The Winters(3)

“Your fahtha is a lazy arse. Eets not moy fault he hezzint saved enough to retire propleh. Oym an idiot for baying sore ginerous. Oy aughta foyer you both.”

Almost immediately after high school, I went to work for Laureen, too, the option of a higher education less and less likely the older and more infirm my father became. Laureen had charter companies all over the Caribbean. My duties at first were secretarial, keeping track of boat schedules and who was captaining what vessel. I also recorded the catches, photographing the more spectacular ones for the walls of Laureen’s office at the end of the pier. My father knew exactly where to find the big fish, even if it sometimes meant spending the night on the water, an extra charge I had to press clients for when they docked. Those who returned with an ice-packed yellowfin tuna, or a four-foot blue marlin, didn’t mind paying. When these clients felt generous, I’d carry their fish to the kitchen myself, some still alive and as heavy as children, for the chefs to cut up, cook, and serve. They’d wrap the bones and guts in paper for me to dispose of in the sea.

Eventually I learned to drive the boats so my father didn’t have to steer and throw lines, exacerbating his arthritis. It galled Laureen to lose me in the office, galled her to pay me for a job she said my father should be able to do alone.

Then five years ago, sixty miles off Gun Bay, my father had a massive heart attack while helping a client pull in a large wahoo tugging at a line. I scrambled down to the deck and held him for a moment, his eyes glassy, left foot kicking the shoe off the right. One of the men barked at me.

“What are you doing down here? Get us to the goddamn hospital!”

I’d piloted the boat, an eighty-two-foot Viking, only once before, so I prayed that the large cruise ships weren’t crowding the city docks. While one of the men (a doctor, I found out) worked frantically on my father, the rest hovered in a semicircle, blocking my view. The doctor only stopped resuscitating him long enough to help carry him to the waiting ambulance.

I sat alone in that small gray room while a different stranger delivered to me the same news about another parent. Laureen paid the hospital bill, the ambulance bill, the emergency docking bill, the funeral bill, and she refunded the doctor’s bachelor party, a debt that became like weather between us, rarely mentioned, always felt. She gave off airs of largesse as she moved me from our modest rental in Bodden Town to a staff townhouse near the marina, where pay was docked for a cramped room with a single bed, and where kitchen and bath facilities were shared with a rotating cast of young internationals who worked on the island, spoke at various decibels in various languages, and whose fucking and fighting would, every four to six weeks, cause a sudden reshuffling of the living arrangements. I felt like a nagging column on Laureen’s ever-expanding debt ledger, giving her greater license to limit my days off and schedule overnight trips that often left me operating the boats alone, in all-male company, ignoring those periodic knocks on my cabin door, tests to see how far my services might go.

For months I grieved, tightly and privately, keeping my pain to myself until I could be alone. Then one day, I decided I could no longer be a grown woman weeping in a single bed. I buried the rest of my anguish and got on with my life, astonished that that was all it took, a simple decision, which I suppose, in retrospect, revealed something unsettling about my character. Despite what passed for shyness, I could be ruthless like that, make a decision and then act, filing and organizing emotions as efficiently as I did a boat schedule in high season. Emotions were things for which I did not have the time or the luxury.

I was in the office one day trimming the edges of a nice write-up about Laureen to pin on the office wall when the brass bells signaled Max Winter’s entrance into the overly air-conditioned hut. As automatically as breathing, Laureen stripped off her stained hoodie and stood to greet him, her ample, sun-spotted chest leading the way. Her wide arms assumed a hug, but Max instantly sliced through those intentions with a stiff extended arm, an awkward moment I pretended not to see.

“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Winter, or should I say Senator Winter? It’s been such a long, long time.”

“I’m just a state senator, so no need for titles,” he said, looking over her shoulder to give me a perfunctory nod.

I didn’t remember Max Winter from previous years, which wasn’t unusual. Laureen had a whole cache of clients she took personal care of: bankers, sports stars, celebrities and the like, people who didn’t like the obviousness of St. Barts or the sleepiness of St. Martin, people for whom banking was a full-time job and the Caymans was where they could both work and play. She hoarded them, bragging about the exorbitant tips she’d declined because they’d formed friendships, or so she said, trusting her enough to drop lascivious details about affairs and divorces, though I knew she’d merely overheard them talking from the bridge.

“Anyway, it is so good to see you again, Mr. Winter. The club didn’t alert me that you were returning. I would have been more than happy to handle your needs there so you wouldn’t have to come all the way down to my ratty old office. Get Mr. Winter a coffee,” she barked at me.

“Oh no,” he said to me. “Please don’t go to any trouble.”

“By the way,” Laureen added sotto voce, “my deepest condolences to you and your lovely daughter. I read about that awful business. Has it been a year already?”

I pricked up my ears, eager to know more about this “awful business.”