Page 84 of Fated

Aldon and Chris are in the water now, repairing gear and scrubbing barnacles from the hull. Chris mentioned casually he didn’t get any sleep. Up till midnight searching for Amy, then out at three for the morning catch. He seemed proud of himself, though, with the confident, easy grin of a twenty-year-old.

“Glad she’s all right,” he said. “She’s a funny one. Told me I should read ‘The Old Man and the Sea.’ I told her, ‘Not until I’m an old man—then it’ll be a biography.’” He shook his head and laughed then dropped his final crate of flopping fish onto the concrete floor of the gazebo.

For me.

To clean.

And sell.

And then deliver to the people who have scheduled orders, and also to the restaurant. I’m amazed thereisa restaurant on this island.

In the shade of the gazebo, next to the low slatted wooden bench, Sean pats the sand with a yellow plastic shovel. He has a line of small toy cars, and every time he finishes digging a hole, he shoves a car in and shouts, “Uh-oh!”

Standing around the plywood table with glistening snapper lining the surface, Maranda, Essie, and Dee all stare at me.

“What’s wrong with you?” Essie asks, the liver spots on her face dark and her knuckles swollen from arthritis. She grips a knife in her hand and forcefully chops the tail from the fish in front of her. It makes a crunching noise, like scissors cutting through corrugated cardboard.

She picks up the tail fin and tosses it into a lined ten-gallon plastic bucket. It hits with a thunk, and overhead a gull swoops toward us with a throaty, insistent call.

I flinch at the noise, and then at her sawing through the dorsal fin at the top of the chunky fish.

I wish I didn’t have that mango porridge. It was the exact color of the snapper’s orange flesh.

Not that I’m against eating fish. This is just ... gross.

I could handle this, except for the noise of the knife ripping through the fins.Kwwwwwkkkk. Kwwwwwk.

I take a deep breath of fish-tinged air as Essie reaches a swollen knuckle into the side of her snapper and hooks her finger to tug out the gills. They release with a sharp pop.

“You get paid by how many you clean,” Dee says, not looking up from the pile of fish in front of her. She has a dozen fish in her bucket. Essie has fifteen. Maranda has eight.

Me? I have zero.

“This is my job?” I ask again, just to be sure. “This is how I make money?”

Why in the world would I dream this?

“No,” says Maranda, shooting me a look. “This is what we do Monday mornings. And Thursday mornings. The rest of the time you work at Grinders.”

Grinders?

“Are you still pretending you’re Swedish?” Dee asks, pulling slimy entrails from her fish’s stomach.

“Swiss.” I pick up my knife. How hard can this be? I get five cents per cleaned and prepared fish. Which begs the question, why am I doing this for five cents a fish?

Maranda’s pulled another snapper from the crate and slapped it onto the table. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, determined to do everything she does.

Across the table, Dee tugs a giant, bulbous gray fish with a fat, blobby head onto the table. It hits with a squishy thud.

“Grouper,” she calls, cackling happily. I’ve never in my life seen a tiny, ninety-plus-year-old woman lift such an ugly, fat-lipped, freakishly large fish (it must weigh seventy pounds) with so much excitement.

I concentrate on watching Maranda without her knowing I’m watching. I grip the cold handle of the knife and slice through the fins on the sides of the fish. They cut with a jagged, zipper-tearing noise. I flip the cold, scaled fish and cut through the other fin.

Maranda’s moving quickly. I hurry, trying to keep up with her slicing through the tail, then the dorsal fin.

“You never told us,” Essie says, tossing entrails into her bucket. “What did you do in New York?”

“Me?” I ask, blinking at her.

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