Keeper of the Light

They arrived at the inlet and Lacey got out of the car, fastening the radio to the waistband of her shorts. She walked ahead of him, and his fantasy of spending a quiet evening in the company of his daughter fell apart.

“Lacey?”

She continued walking. Whether she was ignoring him or truly couldn’t hear him with the headset on, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She was cutting him out one way or the other.

He caught up to her, stopping her with his hand on her arm. “Please don’t take the radio on the boat,” he said. “Leave it in the car, Lace. Please.”

She muttered something under her breath, but returned to the car with him and left the radio on the front seat.

She was the only female on the boat. There were a dozen men from their early twenties on up, and they stared openly at Lacey when she boarded, forcing Alec to look at her with a more objective eye. Her clothes looked suddenly provocative. Her shorts were insanely short, her legs long and slender and remarkably tanned, given her delicate skin. She’d changed out of her T-shirt into some sort of tank top—a flimsy piece of white cloth with a scooped neck and a hacked-off length so that it didn’t quite reach the waistband of her shorts. The nipples of her small breasts were visible beneath the thin white fabric. She was carrying a blue windbreaker that he wanted to wrap around her.

One of the younger men smacked his lips and grinned at her as she hopped from the pier to the boat.

“I’m her father,” Alec said to the gawking young man. “Watch it.”

“Dad,” Lacey said. “See why I don’t want to go out with you? You’re so embarrassing.”

He found a spot for them at the side of the boat, near the cabin and away from the other fishermen, who occasionally turned from their posts for a beer or fresh bait and stared in Lacey’s direction. Was this what happened every time she went out on the street? If these guys were as blatant about it here, when she was with her father, what would they be like if he were not around?

Lacey baited her hook with a chunk of mackerel, effortlessly, as if she did it every day of her life.

“You were always better than Clay at this,” Alec said. “He could never bring himself to touch the bait.”

“Clay’s a wimp sometimes.” She sat down and leaned against the back of her chair.

Alec sat next to her and breathed in the scent of salt and seaweed as the coastline faded into the distance.

“Remember the one that got away, Lace?”

“Huh?”

“The blue you caught that jumped off the deck.”

She nearly smiled, turning her face away from him so he wouldn’t see. “A long time ago,” she said.

“It was huge. I helped you reel it in and you were so excited, but once we got the damn thing off the hook, back it went.”

“No one believed me,” she said quietly, but with a certain indignation. “And you said you’d gotten a picture of it and…”

“And the film got wet and didn’t turn out.”

She laughed, but caught herself quickly. “Well, I don’t think Mom ever believed it.”

“Yes, she did. She just liked teasing you about it.”

They were quiet for a few minutes. “I hate bluefish,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I hate fish.”

It grew dark quickly, and with the darkness came a sudden blustery wind. The sea began to kick up a little, the boat bouncing and rocking more than Alec would have liked. He and Lacey put on their windbreakers.

Lacey suddenly stood up. “I’ve got something, Dad.” Her pole was bending, the reel clicking rapidly as the fish carried the bait out to sea.

“Just hold on, Lace. Let it run. That’s it.”

She hung on to the pole, the tip of her tongue caught between her lips in concentration. “It stopped!” she said.

“Okay, reel in the line. Get the slack out of it. Do you want some help?”

“Uh uh.”

One of the young men came over and stood by her side. “Atta girl,” he said as she cranked the reel. “It’s probably gonna take off on you another time or two. Just…”

She yelped as the fish began stripping line from her reel once more, but it quickly tired of the battle this time, and she started reeling it in again, laughing.

Another of the men had come over to watch. “It’s a blue,” he said, as the fish thrashed wildly just below the surface of the water. “And a real beauty. Almost as pretty as the fisherman.”

Lacey managed to grin at him as she struggled with her pole.

“Fisherwoman,” the first young man corrected him.

“Right,” said his friend. “No doubt about that.”

Lacey blushed. Alec thought she looked like a trembling mass of erogenous zones.