend. The waitress brought them beers without even waiting for them to order. They were well known here.
“How was work?” he asked Kenny, taking a swallow of beer.
“Good, but man, I’m losing more hearing in this ear every day,” Kenny said, rubbing his left ear with his hand.
“Well, you know the cure for that,” Clay said. Kenny did much of the diving for the marine repair business he owned, and hearing loss was part of the job. He’d be deaf in another ten years, but Clay knew that wouldn’t stop him. Kenny was happier underwater than he was on land.
“I’d rather go deaf and have my cock fall off than give up diving,” Kenny said.
Clay laughed. “You have a way with words, Ken.”
He spent more time with Kenny these days than any of his other buddies. Most of his friends were married, and he felt their pity when they were with him. He saw them glance at each other when one of them committed a faux pas by talking about getting in trouble with his wife if he got home late or whatever. They treated Clay as if he was fragile. The worst part of it was, they were right. He did wince, if only inside, when they talked about their wives. He was jealous, resentful, angry and hurt, all those things they thought him to be, but he let none of it show. Being with Kenny was much easier. Kenny was not ready to give up bachelorhood. He could talk to Clay about diving or windsurfing the way they always had, with no mention of a wife at home who might try to put a damper on their fun. Still, Kenny liked women, and they liked him. He was a notorious flirt, burly, bearded and blond. It could be disconcerting talking to him, since he so rarely looked Clay in the eye. He was too busy following the movement of every woman within sight.
Now that he was done with the cistern repair and had delivered Henry to his friends, now that he was just sitting and relaxing, one particular woman crept back into Clay’s mind. For a moment, he thought of telling Kenny about Gina. About how beautiful she was, how he was both drawn to and repelled by her at the same time. But he couldn’t do that. It would break one of the unspoken rules of his current relationship with Kenny: talk about sports or diving or fishing—anything but women.
They had been friends in high school, but had taken different paths when it came to careers. Kenny, reluctant to leave the Outer Banks, took over his father’s marine repair business after graduation from high school, while Clay went to Duke to study architecture. It would have been logical for their educational differences to separate them, but they remained friends. Kenny was not educated, not in books or in life—he still called women “girls,” for example, and he would probably get off on the jugs on tattooed guy’s back—but he had brains that Clay respected, and he was a better, smarter diver than Clay would ever be.
The young man with the tattoos left the back room and started walking through the main restaurant, probably on his way to the rest room, but he stopped short as he passed their table, his eyes on Clay.
“Hey, you’re Clay O’Neill, right?” he asked. He wore a diamond stud in his left ear, and his dark hair was very short.
Clay nodded. “Yes.”
“I’m Brock Jensen,” the man said, holding out his hand.
Clay shook his hand, and for the first time got a good look at his arms. The tattoos were designs rather than drawings, swirls and curlicues and arrows and waves, and they covered so much of his skin that it made Clay’s arms burn just to look at them.
“I know your sister,” Brock said.
“Lacey?” Clay asked, as if he might possibly mean Maggie. Lacey rarely came to Shorty’s.
“Yeah. I met her at an Al-Anon meeting. She said she might be able to help me find a job.”
“What kind of work are you looking for?” Kenny asked.
“Construction.”
Construction jobs were a dime a dozen here, especially for someone who looked like this guy. He was slim, but powerfully built. The dark swirling lines on his biceps shifted with the slightest movement of his arms.
“Shouldn’t be hard to find a construction job,” Clay said. There were people he could put him in touch with, but he frankly didn’t feel like helping him out.
“Try this place.” Kenny pulled a pen from his T-shirt pocket and wrote something down on a napkin. He handed it to Brock, who glanced at it, then nodded.
“Hey, thanks, dude, I will,” he said, then looked at Clay. “And tell your sister I said ‘hey.’”
“Sure,” Clay said. Neither he nor Kenny spoke again until the man had left the main room and was out of earshot.
“Brock?” Kenny laughed. “Give me a break.”
Clay laughed as well, but he felt uneasy. Houses and stores were being built and remodeled up and down the Outer Banks. That guy could walk onto any construction site and be working within two minutes. He didn’t need anyone’s help. Clay had a feeling that help in finding a job was not all this guy wanted from his good-hearted sister.
Chapter Nine
GINA SAT IN THE HIGH-CEILINGED WAITING room of Dillard Realty, with its faux sea-worn paneling and beach motif. She was nervous, on the verge of panic, and sitting still was a challenge. She’d told Mrs. King, a woman she had
