And The Sea Called Her Name Read Online Free PDF Page B

for
seafood lately. Could you start bringing more home?”
    “It’s the one thing I can do well, I guess,”
I said. “No one else seems to want to hire me.”
    She touched my hand. “It’ll happen when it’s
time, just like everything else. Until then we’ll be just
fine.”
    And so throughout the next week I brought her
the food she requested. Lobster, shrimp, tuna, cod. Some I caught
and others I purchased from the market beside the harbor. Despite
the jubilation at our relationship rekindling, a small part of me
was growing more and more concerned. It was Del’s requests for how
her food was to be cooked. Increasingly she wanted the fish cooked
less, the shrimp boiled for only minutes. At times she caught me
watching her tear through a limp and slightly slimy cut of fish,
and I’m sure she saw a hint of revulsion on my face. I couldn’t
always hide it, and she assured me that anything from the sea was
perfectly safe to eat even raw. She would shrug and say the
cravings must have come late, before popping another jellied piece
of seafood into her mouth.
    It was a Saturday when I brought the three
small squid home for dinner. I’d spent the day in Portland,
checking on several applications I’d dropped off and shaking hands
with various managers at the businesses, making it a point to
introduce myself personally each time. The need to be off of the
boat was nearly a physical thing by then. I had even started to get
seasick on days that the swells climbed anywhere over five feet. I
hadn’t been seasick since my seventh birthday.
    When I got home, Del was doing a load of
laundry and humming something to herself. I carried the squid to
the kitchen sink in the container the market had provided, the six
inches of water inside slopping against the lid. I could see their
shapes through the semi-transparent plastic the container was made
of, their alien bodies interwoven and claw-like where their short
tentacles trailed out. They propelled themselves through the water,
bumping against the plastic barrier with soft thuds. Del had asked
for them specifically the night before, saying she had such a
craving for fresh calamari it wasn’t even funny. I had only cooked
squid twice before and wasn’t relishing the thought of dispatching
the live creatures with my fillet knife.
    I left the container in the sink and returned
to the truck to retrieve the last of the groceries. The air was
cool and picked at my flannel shirt as well as the tops of the
pines that bordered Harold’s yard. As I was pulling the last bag
from the truck bed, I heard the old man himself call out to me from
his porch. I hadn’t seen him in well over a week and had meant to
call his son to see if he had gone on a trip or been hospitalized
again by the pneumonia that had afflicted him the prior winter.
    “Harold, where’ve you been? We were starting
to worry about you,” I said as I approached the porch. Harold sat,
reclined in one of his chairs, a steaming cup of coffee on the
table at his elbow. His white hair, normally in slight disarray,
had been trimmed and combed, and I noticed the jacket he wore
appeared to be new.
    “Went and visited my daughter down in South
Carolina. She and her husband were goin’ ta’ come here but they got
waylaid by his job. He’s a good man, but a lawyer, so I’m not
overly certain he’s completely human.”
    I laughed, shifting the grocery bag from one
hand to the other. “Well, I’m glad you got a trip under your belt
before winter showed up. Don’t think it’ll be long now before it
snows.”
    He regarded the skies like a weatherman
studying a barometric pressure reading. “Be a day or so and we’ll
be gettin’ a storm. Not snow yet but wind’n rain for sure.” Over
the years I had come to trust Harold’s predictions when it came to
the weather. The old timers had something that the forecasters
could never attain with their technology and weather models. It was
as if time bestowed gifts to certain