Wickedly Wonderful (Baba Yaga, #2)(24)
Candace sat as though her legs might not hold her for another moment, eyeing her dinner with a notable lack of enthusiasm. Marcus didn’t blame her.
She looked around the room. “Is your father here?”
“Emergency room,” Marcus said shortly, then held up a hand when she looked alarmed. “He’s fine. We were out in a storm and he pushed a little too hard. They’re pumping him up with fluids and balancing his electrolytes, and then he gets to go home.”
“You were out in the boat in that storm?” Tito’s eyes looked even bigger in his gaunt face. “Wow. That must have been something.” He turned to his mother. “You know, Marcus promised to take me out fishing sometime. On his dad’s boat. That would be so cool.”
Marcus smothered a grin at the boy’s enthusiasm. It had been a long time since he was that excited about going out on the water, but he could remember what it felt like as a boy. There was something magical about being out on the ocean.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it as a promise, Tito,” Candace said, with the tone of someone who had been let down one too many times. Marcus didn’t know what the story with the boy’s father was; just that he had never heard one mentioned.
Tito’s face fell. “Oh, sure. I didn’t mean to be pushy or anything.”
Marcus couldn’t stand the look of disappointment. “Hey, I have an idea,” he said.
The other two looked at him, one with blank exhaustion, the other with budding excitement.
“What?” Tito asked.
“Well, if your levels check out okay, and your mom says it is all right, what about coming out in the boat with me tomorrow?” Marcus had no idea what had possessed him to offer. Since he’d gotten back, he’d studiously avoided emotional attachments of any kind. There was too much collateral damage when you got close to people. But this wasn’t a war zone, and Tito was just a sick kid.
“Really?” Tito said, a wide grin showing off a mouthful of white teeth. His mother looked torn between hope and fear.
“Sure, why not?” Marcus said recklessly. “The doctors told my father he had to take a day to rest before he could go back to work, and I’ve got this woman who is paying us to bring her out to a dive site, so I have to take the boat out anyway. She can only dive for a couple of hours, so we wouldn’t be out that long. You wouldn’t get too overtired.” Marcus found himself looking at Tito’s mother as eagerly as the boy was.
Candace tried to appear stern, but an indulgent smile played around the corners of her chapped lips. “If his levels are good, and if you don’t keep him out too long, I suppose it is okay,” she said. Gratitude shone out of shadow-haunted brown eyes. “You’re sure it is no trouble? I have to work most of the day, but I can drop him off at the dock on my way in and then he can go to my mom’s house afterward.”
Marcus high-fived Tito over the top of the table, trying not to notice how thin the boy’s hands were. “No trouble at all, ma’am. I hope you like fish, because we’re going to do our best to catch you a few for dinner.”
“That would be great,” she said. “We used to be able to bring home a fish here and there from work, but since the catches lately have been so small, there simply isn’t anything extra.”
“My father has been saying this is the worst year he can ever remember, and the other guys all pretty much agree.”
Candace shook her head, looking grim. “It’s bad, all right. There are so few fish being brought in, they’re talking about shutting down the plant. There’s some guy who has been bugging the owners to sell; he wants to turn the space into luxury waterfront condos or something.” Her full lips pressed together. “The owners are third generation. They don’t want to lose the place. They know the locals need the jobs. But they may not have any choice if the fish don’t start running again soon.”
She gave a sideways glance toward her son, blinking away tears before the boy could see them. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose that job. We need the health insurance to pay for Tito’s treatments. As it is, I’m barely covering the copays.”
Marcus wished there was something he could do. He’d heard stories from the other fishermen about how tough things had been—for years, really, but even worse now. Men like his father were having to go farther and farther away to catch fish, sometimes being away from home for days as they competed with fishermen farther up the coast for a dwindling supply of fish. But if the plant closed, that would be a disaster for everyone.
Still, if there was one thing he’d learned in the service, it was that there was no point in fretting about the things you had no control over. As his old sarge used to say, “Figure out what you can do, then f-ing do it!”
So Marcus gave Tito his biggest grin and said, “I guess we’re going to have to find us some fish, isn’t that right?” And he was going to do it, too, even if he had to beg Beka to talk to her damned dolphins again. He’d never live it down, but it would be worth it to see a smile on Tito’s and his mom’s faces.
*
BEKA WAS GLAD to hear that Marcus’s father was okay, and just as happy to discover that the Wily Serpent wasn’t going to head out to sea until the very reasonable hour of ten o’clock. That meant she could actually get in a morning of surfing, which she’d been pining for. It wasn’t as though she wasn’t spending every day in the ocean; hell, during yesterday’s storm she thought she might have absorbed half of it through her skin. But that wasn’t the same thing as catching a wave and riding it halfway up to the sky.