Envious Moon(20)

“I’m not a lot of boys.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said.

“What?”

“Are you Puerto Rican?”

I laughed. “No, Portuguese.”

“I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

“We all look alike,” I said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“I’m messing with you.”

“Show me what you’re doing,” Hannah said.

“Move closer,” I said, and she came to the counter and stood next to me. I could smell her soap and it was bright and clean.

“Look,” I said. I held my knife down along the body, under the gills. “The fillet is here. You have to make a slice by the tail and then peel it away from the spine. You got to have a sharp knife and work quickly. It can break on you. You want the fillet whole.”

“It looks hard.”

“Just takes practice.”

I held the fish in front of me and made a small incision above the tail of the striper. I worked the flat of the blade in until I reached the spine. I began to scrape and slide, working from feel. I separated it from the length of bone and I pulled the fillet free and showed her.

“See?” I said.

“Cool.”

“Wait till you taste it. Fish this fresh is its own thing.”

In a pantry off the kitchen I found all that I needed to make Berta’s Portuguese sauce. I had never made it myself but I had seen her make it hundreds of times. It was easy. I simmered canned tomatoes with garlic, onions, cloves, and bay leaves. I added some cayenne pepper and the two fish fillets and I let them braise in the liquid. The air filled with the smell of the spice and while it cooked, we leaned against the counter and we talked.

Hannah told me she was seventeen, too, and that she went to boarding school in Connecticut. It was called Miss Watson’s and she did not like it much but it was her last year. Next year she would go to college and she thought maybe Smith and she said this like I should know what Smith was but I didn’t. I didn’t care if she thought I was stupid. There were lots of things I did not know but then again there were lots of things I did. Smith was not one of them. I asked her.

“It’s a college,” Hannah said. “In Massachusetts. My mother went there. So did my grandmother. I probably will. Go, I mean. Though sometimes I think about going far away. To California or something. Just to piss my mother off.”

“I know what that’s like,” I said.

“To piss your mother off?”

“No,” I said. “To do the same thing. My father fished. And his father did. Now I do.”

She nodded earnestly. “Oh,” she said, “I get it.”

We ate outside on the stone front porch and I put the fish on white plates and I covered it with the sauce and when she had taken a bite I looked over at her and I asked if she liked it.

“It’s good. Spicy.”

“The cayenne. Gives the heat.”

“I like it.”

“All we need is some wine.”

“There’s wine here,” she said. “Tons of it.”

“Yeah?”

“Help yourself. My mother won’t notice. It’s in the basement. The brown door in the kitchen.”

I returned to the house and in the kitchen I found the door and made my way down a rickety staircase into a cavernous cellar. In front of me was more wine than I had ever seen in any store. Rows and rows of it in wooden bins to the ceiling. I reached into the one in front of me and pulled out a bottle. The label was in French but the wine was red and this was what I wanted. In the kitchen I found a corkscrew and brought the bottle outside. Hannah said, “We have glasses, you know.”

“Tell me where.”

“I’ll get them,” she said, and she disappeared inside and when she returned with the wineglasses I poured wine into each one.

“Good wine,” I said, after sipping from it.

She shrugged. “It all tastes the same to me.”

“Crazy how much is down there.”

“I only drink it when my friends come from school and want to get drunk.”

“I’d drink it all the time,” I said. “Wine’s good for you.”

“My father drank it. My mother just wants vodka.”

“Where is your father?”

“He died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost mine, too. When I was little.”

“It’s hard,” she said. “And now my mother wants nothing to do with this place.”

“She doesn’t mind you being here alone?”

Hannah shrugged. “She’d rather have me in Boston but knows I’d fight it. She wanted someone to come stay with me. She was actually going to hire someone, like a babysitter. I told her I was seventeen. I mean, come on.”

I smiled and then I was silent for a moment. I thought of her father. I looked out to the ocean and I searched for something to say. I finally said, “You have a boyfriend at school?”

She laughed. “No.”

“What’s so funny?”

“My school is all girls.”

“I’d be okay with that,” I said. “All girls.”