by Melinda Minx
I look back over at her as she disappears into the kitchen again. I wonder how in the hell I could fuck up something so good.
They all laugh.
“Didn’t take you for that kind of guy,” Ashton says.
“What’s that mean?” I ask, frowning.
“Uh,” Ashton mumbles. “I don’t know, I was just talking shit.”
“Really,” I say, pressing. “What did you mean by it? I’m trying to...objectively analyze myself. I’ve been away too long, I don’t know how I look. To everyone else.”
They all give each other looks.
Marv finally speaks up. “You really wanna know?”
I laugh. “I guess that means it’s not good.”
Samuel, John, and Ashton all look over at Marv. He’s the captain, so he’s got to tell me how fucked up I seem.
“It’s not bad, man,” he says. “Or maybe it is bad, you know? In the kind of way that gets women going. You got that whole damaged goods thing going on, but not so much that a girl like Sophie wouldn’t think you’re past trying to fix up.”
“Yeah,” Samuel says. “Women like fixer-uppers.”
“Why don’t you got a girlfriend then?” Ashton asks.
“’Cause I’m already fixed up!” Samuels says, punching Ashton. “I gotta work on that face Mason makes, then girls will all be flocking to me to see what’s going on, what I’m brooding about, you know?”
“It looks like I’m brooding?” I ask.
They all shrug. Marv says, “Yeah, man, it’s a bit like you just kind of check out mid conversation. Don’t worry though, a girl like Sophie doesn’t ever come back to Tuckett Bay. Maybe at Christmas, or something, but no fucking fancy Ph.D. ever has come back here to work at the Crab Shack. She’s here for a reason, man, maybe God himself brought her back here!”
“To run into me?” I ask. “I came back…”
I trail off. I was going to say “I came back here to find her, so it wasn’t God, or chance.” But I catch myself—I realize how that will sound.
The food comes, and I nearly inhale it. It tastes so good that I can’t slow down, and when it’s gone, I want more.
“Jesus,” Samuel says. “And I thought I had an appetite.”
“He’s back home,” Marv says. “They say hunger is the best spice, but that’s not true, homesickness is.”
The other three roll their eyes.
“Marv thinks he’s fucking Hemingway,” John says. “But it’s not like he’s ever been gone from Tuckett Bay long enough to miss it.”
“You don’t read books,” Marv snaps. “Don’t act like—”
“I had to read that book in school, man,” John snaps. “I remember it because it was so damn boring! Just like all your nuggets of wisdom, Marv.”
Marv crosses his arms and looks at me. “Take what you want, man. You want more food? I’ll go get Sophie to—”
He starts to raise his hand, but I pull it down. “No, leave it. I appreciate the help...but I got this.”
Marv nods.
I keep wondering if Sophie will at least come over to say hi, or wave, or even look at me. But she doesn’t. And when it’s time to go, I tell Marv I’ll be a few minutes.
I stand at the door and compose myself. There’s no reason to wait on this, I need to go talk to her. If she wants to slap me, she might as well do it now.
I head back inside and see her swiping a credit card into the register near the back.
I walk right up behind her, but I clear my throat as I get close, so that I don’t scare the shit out of her.
I see her tense up as soon as I make the noise.
“Sophie,” I say. “Mind if we talk?”
She doesn’t turn around to face me. She just slams buttons on the touch screen without looking up at me. I’m pretty sure touchscreens don’t need to be hit so fucking hard. “You want to talk now, Mason? Isn’t it a bit late for that?”
“Probably,” I say. “I mean…”
My mind goes blank. What the fuck? Why can’t I get any damn words out? I’ve wondered what I’d say to her if I ever saw her again—played it back in my mind, thought out all the ways I could explain to her what happened. And now, when it finally comes down to it, I’ve got nothing?
“Nothing to say?” she says. “So I guess we’re done talking.”
“I don’t want you to forgive me,” I say.
“Okay. I don’t forgive you. Happy?”
I bite my lip. “Uh, no, I haven’t been happy in a while, Sophie—”
“Me either,” she snaps. “But it’s not because of you, Mason, nothing about my life for the past decade and a half has been because of—or had anything to do with—you.”
She grabs another credit card and swipes it, the first one falls to the floor and slides toward me.
I reach down to pick it up. She spins around, looking at me with frenzied anger. “Don’t touch that! It’s a customer’s card!”
I pick it up off the ground anyway. I hold it out to her.
She snatches it out of my hand, not making contact with me at all. “You asshole.”
“You think I’m gonna’ steal Barb Smith’s identity?” I ask.
“So you read her name off the card?” Sophie asks, raising both eyebrows at me. “I told you not to touch it, and you read it.”
“In the special forces...we were trained to memorize anything we saw written down—”
“Great,” Sophie says. “I’m sure that will serve you well on Marv’s fishing boat. Now get out of my way.”
“Sophie,” I say, not moving.
“Move your wide-ass shoulders out of my way, Mason!” she says, shoving me.
It’s not like she could really move me, but feeling her hand on me, the warmth of her skin on my arm again...I just slide out of her way. She bristles past me and doesn’t look back.
I walk out of the Crab Shack and meet up with Marv.
She touched me. She fucking touched me again. And she’s fucking furious with me. That’s great. Nothing gets a woman back into a man’s arms like red-hot fury.
“How’d it go?” he asks.
I smile really wide and nod my head. “Really well, man. I think I’ve got a real shot at this.”
We throw down the anchor and tie the boat to the dock as the sun sets. I’m exhausted, which is nothing new to me, but being exhausted like this, with the salt water cracking my skin, is something I haven’t felt in a long time.
And there’s only one cure for it.
“Drinks?” Ashton asks.
We all nod.
When a fisherman is tired deep down to his bones, he doesn’t sleep, he drinks.
“Tillman’s?” I ask.
Ashton laughs. “I thought you were from here?”
“I am,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “Everyone drinks at Tillman’s.”
Marv slaps a hand onto my back. “Yeah, everyone drinks there now. It’s a tourist destination now.”
“Good for picking up chicks not looking for more than a night,” John says, licking his lips. “Maybe Mason’s looking for that?”
Nope. I’m only looking for one woman right now, and I want a hell of a lot more than a single night with her.
I shake my head, “So, where does everyone go now?”
“The Midnight,” John says. “It’s new...ish.”
When we get there, I see what he John means by newish. The Midnight certainly isn’t old, I remember going there a few times in high school with a fake ID, but it used to be a fucking hole. It had more townie cred than Tillman’s did, but if there’s such a thing as being too “authentic,” then The Midnight had definitely been way too much.
Last time I remember seeing it, all the floorboards were nearly rotting. I remember getting drunk and having my boot break through a plank, like the place was trying to fucking swallow me alive. The only bartender had been the owner, and no one I talked to had really any idea how he managed to stay in business. I’d never seen more than two people
in there at a time, save for when we rolled in with our fake IDs and bought ourselves few cheap-ass pitchers of Bud Light.
So the place I walk into now is a bit of a different story. There are two perky women with even perkier tits pulling the taps, and the place isn’t quite bustling, but it’s on the verge of it. I see a lot of people I recognize but haven’t seen in over fifteen years. I even see a few of my old teachers, but instead of middle-aged men or women with some grey in their hair, they look straight-up old.
The old rotting floorboards are gone, replaced with gleaming waxed planks. The place is barely recognizable.
It’s almost like I’ve been locked up in some kind of vault, and only now stepped out. Everything around me has changed. But nah, I wasn’t in a fucking vault, I was in hell. And I’ve probably changed more than anyone else. Just hopefully I haven’t changed too much for Sophie.
Or maybe I should hope that I’ve changed enough for her. If I was still the same guy who abandoned her, then I wouldn’t deserve a second chance with her.
“You heard of Ketchikan?” Samuel says, looking around the bar.
“Huh?” I ask. “Catch A Can? That another bar?”
“Nah,” he says. “Ketchikan, it’s a city in Alaska. Killer fishing destination. All the big cruise liners started making stops there. They built a big fucking dock for the cruise liners right touching downtown. It used to be a sleepy little town, shit, it still is I guess. Only ten thousand or so people, but those cruise liners bring in a lot of cash, and they dock right on the city. If you live there, you got tourists flooding into the heart of your city every few hours during cruise season. Good for business, not so good if you want to just relax with some friends.”
“So Tillman’s is Ketchikan?” I ask, grabbing my glass from the bar and taking a long drink.
“Yeah,” he says. “And The Midnight is New Ketchikan. The place all the people built a few miles down the road, far enough where the tourists won’t bother to walk, where they can go to have a drink with old friends. We didn’t bother with a whole new town in Tuckett Bay, but we’ve at least gotta have a bar to ourselves.”
I nod. It seems like the tourists have increased at the same rate as the fishing industry has declined. It’s hard for a town to have a real identity when more than half of the people there aren’t staying more than a week. When the memories of what the town was overshadow what it is now.
I see someone moving toward me out of the corner of my vision. It’s not something I’d have noticed before being in the Special Forces, but I notice it now, from all the way across the bar and through the crowds.
From the size, it’s a man, but I don’t turn toward him. I’d rather he thought he was getting the jump on me.
He sits down beside me, and I finally turn to look at him.
Shit. It’s Sophie’s old man. Older, fatter, and a lot less friendly looking than before.
“Mason,” he says.
“Mr. Sinclaire.”
“I think you can just call me Hank. So you’re back?”
“Yep,” I say, taking a long swig of my beer. “Want a drink?”
“I’m an old man, Mason,” he says. “I already have too many in me.”
How much does he know? He must know I hurt his daughter all those years back. Teenage daughters don’t usually spill their guts to their fathers, but Sophie was real close to her father.
“I saw Sophie,” I say. “She wasn’t too happy to see me.”
Hank laughs. “She’d have been over the moon to have seen you years back, Mason, but you sure as hell fucked that up. She looked furious when she came back from work today. I’ve been pushing her to apply for real jobs for months now, and she hasn’t touched an application. Today though, she was all over it.”
I bite my lip. So I’m driving her out of town? I better get to work on her before she’s gone.
“Mr. Sinclaire—Hank—I’m going to do everything I can to get your daughter back. The biggest mistake I ever made was not coming back to her sooner. It took me longer than it should to realize that, but—”
“Look, Mason,” he says, squeezing my arm and looking me right in the eyes. “I love having Sophie here, but she’s not happy here. She never will be. She’s like a bird in a cage. She can’t spread her wings here. Why don’t you have dinner with us tomorrow?”
My jaw drops open. When he first approached me, I thought he might hit me. When he sat down and started talking, I assumed he’d tell me to stay the fuck away from Sophie. I didn’t expect a dinner invite.
“Didn’t you just say…?” I start, but then it all clicks for me, and I laugh. “You got no confidence in me, Mr. Sinclaire?”
“Hank,” he says. “And no, not really. I think having you over to dinner is the best way to get Sophie to stop wasting her time here, to leave, to do something with herself. I’m happy to bet against you, Mason.”
I stand up from the barstool. “Should I bring a bottle of wine?”
7
Mason
Fifteen Years Ago
I get out of my last class early. It’s one of those “history” classes where the football coach teaches it. Coach usually only manages to pretend he knows about history for forty-five minutes, and then he lets us leave early. No one complains.
I gotta wait in the parking lot for Sophie. I don’t really know why I’m doing this, but it felt like the right thing to do. I’ve never really been into girls like her, and I’m not even saying that I’m into her…but as I lean against my car and wait for her to show, I realize I feel fucking nervous. Me, nervous over a girl?
My car is an ‘89 Camaro. My pride and joy. I’ve fished almost every day after school since I was fifteen to pay for it. Like most guys in Tuckett Bay, fishing is what we do to make some extra cash. And if you fuck up and get C’s on your chemistry tests, fishing ends up being your career.
My Camaro is gleaming black, and even though its boxy frame is pretty outdated, I still think it looks cool as shit.
Plenty of girls seem to think it looks cool, too, though a few have complained because it doesn’t actually have a back seat. It can be a bit difficult and uncomfortable to fuck a girl with the shifter box right in between the bucket seats, but I like a challenge.
“Mason,” a voice calls out.
I look up to see it’s my brother Eric.
He’s younger than me, but only by about ten months—Irish twins.
“What’s up?” I ask.
“Can I get a ride?”
“Uh,” I say. “I would, but I’m meeting Sophie.”
I look over at my car, as if to emphasize there are only two seats.
“Sophie?” he asks. “Sophie who?”
“Sinclaire.”
He looks confused, but then his eyes widen. “Robot Girl? You’re fucking Robot—”
I shove him into the side of the car. “Watch it!’
He laughs. “Dude, I didn’t know you were into chicks like that. I mean she’s got some big tits, but—”
I pull him off the car and shove him into it again, harder this time. “Alright!” he says, smiling, putting his hands up in mock surrender. “Sorry, bro, I was just giving you a hard time. Sophie’s nice, you two would be good together.”
“She’s helping me with chemistry,” I say, narrowing my eyes at him. “That’s all.”
“Call it whatever you want,” Eric says. “It’s cool.”
I roll my eyes and let go of him. He adjusts his collar and starts to leave.
“Hey,” I say, stopping him. “I’ll give you a ride tomorrow. You gonna be home tonight?”
Eric shrugs. “I dunno, maybe. I’ll get a ride from Grossman.”
“Danny Grossman?” I ask. “Come on, man—”
“Drop it, Mason, it’s not like you don’t drink sometimes, too.”
“Yeah, well, if he tries to get you to smoke crack or something—”
“I’m not a dipshit, Mason. See ya. Have fun with Sophie.”
He w
aves to me and walks off in the direction of the school.
The bell rings in the distance, and crowds of people start to flood into the parking lot. I lean with my back up against my car with my arms crossed, just in case Sophie doesn’t know which car is mine.
I finally see her, only after she’s right on top of me. She’s no longer wearing the torn sweater, so I didn’t even recognize her.
I notice my eyes wandering down to her chest. My brother was right, she really does have big—
“Hey,” she says.
I smile. “Hey.”
We close our chemistry books. We’re sitting at a table in a coffee shop.
“You think you got it?” Sophie asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “It all kind of clicked just now. You’re better at teaching this stuff than Mr. Holloway is.”
She smiles really wide. She’s been smiling a lot, and I can’t help but notice that she looks pretty damn good when she smiles.
“You can go if you want to,” she says. “I mean, you probably have other stuff to do.”
I cross my arms. “Remember the deal?”
“You don’t have to help me with...that,” she says. “It’s my own fault.”
“You’re bad at it,” I say. “You gotta treat yourself with more respect. Don’t assume you’re always inconveniencing everyone.”
“I’m not,” she snaps.
“How far do you live from here?” I ask.
“Uh,” she mumbles. “Three miles or so?”
“So, just now, you told me to just leave you here. What was your plan to get home?”
She blushes, and both of her cheeks redden. “I dunno.”
“Walk?”
“I was going to call my dad.”
“But I’d be happy to drive you home,” I say, “so why not just ask me? It’s because you have no confidence.”
“I took off the sweater,” she says. “That’s good, at least, right?”
I look down at her tits. And not for the first time tonight. “Yeah...that’s good.”
I force myself to look back up at her face. She smiles. Again. She looks pretty good all over, I realize.
“Are you going to Homecoming?” I ask her.
