Читать книгу Follow the Sun - Edward J. Delaney - Страница 16

9.

TINA HEARS THE RAKE OF HER MOTHER’S VOICE THROUGH thin doors. Time, or day, or situation: no idea. Just darkness; just her mother’s bellow, come in drunk again on cheap wine, needing attention.

“Tina!” Gina shouts, as if calling down a mineshaft.

“I got work in the morning!” Tina shouts back, rolling her pillow over her head.

Tina hears the leaden footsteps, the endless rub of shoulder gliding along wall as Gina tries to stay on her feet. And now the shadow in the doorway, framed by light, somehow insistent. Now the breathing, drink-heavy and humid.

“I saw him,” Gina says, “but he didn’t see me.”

“Who did you see?”

“Your father.”

“So what?” Tina says, rolling over toward the wall, trying to make a point.

“I don’t even think he knew it was me.”

Tina is silent, but her mother knows she’s awake.

“He’s got the money to drink beer,” she says, “but not the money for us.”

Tina says nothing.

“And I’m broke trying to support you.”

Bullshit, Tina is thinking. Gina is in her forties now, and bristling with grievances. She only works sporadically, and they both know they’re getting the usual array of support: AFDC checks, food stamps, an EBT card, and a Section 8 apartment, all for the purported purpose of providing for the child. Me, Tina thinks, the dependent minor. But Gina cashes out the food stamps with a cooperative package-store owner, and has a convenience store where the Pakistani owner will give her cartons of cigarettes and ring it up as milk and eggs and bread at twice the listed price.

That’s the place Gina’s gotten to, on wiles and rationalizations. Tina doesn’t know past history, but she’s seen her mother mixed up with such a gallery of unfortunate men that Tina wonders how life might be if she just got a job, stopped drinking, and shut the hell up.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Tina looks at the clock. It’s a quarter past three in the morning. The bars all close at one.

“Ma, I gotta sleep.”

“Your father doesn’t give a shit about you.”

“I know. You told me already.”

“You should ask him for that money.”

“I will.”

“He’s fucked everything up. I mean like, forever.”

“Okay, okay.”

Then there’s another voice. A man.

“Gina?” he calls from what sounds to be the kitchen, a voice similarly drink-sodden. “Are there any clean glasses?”

Tina awakens again in the darkness, as if by phantom noise. The apartment is quiet. She has no idea if her mother’s still home, or come and gone. Her clock reads four thirty and she sits up in bed. She doesn’t remember a dream, but feels as if she’s been knocked roughly from sleep. Some revelation. Some intuition. She doesn’t know quite what it is. But she feels convinced, right now, that it’s time to go see her father and have it out.

It’s been so many years. She needs for him to help her, but maybe the help could be mutual. Maybe there’s something she could do for him. She’s never heard of a girl working a lobster boat. Maybe something else, though.

She dresses quickly, only rubbing a palmful of tap water on her face. Out the door pulling on her coat. It’s cold in the mornings, still. She shivers and then quickens her pace to warm herself. The streets are quiet, but from inside houses she passes, dogs hear her steps and begin the howling chorus. Turning at the bottom of the street and onto Main, she passes empty shops and a few diners open for the earliest risers and latest drinkers. Men in plaid coats sit over their coffee. As she moves, she inventories, trying to see if he’s among them. But no. She pushes on to the docks.

The boats are loading up under blued floodlights. She’s not sure which one is his. It’s a new boat, she knows, after the old one was seized. She has no idea, however, what this boat would look like.

Some fishermen come walking from the near shadows, and she asks if they know Quinn Boyle.

“He’s around here somewhere,” one says.

She walks along the seawall, sighting down the long docks. A half dozen boats are getting ready, tired men moving slowly, the endless routines. The pots, wire boxes in high-visibility yellows and oranges, stack on the afts in risen walls that seem to likewise cage in their owners.

One boat is just pulling off to open water, its engines surging as it moves to gather speed. Now she sees in the weak light that it’s him. She cannot mistake the imprint of his shape and movement, as little as she ever knew him. There he goes, out to sea, once again. Just missed. She could shout but he’d never hear it, wouldn’t probably know her now if he saw her. Then he turns his head; for that fraction he seems to lock on her from across the water. She’d like to think that, but who can say. The boat swings to the starboard and she sees the name hand-painted on the stern. Christine II. Her given name, the name no one calls her by. Her mother had christened her Tina somewhere along the way, the cute contrivance of “Gina and Tina,” like matching outfits in a yellowed Easter photo.

She watches the boat, her namesake, as it escapes out past the breakwater. She’s determined to follow it to the horizon. She has the time and even as she shivers she doesn’t waver. In time, somewhere out there in its tininess, it disappears from her sight, lost amid the broad, gray palette of the morning ocean. She stays anyway, until she guesses it has slipped across the other edge of this constricted world she knows. All she can hope now is that he has a good catch, for both of them.