Either the Beginning or the End of the World (5 page)

I could already stitch bait bags as fast as a bufflehead could dive for food, and I could mend my father's nets. I was a fisherman's daughter from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Nothing to do with these people.

But against my will, all the time I missed the smell of the room where I wouldn't talk to my mother. I felt her hand smoothing my shirt. I remember the surprising sweetness of the rice. I wanted her to have more than a room. I didn't want her legs to ache. Now and then she called me after she went with her mother to Lowell. What could I say? Please, please let me live with you in your room. I won't bother you.

I thought by sixteen, I'd be over her.

WHEN I SEE MY MOTHER

“I'm late,” I call in that flash of a second before my mother's yellow car actually comes to a full stop in front of our house. “Taking the truck, Dad. Bye. Back around nine.” I force Pilot in the house, nearly dragging her. “Go go go, you have to go!” She doesn't understand and cries. I shut her in anyway. I need to disappear in my father's truck.

But I can't stop myself from turning to look. Just at that moment, my mother steps out of her car and looks over her shoulder.

Her long black hair is lit by a yellow halo from the streetlight. My mother and I both slip our hands in our front coat pockets against the cold.

A sharp pain jolts me over the next thing I see.

She wears a white nylon puffy coat. It hangs wide open even in this cold, the two ends of the belt dangling. Silver buttons glint in the light, framing her belly, which the warm coat can't cover. Her belly bulges with baby.

I think two things at the same second.
How could someone like you be my mother?
And
A baby! How dare you?

Even though I know it's that guy in Lowell she goes back to, I am betrayed, and she's never been mine. I am also pulled back to a house, a room, the pungent smell of lime and garlic in fish sauce, women chopping lemongrass, stringy strands of lemongrass, long windows swollen shut by ice and an overheated, suffocating Massachusetts night.

Women squatting, balling mounds of sticky rice for children who tear past them, laughing. I wear a tiara. I remember someone's hands placing the tiara in my hair.

It is my birthday party.

This is my own memory, coming loud as a freight train. I know the rhythm of the women's voices. The words in Khmer soften at the edges and turn to smoke. This can't be
my
memory. But the tiara is as real as my ring with the tiger's eye that Luke found. I swear I can feel the tiara on my head.

“Stay a while,” my father calls. It stops me as I haul the truck door open.

“No.”

My fingers touch the soldier's dog tags that nest in my pocket.

When I see my mother with a new unborn child I become a child. Did she put the tiara on my head when she was only a few years older than I am now?

I step up into the old Chevy with the “Save the Fishermen” bumper sticker on the back. My father follows me, his long legs slow and easy-does-it, even in the cold. He has something to say. I lower the window. “Dad, I need to go. Please.” My voice rises. My mother is walking toward us.

“I told that kid I owe him one trip. When I let him go.” My father doesn't look at me. “Said I'd take him on one more trip. Then he needed to find a new boat. He's a brawler in town, but on board, he never missed a beat. I allowed myself to shut my eyes when he was on board. The only crew I can say that for. You'll never see him again, Sofie.”

I knew this was a command. The first I have ever heard from my father.

I pull out onto the street just in time.

STRIP MALL

“Late,” Vincent says when I push open the door, clutching my apron and cap.

My boss never misses the time. I check the clock. It's five minutes after five. It could be much worse. I stash my coat, wrap my hair around my hand and pull it into a ponytail, put on the cap. Clock in. Tie on apron.

Vincent is built low and gorilla-like. He is gruff, tattoos bursting down his arms. If customers ask, he tells them about his tattoos. He designed them himself with symbols from all the cultures he is made up of. A koi fish on his bicep for the Japanese blood, a Celtic cross for the Irish blood, a muskrat he read about in a legend for his Abenaki blood.

“Forgive you this time, babe.”

“Don't call me that, Vincent. I won't be late again.”

“Don't be shy about it. You're not a California babe. But you're a babe.”

Jesus, he irritates me so. If it weren't for the pay.

The Dunkin' Donuts is in a tiny strip mall with an Asian market that I've never been in. Behind it are the city's only projects, though hardly projects compared to the ones in Lowell and other cities in the Valley. The Valley is south of us, Lowell and Lawrence on the Merrimack River's banks where European immigrants came for jobs in the mills. Next the Hispanics and the Asians came, like my mother. Like me?

“Hi, what can I get for you?” I ask the customer at the drive-through who is only a voice in my ear. She lists a string of drinks and a dozen chocolate frosted. I fill the box of donuts. Pour the coffees with creams and skim and sugars. Get them to the window. This will continue for hours.

My hair is falling from my cap, and I jam it back under. The cap is beige with a tiny strip of orange around the bill and a cherry-red, orange, and white DD on the brim. I hate the cap. Vincent wears one just like it, plastering his thin hair to his head. He wears it low over eyes that are heartsick like a basset hound's. I imagine a story of unrequited love that left his eyes so bereft.

A girl comes in, her elbow loose around a guy's neck and him in jeans hanging beneath his hipbones. The girl wears earrings that dangle and long hair in spirals down to the small of her back. I know this couple likes their coffee with double milk, double sugar.

A tiny woman with pixie hair under a pink beret stares at the trays of donuts.

“Hi, what can I get for you?”

She comes every night. She's waiting for the time we throw out the donuts that have been on the rack too long. “May I have one of the cream filled?” she asks, very upper class.

“I'm sorry, that's against the rules,” I say.

We each say this every night. And every night when Vincent's back is turned I put two cream filled in a paper bag for her. Vincent knows I do this.

Mrs. Bennett goes out with her donuts, easing her way up the sidewalk and through the crush of lights at the intersection of roads to the mall. I brew more decaf. Sometimes people want that at night. When I turn I see Mrs. Tuttle, who wears sequin ducks on her sweatshirt jacket, lean her head in the door. She's a neighbor from the Heights.

“I know your dad's a fisherman,” she says. “Do you have any Maine shrimp? I wonder if you'd sell me some shrimp straight from the boat. It's my husband's birthday. He is eighty-three tomorrow.” Wind blows her most of the way inside. “I remember when they used to sell shrimp off a truck right here on Woodbury.”

She means northern shrimp, what the New Hampshire fishermen call them. Tiny, sweet shrimp only in these northern waters. And that's when it comes together for me.

Brilliant.

“I can get you some shrimp for Mr. Tuttle's birthday,” I say. “Whole shrimp?”

“I don't mind. Grew up cleaning shrimp. Ned Dickerson's got a thing going off his boat,” Mrs. Tuttle says, “Whole shrimp. One seventy-five a pound.”

“I can beat that,” I say. “One seventy.”

“Dickerson's getting a better price selling locally. It's a lot of work. Like they're giving out recipes and telling people how fresh tastes better than frozen.” This conversation is happening around the orders coming in through my earpiece.

My head spins with possibilities for profit. And keeping my father home. He gets seventy-five cents a pound for the shrimp going to Gloucester. You don't have to be good at math to figure out it'd be good to sell to Mrs. Tuttle.

“Couldn't do it,” Vincent says. He was doing a crossword between jobs back behind the counter. It's all filled in, in ink, with the tiny black letters, except for one tiny block.

“What's the question?”

He puts the clipboard away, slides the pen in the metal clip, and shakes his head. “Got standards,” he says. I know the standards. 1: No reference, not even Sofie. 2: No guessing. 3: In ink. Vincent should be running a country, not a donut shop.

I mop, imagining measuring out shrimp for Mr. Tuttle's birthday. Wash out the pots. Put on my sweater, over the shirt that says
DD Oven Roasted, Gets You Running
. The floor shines. The traffic has grown lighter outside. The ribbon of lights that crosses the storefront has slowed. “'Night, Vince.” I don't look back. “Five sharp tomorrow,” he says in his way, and I don't have to look to see his heartbroken eyes.

Sometimes I wonder if it's Vincent who wrote on the seawall at the beach in all-cap black letters,
You were too beautiful for this world
. . .

When I step out, I instantly see him. The soldier is a silhouette, his boot on the runner of my father's truck, knee bent. I realize later that the command my father gave never crosses my mind.

THE ASHWORTH

The fear is the first thing. Of the rawness of him. Of his eyes, acutely on guard and tender at the same time. He watches me come. When I'm closer, I see the line of his lips. He takes me in, my eyes, my cheekbones, my hair.

I stop. I slowly slide the Dunkin' Donuts cap off my hair. His eyes soften.

Something almost like a smile crinkles in his eyes. We are not in color, like we were when the sun splashed in the sky. We are gray beneath hooded streetlights with streaks of white headlights cutting through us.

I start to shiver.

First my teeth. Then my shoulders and knees. At home, maybe my mother is still talking to my father. With her big belly. With that new baby. I see her more clearly than if I'd stayed at home. I can't picture my mother with me and Dad at the Formica table, fretting over the piles of papers—bills for fuel, bait, the new GPS, crew, boat mortgage, taxes, fish brokers, federal permits, documents for days at sea, what it cost one time Pete rammed the
Karma
over a rock in the channel.

Luke and I stand with our arms crossed against the cold. The sky allows haze from the moon to seep through. The moon is waning but bright.

“You're cold,” Luke says, beside my father's truck.

“I'm scared,” I say.

“Of me?”

I shake my head.

“Should I go?”

“Jesus,” I whisper. “You better stay.”

Then a laugh, a roaring laugh. We are nothing like we were on the beach in the snow and splotchy sunrise, when I was in shock over the gun and then lost with him. He is laughing. “Aren't you your father's daughter.
Jesus
. On the boat it's like he's calling up the spirits.”

I smile. My father's daughter. Luke drops his boot to the ground. We face each other. He is laughing, but his hand shakes until he rests it low, on his thigh.

“Come on,” he says.

Yes,
I think. “Where?”

“Get some food.”

It seems natural to go. I've been waiting for this. We get in his car. The seat cracks with cold, and I wonder how long he'd been standing with his boot on my runner. We drive out of the streetlights of the city, heading east. We pass the cemetery and follow out the dark roads and I know where these roads are leading, toward the ocean. We follow along the road that hugs the ocean in the winter dark and can hear the waves beat on the rocks as the tide crashes in. We are silent. It's late, and we've come so far, but my father will be asleep and when we come to Hampton Beach, I feel like I am the only place I could possibly be tonight. I know the beach, the strip. Rosa and I have come here all our lives to the shops and arcade along the boardwalk.

Luke pulls into one of the diagonal parking slots. I take him in as we walk. He's wearing a jacket that swings open over a thick, navy blue sweater, a baseball cap. He gives me a crooked smile as we walk along the strip. That's what they call the stretch of Ocean Boulevard with the boardwalk and Blinks Fry Dough, the casino, bead shops with shells and stones from all the wide world, Jerri's Breakfast, Ice Cream, Subs. Toe rings. On Memorial Day, in the crush of people, the police start patrolling. Break up the rowdies. Track the walkaways and reunite them with their moms.

“No place open,” I say.

“One place. Ways to go. I just like walking the strip.”

We keep walking. It's natural. Like we do this. I have school, Mrs. Bennett's cream filled, then race down the boardwalk with the soldier. We come to the arcade where you can put a quarter in to get the mannequin fortune teller to turn her gray head and spit out your fortune on a card, arcade games, shooting gallery, bowling lanes.

The arcade is closed. Light snow falls against the shuttered wall.

“I want you to listen and listen tight,” I imitate the words that play on a loop in the shooting gallery. “I want you to shoot it and shoot it right,” I recite. “It's the gunfighter in the shooting gallery.”

“First weapon I fired when I was a kid. My friends and I used to come up from Nashua,” Luke says. “I always went for the piano player.”

“And the piano plays jive.”

Then we list all the animated creatures in the shooting gallery and the sounds they make when you shoot them with laser guns on their small triangle targets.

“The bear . . .”

“Growls,” I say.

“The clown . . .”

“His nose flashes.”

I am laughing.

It's okay. He is okay about the bridge. And the pier. And the gun. He is okay talking about a shooting gallery everybody in the Merrimack Valley and everybody from the Seacoast over generations—the Italians, the Scots, even the Cambodians,

everybody—knows. It's our history.