“You’ve got talent. They look real.”
“Knock on wood the fish concur.” He set a mug of coffee before her. “Had a bad day, huh? I’ve had my share of those. I prefer the good ones.”
“It’s Nat Rhone. He’s so…”
“Arrogant? Obnoxious? Infuriating?”
“Yeah, that.”
“The guy’s not easy to get along with. Never has been. Never will be. He’s had a hard life.”
“Who hasn’t?”
The microwave beeped, giving Merle an out. He spooned a large serving of casserole onto a plate for her. “It’s hot. Don’t need to burn your tongue again.”
Ignoring the warning, Abigail dug into the meal. It tasted wonderful. She devoured forkful after forkful, cleaning her plate. She didn’t dare confess to Merle that it was the first warm meal she’d had since she arrived.
“For such a skinny person, you can really put it away. You’re not one of those, what do you call it, narcoleptics, are you?”
Abigail laughed, nearly choking on her food. “You mean bulimics? No, I’m not.”
She suspected that Merle made the slip on purpose to squeeze a laugh out of her. She appreciated that as much as the food.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Nat’s got a chip on his shoulder. That’s that. Whatever happened to him, he must deserve to be angry.”
“Being that angry usually means somebody’s been hurt. Hurt something fierce,” Merle said, insinuating that he had a full story on the notorious Nat Rhone.
Abigail put up her hands, as if to physically stop him. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s none of my business. And Nat would go ballistic if you did.”
“Probably.”
“You’re going to tell me anyway?”
Merle’s expression was impassive. He was going to tell her anyway.
“If you’d confide Nat’s secrets to me, who’s to say you won’t spill mine to him? Or anybody else?”
“S’pose you’ll have to trust me.”
Trust was a tricky concept for Abigail. In the wake of the fire, she couldn’t always trust her senses or herself. Putting her faith in someone else was asking a lot.
“I’ll trade you a little trust for another plate of that tuna casserole.”
“Coming right up.”
The fishing lures and the racket from the football game were the lone strands of masculinity in Merle’s house. An ivy wallpaper border lined the kitchen, the magnets on the fridge were in the shape of watering cans, and the pot holders hanging from the oven had a floral motif. Merle, the strapping embodiment of manhood, was immersed in the girliness of his ex-wife’s possessions. At first, Abigail wondered why he held on to them after what she had done, jilting him and taking his child. Then she realized that if her house hadn’t been destroyed, she would have continued to live in it after the fire. She would have given anything to be reminded of the special times imbued in every wall, banister, and floorboard, willing to look past the sadness that was incised in them as well.
“Is this the kind of story that’ll make me cry? Because I’ve already done my share of that today.”
Merle set the refilled plate of casserole on the table for her. “Depends on what you cry at.”
“Okay, okay. If you’re going to tell me, tell me already.”
“Nat didn’t relay this to me himself, not personally.”
“Is that a preface to the saga?”
“It’s not—what do you call it—hearsay. But it’s not from the horse’s mouth neither.”
“Whose mouth is it from?”
“Hank Scokes.”
Abigail was hazy on the island’s lines of alliance. She was unaware of who was close with whom and who wasn’t. “I didn’t realize you and Hank were friends.”
“Friends in as much as I’ve known him most of my life.”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“A while after Hank’d taken Nat on as his mate, they got to drinking together. Liquor doing what it does, Nat opened up to Hank. Nobody else knew hide nor hair about the guy. Hardly the chitchat type. He’d already been fired by three other captains. Not because he couldn’t handle himself on a rig, but because of his temper. That got rumors swimming.”
“Rumors about what?”
“That Nat was some parolee or an escaped convict or that he’d broken out of a mental hospital with only the
