Swim That Rock (16 page)

I come to a stop on Gano Street and rest on a bench. The single streetlamp throws a blanket of light around me. I’m breathing hard.
What do I do now? This is so messed up. Help me, Dad.

“Aha! Visitors!” The voice is filled with joy. A homeless woman is wheeling a shopping cart out of the shadows. The cart overflows with bottles, cans, an old backpack, and some dirty stuffed animals. I’m thinking of running again, but she seems harmless enough, and I don’t have any more run left in me. She parks the cart and falls heavily onto the bench. “Welcome.”

“Welcome?” I ask, sliding away from her, but too tired to get up.

“Yeah, welcome to my home.” She slides a dirty thumb proudly over some letters carved into the bench.

“This is your
house
?” I stand and take a step back.

“Please, please, sit down. I don’t bite. I never have guests.” She smiles warmly and I sit.

“So are you Mary Carol?” I glance at the letters she’s thumbing.

“I’m just Mary. Carol’s gone.” She pats the name tenderly.

“So, really, this is like . . . your home?”

“Only for the last seven years. Before this I had a great bench over on Wickenden Street, but it got too fancy for me.” She opens a tinfoil wrapper with half a sandwich inside and brings it to her nose. “Tuna . . .
blech
! It never lasts in this heat.” She tosses the sandwich into the garbage drum and folds the foil into a small neat square. “So where are
you
living?”

“Me? I live over in Warren.”

“Warren. Great town. You gotta house?” She takes a sip of water from a scratched-up soda bottle, then offers it to me.

“No, thanks.” I wave my hand. “Yeah we’ve got a house, well, sort of. It’s a small apartment above a diner. It’s not that big.”

“Probably a whole lot bigger than this bench.” She laughs. “Above a diner . . . how great is that? I can just imagine waking up to those smells every morning . . . bacon, eggs, home fries . . . whooo-wee.” She looks off dreamily.

“Well, we used to have a real house, with a yard and a garden and stuff, but the bank . . . you know . . . they take stuff.”

“The bank can’t get nothing from me.” She winks. “So who’s
we
? You got family or something?”

“Sort of. I mean, I live with my mom.” I don’t want to start explaining how my dad disappeared, so I keep that to myself.

“Well, then, there you go! You got a family all right . . . a mom . . . doesn’t get any better than that. I should know . . . I’m a mom myself.”

“You’re a mom? Where are your kids?”

“It was just Carol. Only Carol.” She runs her hand tenderly across the name carved into the bench. With the other hand she reaches down into her pocket and pulls out a quarter and hands it to me. “You see that pay phone over there?”

“Yeah.”

“Call your mother.”

“I can’t take your money.”

“Call . . . your . . . mother,” she says, leaning closer.

I take the quarter and walk across the street to the pay phone.

On the third ring she answers. “Mom?”

“Jake, where are you? What’s happened?” She’s panicked.

“I’m in Providence. I . . . I need you.”

“Are you okay? I’ll come and get you.”

I tell her where I am and hang up the phone. When I look back at the bench, Mary is gone. I didn’t even get a chance to thank her.

Twenty minutes later we’re driving home. My mom has one hand on the wheel, and she’s raking her fingers through her hair, and her lip is quivering. She doesn’t say anything.

“Don’t you want to know why I was in Providence in the middle of the night?” I can barely get the words out. I’m choked up.

She takes a deep, long breath through her nose. “Of course I want to know. What mother wouldn’t want to know where her fourteen-year-old son is in the middle of the night?” She’s talking at the windshield and gesturing wildly with her hand. “I have a son who thinks it’s okay to be out all night, and that his mother wouldn’t care?”

We come to a red light and I turn to face her. “I’ve been trying to raise the money, you know . . . the money we owe for the diner. I know you’re ready to give it up and move to Arizona, and you cry every day. Dad would have never given up. I’m just doing what he’d do.”

My mom swerves into an abandoned parking lot and rests her head on the steering wheel. When she looks up at me, there are tears streaming down her face.
Here we go.

“Jake, do you
really
think I want to give up the diner? I know I’ve been a mess, but that diner is the only thing that keeps me going. Being there every day is like being with your dad. It’s a piece of him. I can’t let that go. The Riptide is part of us.” She can barely say the words. “I just don’t know what else to do. What can we do? We owe too much money, and the bank won’t loan us a dime, and we can’t ask any more from our friends . . .”

“But Mom, I’ve been making money, lots of it. I’ve been out working nights with Gene’s brother, but . . . he just got arrested.”

“You think I didn’t know you were up to something? I knew you were out on the bay every night. Muddy clothes don’t
magically
get cleaned every day. Believe me, Jake; I couldn’t sleep until I knew you were home. Kids your age are stealing, vandalizing, and getting into all kinds of trouble. I don’t know how to handle
everything.
I even asked Darcy what was up. Of course she wouldn’t say a word, and Tommy avoids me like the plague. I didn’t know what to do.” She takes my hands into hers and holds them tight. She’s shaking them as she speaks. “I can’t lose you too. You promise me you will
never
do that again.
You promise me.
Look at me, Jake.
Promise.
”

I lift my head and look at her and she’s not crying anymore. She looks strong. She looks like she used to before my dad disappeared. I throw my arms around her and bury my head into her shoulder. She pulls me in tight, and I start convulsing with tears as if she’s squeezing them out of me.

“Finally. Thank you, Jake.”

This is it. The first time I’ve hugged her since dad went missing.

A dark, twisted knot, this mass in my stomach that I’ve felt for a long time, is working its way up to my throat. I cough and gag and I can feel it leaving. And now all I can feel is my mother’s arms.

I’m not alone anymore.

When we arrive back home, my mom heads into the kitchen of the diner and flicks the lights on. I follow her in.

“What are you making?” I ask, plopping down on one of the stools.

“Late breakfast.” She looks at the clock on the wall and laughs. “Or maybe an early one. Hungry?”

“Starved.”

“Did you know that your dad made breakfast for me when I came home from the hospital with you?” She points with the spatula to one of a hundred faded Polaroids pinned to the wall above her. “That’s you and dad. You were three days old.”

“That’s us?” I lean forward in my seat. It’s a picture of my dad sitting at this very counter, holding a tiny little baby wrapped up in a blue blanket. My mom pulls the photo down and hands it to me. My dad is surrounded by a bunch of his buddies, and they all have big cigars hanging from their mouths. To the right of my father, I see Gene, and directly behind him is another man.
George Hassard.
I drop the photo on the counter like it’s a hot plate burning my fingers. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s weird seeing Captain standing next to my dad, and it’s even weirder seeing him standing next to me at three days old. “Did Dad know George?”

“Of course. He and Gene and your dad were best friends. They were inseparable. They grew up together. They went out quahogging together, camping together . . . everything,” my mom says with a tight smile. “George was the best man at our wedding.”

My head is spinning. I can’t imagine my dad being friends with Captain, never mind his
best
friend. I’m staring at the photo now, looking at George Hassard. He looks so young, tanned and smiling. His shirt is unbuttoned and I can’t see his scar.

“What happened? I only met this guy for the first time eleven days ago,” I say.

“He turned up now and then over the years, but it always ended in arguments. Your father would never really tell me much.” She pours pancakes on the griddle and puts the bowl down carefully. Turning back to me, she places both elbows on the counter. “George is not a bad man, Jake, but he does bad things.” She places her hands on my forearms and opens her eyes wide. “Even so, you need to stay away from him. I know you were just doing what you thought you had to, but it’s not worth it.”

“How come I’ve never seen this before?” I ask, holding the Polaroid up to my mom’s face.

“I just found it.” My mom is watching me carefully as I study the photo. “I was packing up some things, and it was tucked between some pages in the photo album.”

“Packing? You
are
giving up!” My voice gets loud.

“I said I
was
packing. I stopped. I couldn’t do it.” Her voice is cracking again as she waves her hands around the room. “This is all that your father left us.”

“Yeah, this, and a bunch of debt.”

“That’s not fair, Jake.” She looks at me and her eyes tighten. “You don’t know the situation we were in. I signed on to that debt too, not just your father.” She slides a plate of pancakes in front of me, but suddenly I’m not hungry anymore. “I was pregnant with you when he injured his back.” She’s looking at all the photos on the wall. “The only thing he enjoyed more than being a quahogger was cooking. So that’s when he decided to build this diner.”

“Yeah, I already know that.”

“But what you don’t know is this: Those jerks at the bank weren’t about to give an injured fisherman money to build a diner. I mean, we already owed them a ton of money for the house.”

“So he went to the Mafia?”

“No.” She whips around to face me. “Well, yes . . . sort of. I mean they aren’t really the Mafia like you see on television. We’d be wearing cement shoes by now, standing there at the bottom of the river.” She lets out a nervous laugh.

“But they are going to take the diner, just like the bank took our house?”

“Business has been slow. I haven’t been able to make the payments. I thought they would give us a break, with John gone and everything.”

“Well
you
drive away all the customers,” I say angrily, and get up from my stool and head over to one of the booths with my back to her.

“That’s not fair!”
I can hear her storming around the counter toward me. She slides into the booth and forces me to look at her. She’s holding a clenched fist to her chest. “I lost my husband. Every time one of our customers walks in that door, I wait for your father to shout out a hello, or break into a story, but nothing comes, just silence.” Her tears begin to flow again.

“Just wait here a second,” I say, and run upstairs.

Seconds later I place the cigar box down on the table in front of her. She traces the lid with her finger.

“This was your father’s. Where . . . where did you find this?”

“Open it.”

She opens the lid carefully and her eyes go wide.

“Oh. Oh, my God. Jake, there must be thousands here,” she says, lifting some of the bills.

“A little over two thousand. Not enough to keep them from taking the diner, though, is it?”

She throws her arms around me and nearly squeezes the breath out of me. It feels great. She pulls back and takes both my arms with her hands. “You know what you did is wrong, though, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but not more wrong than them taking the diner,” I say defensively.

“It doesn’t matter what they do. It only matters what we do.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Well” — she claps her hands together —“Darcy had a pretty good idea, and I think we should do it.”

The mention of Darcy shakes me. I wipe my face as if she might walk into the diner any second. “Yeah, what is it?”

My mom’s eyes light up as she says, “A cabaret.”

“What’s a
cabaret
?”

“Well, we turn this diner into a fancy nightclub for a night. We have entertainment, dinner, drinks, candlelight . . . it’ll be fun.”

“
That’s
Darcy’s idea?”

“Oh, come on.” She slaps my arm playfully. “It’s a great idea. Robin will sing, and we’ll charge twenty bucks a head, even fix the jukebox.”

I haven’t seen my mom this excited about anything in years, and I don’t want to burst her bubble, but the math just doesn’t add up. Even if we fill the place, at twenty bucks a head that’ll be about fifteen hundred bucks. Not nearly enough to cover our debt.

“When?” I ask.

“Well, I was thinking. . . .” She starts pointing to the tabletop as if it’s an invisible calendar. “The day after tomorrow is the big Barrington Beach opening, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And all these quahoggers can’t think of anything else right now. I swear that’s all they talk about. So I was thinking the next night, Wednesday. We’ll paint up a sign and leave it out on the street so everyone can see it.”

The phone rings.
It’s the police. They saw me.
I get flush with fever; my rib cage is about to burst.
Please don’t let it be the cops.