Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever

never Dylan.
     
    Customers came and went, picking up orders of lobsters and pizza, lingering to chew over gossip or pasta in the dining room. Antonia came and went during the height of the dinner rush to help on the line. Nick came downstairs to bolt a meatball sub between the first and second features of a Chuck Norris movie marathon on TV.
     
    Dylan did not come.
     
    Maybe his conversation with his brother took longer than expected, Regina thought as she shut down the grill.
     
    Or maybe she had finally driven him away. She walked through the silent restaurant, her own words echoing in the empty space. “You try being responsible for somebody besides yourself sometime, and we’ll talk.”
     
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    Well, fine. She flipped the sign on the front door from OPEN to CLOSED.
     
    She didn’t expect anything else. From him, from anybody. If you learned not to expect things, you couldn’t be disappointed. She and Nick were fine on their own.
     
    Or they would be with a little help. Tomorrow she would talk to Lucy about working out the summer.
     
    She closed the register, counted bills and receipts. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty . . . Counted: September, October, November, December . . .
     
    Her baby would be born in April. If there was a baby. If the pressure deep in her abdomen was more than nerves and water weight.
     
    She lost track of the numbers, had to begin again. Twenty, forty, sixty . . .
     
    Wipe the tables, clean the case and counters, haul out the garbage, mop the floor. The routine should have steadied her, but her mind kept racing like a hamster in a wheel, circling round and round without getting anywhere.
     
    She was accustomed to planning and preparing, more comfortable with “What next?” than “What if?” Even the gamble of going to Boston at the age of eighteen had appeared to her practical mind as the next logical step in her chosen career.
     
    Yeah, and look how that had turned out. Every risk she’d ever taken, no matter how calculated, had ended in dead ends and disaster.
     
    Except for Nick. She was glad she had Nick.
     
    But God, oh, God, she didn’t want to be pregnant again.
     
    Fatigue pulled her muscles, settled in her bones. She returned from the Dumpster and headed for the mop sink, a cramped closet in an out-of-the-way corner.
     
    She flipped on the light. The mops jumped out of the shadows, skinny monsters with clumped and stringy hair. Regina leaned against the
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    tiled wall, listening to the water hiss into the bucket and trickle down the drain.
     
    She couldn’t say what made her turn. A noise. A shadow. A tickle at the base of her spine . . .
     
    “Jericho!” The name whooshed from her, an explosion of breath, of annoyance and alarm.
     
    He blocked the work aisle behind her, skinny and stringy as the mops, and close. Too close. She could smell him, his clothes, damp with the outdoors, sour with sweat and the smoke from too many campfires.
     
    “He smells . . . wrong,” Margred had said.
     
    Yes.
     
    Her heart beat in her throat. “You scared the shit out of me.”
     
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
     
    But he did not move out of her way. She could shove past him. But touching him didn’t seem like a good idea. She didn’t want to commit herself to physical contact, to push him into violence. Skinny or not, he was bigger than her.
     
    The taste of adrenaline was flat in her mouth. “What do you want?”
     
    The job, she thought with sudden hope. Maybe he’d come about the job. Although now, with him looming between her and the door, didn’t seem like the best time to tell him she was thinking of hiring somebody else.
     
    He didn’t answer.
     
    “Listen, it’s late,” she said in what she hoped was a calm, rational voice. As if her tone could tug him back from whatever brink of crazy he was on. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow—” She wet her lips. In daylight, when there are people around.“— and we can talk about that job?”
     
    He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.
     
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    He sounded sincere. Which, for some reason, made her knees tremble. Her knives were on the other side of the kitchen, like the phone, like the door.
     
    She couldn’t run away. Nick was upstairs.
     
    Should she scream? But if she screamed, Nick might hear and come down to investigate. Please, God, don’t let him come down, her boy, her baby. “Take care of yourself,” Caleb had advised, but he didn’t have an eight-year-old depending