The Fish
Dom had come straight from the yard. White shirt, sleeves shoved to the elbow, salvage grease still under one thumbnail. His cut lay folded on the seat between them with the President patch facing up, like a jacket he'd taken off to be polite.
She had braced for five years to show on him. It hadn't. Same clean lines, same calm mouth, and his eyes found her across the dim of the car and did the thing they'd always done. Steady. Warm. In every room they'd ever shared, that look had made her feel like the point of it.
And she stood there on the curb feeling like a stranger who'd gotten into the wrong car.
"June."
Low, unhurried. Same voice. Something in her ribs pulled tight anyway. She dropped her eyes to the floor mat. Then made herself lift them.
"Hey. Dom."
She got in. The Suburban slid into the evening traffic without any hurry, and neither of them said anything. It wasn't a bad silence. It was careful. The kind that builds up between people who've learned to step around each other.
Dom had one ankle crossed over his knee. He watched the windshield. "What time did you land?"
"Just after two."
"You should've called. I'd have come."
"You were working. Cabs are easy." She watched wet street go by. "The airport road was shut for a while, actually. The Sovereigns came through."
"Heard." Something crossed his face too fast to read. "Rook's back from the Citadel."
She filed that away and didn't ask.
He looked over. She sat very straight, hands folded, eyes fixed on some spot beyond the glass, and the posture told him more than her words had.
She'd been fearless with him once. She'd climbed into his lap at twelve and demanded to know why the sky was that color.
He had spoiled her into it, he supposed. On purpose. He'd wanted her to know she could.
Now she sat beside him like a guest who'd been told not to touch anything.
He understood it, in the abstract. She'd been sent away before she was ready, and she'd shown him what she thought about that by not coming home, not once, not even at Christmas. So he'd gone to her.
Last spring, when she ran a fever for four days in a flat in Edinburgh and told no one until it was bad. He'd found her smaller than he expected. It had nothing to do with her height.
There was something new about her now. The soft edges had been taken off somewhere along the way.
What was left was quieter and harder to name, the kind of composure you get from a long stretch of doing everything alone.
He watched her a beat longer than he should have.
"You've gotten formal with me," he said.
"I haven't. I just—" Didn't want to be any trouble. The end of that sentence would only prove his point. She swerved. "I wanted to surprise you."
He let that sit. It had worked, in a way. He just hadn't decided yet if that was a good thing.
The Reyes place stood on Tanner's Bluff, a big white clapboard house with a wraparound porch and a garage that had held more bikes than cars since before June was born.
The porch light was on. So was every other light.
Aunt Pat had the door open before the Suburban stopped. She had June by the shoulders before June had both feet on the gravel, turning her, front, side, front, saying she'd gotten taller and in the same breath that she hadn't changed at all.
"You video-call her every month," Pop said from the porch swing. He was a big man gone thin, his old cut hanging off him, the Founder rocker faded almost to gray. He looked pleased and was working at not showing it. "Course she looks the same to you." Then, to June: "You should've told us. We'd have got something ready."
"It was last-minute. I barely packed."
"You're starving." Aunt Pat had her by the wrist now, steering. "Dee's been at the stove since she heard. Everything you like."
The table proved it. Crab chowder with the cream skin still on top. A cast-iron pan of cornbread. A plate of crab cakes, four to a person, June's four sitting directly in front of her chair with the good lemon wedge.
Aunt Pat kept reaching across to add things to her bowl. Pop asked about the engine shop, the work, the flat.
It all went along nicely until it reached, the way these things do, the only question that mattered.
"How much time'd you get off?"
June put down her spoon.
She'd known. She'd had a whole flight to decide, and she had decided she wasn't going to dress it up.
"I quit."
Nothing moved. Aunt Pat's hand stopped over the cornbread. Her eyes went from June to Dom and back. "You quit. When? You never said—"
"Last Friday."
Nobody said the next part out loud, but it settled over the table anyway. If June had quit, nothing was pulling her back. She might not go anywhere at all.
The warmth of the last hour, the chowder and the fussing and the plain pleasure of being fed, turned suddenly into the thin glass around a lightbulb. Still whole. But you could hear it.
"Quit the engine shop," Pop said slowly. "Thought that was the whole point of you."
"It was a job."
"So you're staying in Port Halloran?"
"Am I allowed to?"
Aunt Pat hesitated. Half a second too long. "You had a good life over there. Why the sudden change?"
Why. There was Nadia. That would have been enough by itself. But under it, harder to say out loud, was just that she'd wanted to come home.
Port Halloran in summer was wet and miserable and in winter it tried to kill you, and it was also the only place she had ever really grown up.
She knew what the harbor smelled like after a storm. She knew which streets flooded. She knew what the light did to the cranes at six in the morning.
But that wasn't what they were asking. They didn't want a reason. They wanted a guarantee.
Nobody at this table had been waiting for her.
It was Dom who moved. No speech. He pulled the big platter of crab toward him, cracked a claw with the flat of a knife, picked the meat out in three clean pulls, and set a small bowl in front of her.
Not a shell fragment in it. He'd done it at every crab dinner since she was nine, because she hated getting her hands sticky.
The bowl touched the table with a small click, and the silence broke around it like ice.
"How's your friend?" he asked.
She told them about Nadia. He listened. He asked if there was anything he could do, and she shook her head.
The plan was set, the drugs were the best available, and now it came down to waiting. The conversation moved. Dinner went on.
After the plates went out, Aunt Pat took her upstairs before she could say no, one hand locked around her wrist, already talking about the room.
"We had it cleaned this morning. Your things are exactly where you left them; I didn't touch a thing." She shouldered open the door and pointed at the bed like a woman unveiling a statue. "New sheets. I picked them myself. Do you like them?"
Pink. Small scattered daisies. June looked at them a moment. "Thanks, Aunt Pat."
"Don't thank me. You're family." She took June's hand in both of hers. "I'm glad you're home. I'm not saying it to be nice. When Dom flew out last year and found you like that, burning up on a mattress with nobody to bring you a glass of water, I didn't sleep for a week." Her eyes had gone red at the corners. "I kept thinking about it."
"I'm fine. I'm old enough to look after myself."
"You'll never be old enough for me to stop." Aunt Pat touched her cheek. "You never could sleep on planes. Go take a bath."
When she'd gone, June walked slowly around the room. Ten years of her life had happened in here. She ran her fingers along the desk, along the spines on the shelf. It smelled of the same cedar and old paper it always had, and she couldn't have explained what that did to her to anyone who hadn't lived it.
After a shower, she decided to go down and ask Dee about a broth for Nadia tomorrow. She'd almost reached the landing when she heard voices from the living room and slowed without meaning to.
Through the railing she could see the back of Dom's head. Across from him, Pop and Aunt Pat on the sofa.
"Dominic." Aunt Pat's voice was careful. "Be honest with me. Did you know she was coming? Did you tell her she could?"
Dom sat with one ankle over his knee. "She wanted to come home. That doesn't take anybody's permission."
"Then tell me how you feel about it. Now that she's here."
"You and the Sterlings sent her away," Dom said, "and didn't ask me."
"I was thinking of both of you. The things people were saying, it was getting to the point—"
"Kids said ugly things." His voice didn't rise. "Grown people chose to believe them. You included."
Aunt Pat went quiet.
Pop laid his hand over hers. "That's finished. She stayed gone five years because she figured we didn't want her. That's nothing. She's back. Let's not hand her a reason to leave again."
"She's always welcome here. She knows that." Aunt Pat meant it; you could hear that she did. "But Dominic, she isn't a child. Even real brothers and sisters have to watch how it looks. And you two aren't even that."
June didn't wait for the rest.
She turned around, went back up the stairs one at a time, and closed her door so quietly it didn't make a sound.
