Nervous Water

by William G. Tapply

  Cassie in a little plaid skirt and a white blouse, with a square lunchbox in her hand. Her knees were knobby and her arms were skinny. Her black hair was short and curly. Her dark eyes were fearless.

  Cassie at eleven or twelve, at the wheel of Uncle Moze’s lobster boat, tiptoeing up so she could peer squinty-eyed at the sea, suddenly tall and lanky and almost womanly, wearing blue jeans, a blue denim shirt, a long-billed fisherman’s cap, and hip boots turned down at the knees, an exact replica of Moze’s standard lobstering outfit.

  Then Cassie a few years later, a teenager now, this photo a professional head-and-shoulders shot. A yearbook portrait, probably. Black hair with bleached-in blond streaks, long now, not so curly, and pulled back in a loose ponytail. Dangly silver earrings, pale lipstick, made-up eyes staring directly into the camera lens, not smiling. That same defiant fuck-you look, only now it was in the eyes of a strikingly pretty woman, not a girl.

  Cassie in cap and gown raising a rolled-up diploma in her fist like a weapon—

  “You probably don’t remember Cassie.”

  I turned around. Uncle Moze was holding a can of Budweiser out to me.

  I took the beer and pointed to the photo of Cassie wearing the smiley-face T-shirt. “This is how I remember her.”

  “Long time ago, sonnyboy.”

  I nodded.

  “Your mother stopped coming up here after your grandma went to Florida,” he said. “You lost track of your family. We lost track of you.”

  I nodded. “It wasn’t my choice. I loved going out on your boat. I always believed my mother wasn’t very proud of her origins.”

  “Moulton, Maine? Old man a logger who got drunk and drowned in the Kennebec?” He smiled. “Your mother couldn’t wait to get away from here. Hard to blame her, I s’pose. Hope Crandall was always smarter than everybody else. Lots of folks—including some of her brothers and sisters—figured she liked to bring your old man up here now and then in his big Cadillac just to make sure us poor dumb Mainers wouldn’t forget how she’d snagged herself a rich Boston lawyer.” He shook his head. “Jealousy, that’s what that was. Hope wasn’t like that. She loved your grandma. That’s why she come up here. She once told me, she said she wished to hell Alan—your old man—she wished he’d git himself a less show-offy vehicle.”

  “I’m glad to know that,” I said.

  Moze smiled, sat on the sofa, and lit a cigarette. I took the overstuffed chair opposite him.

  He leaned toward me with his forearms on his thighs. “So you’re a lawyer like your old man, huh?”

  “Not like him,” I said. “He was a partner in a big firm, did corporate work, made piles of money. Defended big businesses against lawsuits, found loopholes, created tax write-offs, hid profits. Screwed people for a living is what my old man did. Me, I’ve got my own one-man office. Just me and my secretary. Small practice, mostly family law. My clients are people who need help.” I shook my head. “Nothing at all like my old man.”

  Uncle Moze nodded. “Doin’ okay, though?”

  I smiled. “Doin’ fine.”

  So. He wanted money.

  He looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know how this works, sonnyboy.”

  I reached over and touched his leg. “Uncle Moze, is there something I can do for you? You need some help?”

  He swiveled his head around and glared at me. “You think this is about money?”

  I shrugged.

  He blew out a quick, angry breath. “I don’t need that kind of help.”

  “Do you need a lawyer?”

  He shook his head. “I know some lawyers.”

  “Any you can trust?”

  He laughed quickly. “Probably not.”

  “Well,” I said, “I do happen to be a lawyer, but I’m also your nephew. That means something to me.”

  “Me, too.” He blew out a long breath. “Don’t know what you recall about Cassie.”

  “I remember she was Aunt Mary’s baby,” I said. “I remember you and Aunt Lillian took care of her. After that…” I waved my hand in the air.

  “Mary had that sickness after Cassie was born.” Uncle Moze tapped his temple with his forefinger.

  “Postpartum depression?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe she was just young and scared. Whatever, she wanted nothing to do with the baby. Didn’t even bother givin’ her a name. We did that. Me and Lillian.” He smiled. “Cassandra. Can’t even recollect how we come up with Cassandra, but it seemed to fit. Cassie Crandall. Lillian used to say it sounded like a movie star. It was just what we decided to call her ’til Mary got back on her feet. I dunno. I s’pose you can understand it. That no-good husband of hers, fuckin’ Norman Dillman, beatin’ her up, kickin’ her out of the house, then gittin’ himself killed, Mary barely sixteen, knocked up, just a baby herself…”

  “I remember the day we found Norman’s body,” I said.

  “Ayup,” he said. “Murdered. Shot in the head and dumped in the river.”

  “And they never found who did it?”

  He shook his head. “They asked around. Even had some feds involved for a while, on account of his body was found in the river and it involved two states. But nothin’ come of it. Far as I know, they never even come up with a suspect.”

  “It’s a genuine unsolved mystery, then,” I said.

  Moze shrugged. “Norman was a pig. Got what he deserved. Everybody said so.”

  I smiled. “So what happened after that?”

  “Well,” he said, “after Mary gave birth, she just stayed in bed, didn’t want to even look at the child. Your grandmother was gettin’ along in years by then, and she had her hands full with Mary, so Lillian and me, we said we’d take care of the baby. Lillian couldn’t have kids, you know. Best thing ever happened to Lil, it turned out, having that little baby in the house. It made her happy, and that made me happy, because your aunt Lillian never was a very happy woman. We thought it was going to be just for maybe a month or two, ’til Mary felt better. But when Mary got back on her feet, she showed no interest in Cassie. Then the next spring Mary run off with that baseball player, never said good-bye, not even to our mother, never come around to see Cassie, and we was, well, that was fine by us. It had got to the point that Lil was all depressed, thinking we’d have to give Cassie back. By then we was loving her, thinking of her as our own. Folks around here, pretty soon they seemed to forget she was Mary’s, or if they remembered they didn’t say nothin’ about it.” He smiled. “Everybody in Moulton has got something in their family they’d just as soon nobody else remembers. We’re all pretty forgetful for each other.”

  “So you adopted her?” I said.

  He shook his head. “That would’ve involved Mary, required her to sign papers and whatnot, and by then she was gone, and we figured it was best to just leave well enough alone. Lillian was terrified that if we raised the subject, Mary would say no, decide she wanted to take Cassie back. My sister Mary could be like that. Perverse. She’d do things she didn’t really want to do just to see if she could piss you off.”

  “I guess I didn’t know Aunt Mary very well,” I said. “In my mind, she was a kid not much older than me.”

  “Younger than you in some ways. Always pretty innocent.” He smiled. “Well, kinda dumb, actually.” He shrugged. “So anyway, we just went on, Lillian and me, one day after the other, thinkin’ of Cassie as our own, and pretty soon we come to believe it. Soon as she learned to talk, I was Daddy and Lillian was Mommy.” He blinked a couple of times, then smiled quickly and took a sip from his beer can. “Then Lillian got the cancer. Spent the last two years of her life right in there”—he jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the bedroom—“with the shades drawn, just watchin’ television all day and night. Every day, as soon as Cassie got home from school, she’d go stand in the doorway lookin’ in. She’d stand there for a half hour or more sometimes, just waiting, and Lillian would never even look at her.” He shrugged. “After a while, Lillia
n died. Cassie was nine that year.”

  “So you raised her by yourself?”

  “From the time Lillian first got sick, really, it was just Cassie and me.” He smiled. “That little girl could row a dinghy, steer the boat, bait the pots, stick her hand in, grab a lobster, measure it, and toss it into the tub without lookin’. She was as good at lobsterin’ as me. Loved to go trolling for mackerel. Good at that, too. She had the feel for fish.” He shook his head. “She was a lot like you, sonnyboy. Good at things. Quiet, the way you were, but you knew there was always something goin’ on in her head. Smart as a whip, she was. Don’t know where she got that. Mary wasn’t much in the brains department, God knows, and fuckin’ Norman was dumber’n a pickled hake.” He jerked a Camel from the pack in his shirt pocket, tapped its end on the face of his wristwatch, lit it with a match, and squinted at me through the smoke.

  “Uncle Moze,” I said, “when you called the other day I asked if everything was all right. You didn’t say it wasn’t, but you didn’t say it was, either, exactly. This is nice, what we did today, going out on the boat, getting reacquainted, and I hope it means we can do it some more. But something’s going on, isn’t it? Everything isn’t all right. So maybe there’s something I can do for you?” I made it a question.

  He shook his head. “After all these years, I can’t—”

  “Is it Cassie?”

  He peered at me for a minute, then nodded.

  “What?” I said.

  “I feel bad. This ain’t your concern, and it ain’t fair to dump it on you. I shouldn’t’ve called you. Regretted it soon as I done it.”

  “You called me because you had a problem,” I said, “and I came up here because I figured you had a problem. If there’s anything I can do, I want to do it.”

  “Well, okay,” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry to be so damn long-winded about it, but I don’t know any other way to explain it to you.” He took a quick drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in a clamshell ashtray on the coffee table. “Cassie finished first in her class. Not that that’s much of an accomplishment for Moulton High School, you know, but it was enough to get her a nice scholarship to the university up to Orono. I missed her something terrible that first year, but she called me once a week, regular as the tides, every Sunday evening it was, told me about her classes and her new friends and how she was on the track team, all happy and enthusiastic, and when she come home that summer she was still the same old Cassie. As far as I could see, college didn’t change her at all except make her even smarter.”

  Moze paused, gazed out the window, took a sip of beer. “But then something did change, because halfway through her sophomore year she up and quit school. I didn’t even know she done it until she called me, said she was in San Francisco livin’ with some friends, had a job as a waitress, was thinking about going to school out there.” He stopped and looked at me. “Hell, you don’t want her damn life story, and this is sounding like poor old Moze, and that ain’t my intention.”

  “Take your time,” I said.

  He lit another cigarette and blew a plume of smoke up at the ceiling. “Next several years, Cassie knocked around. San Francisco, then someplace in Colorado, then Key West, back to Frisco, D.C. for a while. She always kept in touch, though, no matter where she was, every Sunday evening, and whenever she was on the East Coast we’d get together. She turned out to be an awful pretty woman. Dressed nice, talked proper. She always was smart. Had a lot of different jobs, I guess, doing I don’t know what. She never said much about what she did. I had the feeling she didn’t think a dumb old lobsterman would understand. But she seemed to have plenty of money. Every year or two she’d be living somewhere new. Never got married, but a couple years ago she took up with a feller down there in your neck of the woods, ended up moving in with him, told me she thought she might marry him.” He hesitated, then laughed softly. “Grannie, she called him. Don’t know where that came from. Anyway, she still called me every Sunday evening, and maybe once every couple months we’d get together, meet in Portsmouth, have dinner, get caught up. I never met this man, Grannie, but I liked him from the way Cassie talked about him. He was teaching English at some college in Boston. She said he treated her good. I kept telling her, one day you ought to bring your Grannie along so I could meet him. She’d say, sure, we’ll do that sometime.” He stopped, looked out the window, and blinked several times.

  “Uncle Moze—”

  “No, sorry.” He coughed into his fist. “Anyway, next thing I know she tells me she’s going to get married. But no, it ain’t that Grannie who I never got to meet. It’s some dentist twenty-five years older’n her, she says, with grown-up kids, whose wife died a few years before, lives in Madison, there, outside of Boston, who she never even mentioned to me before. I know what I should’ve said. I should’ve told her, ‘That’s great, honey, congratulations, you found a man you love, who loves you.’ But instead, what comes out of my mouth? I say, ‘What the hell, Cassie? You’re going to marry some horny widower old enough to be your father? A goddamn dentist with grown kids? What’s wrong with that nice English teacher, that Grannie feller? Ain’t he rich enough for you?’ ” He shrugged. “She hung up on me. Don’t blame her. You want another beer?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  Moze groaned, pushed himself to his feet, picked up our empty beer cans, and shambled into the kitchen. For the first time all day he looked his age, which I figured was about seventy-five.

  He was back a minute later. “Here you go, sonnyboy.” He handed me another Budweiser and sat on the sofa. “Where the hell was I?”

  “The goddamn dentist,” I said “Cassie hanging up on you.”

  “Right.” He smiled quickly. “That was a year and a half ago, Brady. It was in the winter, I remember.” He took a slug of beer. “I ain’t heard a word from her since.”

  “A year and a half?”

  “Ayup.”

  “Just like that? No warning? No explanation?”

  “Just like that.” He shook his head. “I should never’ve spoken my mind about her marrying the damned dentist. Made her mad. S’pose I can understand that. And it appears she just kept on being mad. Cassie always was a damned pigheaded woman.”

  “It runs in the family,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “You tried calling her, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. “Oh, hell yes. Not at first. Like you say, I can be pigheaded, too. At first I was mad that she didn’t call. It’s okay to be upset for a little while. But hell. This is her old daddy. You ain’t supposed to hold grudges with your daddy. So I figured I’d just wait her out. But after a while I stopped being stubborn. I wanted to hear her voice. So I called her. I had the number of her cellular. Left her a message, but she didn’t get back to me. I did that a few times, leaving messages. She never answered. I figured, when her phone rang, she could tell it was me and was still being stubborn. So I stopped trying for a while. Figured I could be as stubborn as her.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t, though. Nobody’s as stubborn as Cassie. So I started calling again. Tried to keep my messages light, you know, even though my heart was thumpin’ in my chest, just prayin’ I’d say the right thing and she’d call me back. ‘Hi, honey,’ I’d say. ‘How you doin’? I know you’re probably pretty busy and all, but maybe you could give your old daddy a call if you get a chance, okay?’ ” He shrugged. “She ain’t done it yet.” He shrugged. “A year and a half.”

  “That’s pretty rough,” I said. I was thinking of my own two boys, Billy and Joey, and how crazy it would make me if they refused to talk to me.

  Moze stared down at the floor. “A year and a half, Brady,” he said softly. “That’s a long time for an old man.” He sighed. “Okay, so anyway, I tried calling her again the other night—the night before I called you—and I was going to just spill it all out, the hell with keeping it light. I was going to tell her I hoped to hell she was okay, and if I’d done somet
hing or said something to upset her, make her mad, I was sorry, but that was a long time ago and it was time to make things right again between us. I was going to ask her please to call me back, tell her I missed her something fierce, but then this recorded voice comes on, tells me her mailbox is full, so I can’t even tell her what I want to tell her.”

  “That was the first time her mailbox was full?”

  He nodded.

  “When was the last time you tried her that you were able to leave a message?”

  He shut his eyes for a moment. “Three weeks, maybe a month ago.”

  “And you find it worrisome.”

  “I guess I do,” he said. “I sure do miss her, but mainly, I just want to know she’s all right.”

  “You want me to find out what’s going on, is that it?”

  “It ain’t fair to ask you.”

  “Uncle Moze,” I said, “I’m a lawyer. I’m pretty good at finding things out. And besides, I live pretty close to Madison. That’s what you were thinking, right?”

  “I guess I was.”

  I looked at him. “So why now?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s been a year and a half since you talked with Cassie, you said. Why did you wait ’til now to talk to me? Is it because her voice-mail box was full?”

  He shrugged. “I s’pose. I can’t even leave her a message. It makes me think something’s happened to her. Makes me miss her even more. I need to talk with her, Brady. In the worst way. It’s eatin’ me up. I feel like I’ve got to clear the air. Make things right with her. Apologize for anything I might’ve said. I want us to be in touch again, talk on Sunday nights, maybe get together once in a while, meet her husband, have dinner or something, you know? I can’t hardly stand being on the outs with her like this.”

  “Have you tried calling the dentist’s house?”

  He nodded. “I finally did. I didn’t want to. Didn’t feel like talking to that dentist if I didn’t have to. But when I found Cassie’s voice-mail box full, I did it. I called his house. This was the day I called you. It’s what decided me to give you a call.”