“I’ll try.”She sniffed, looking worried.“If I cry, I’m sorry.I don’t know if I can talk about Eddie without crying.”
“Don’t even worry about that,” I said softly.“You can cry all you want, Rosa.Hell, I might cry along with you.”
She gave a tearful laugh, and she set her mug on the side table.
“Do you mind if I record our conversation?”I tugged my phone from my pocket.“It makes the small details easier to remember.”
“That’s fine.”She got up and grabbed some photo albums from a bookcase nearby.Then she set them on the footstool, and the old leather creaked as she opened one of them.She pointed at a photo that showed Eddie holding their daughter Maria the day she was born.
“He was terrified,” Rosa said, laughing through the tears.“He’d faced winter storms, equipment failures, rogue waves, but a seven-pound baby had him shaking in his boots.He was so afraid he was going to hurt her.”
“Babies are terrifying.”I grimaced.
“Our son David came two years later, and by then Eddie was an old pro.”Rosa showed me a photo of Eddie asleep on the couch with both kids on his chest, all three of them out cold.“He always fell asleep watching football,” she said softly.
Rosa turned the pages and laughed at many of the photos.She’d tell little stories about Eddie, and then move on.At one point, she paused on one of the photos, her expression soft.“God, I remember this day so clearly.”
I leaned forward and peered at the photo of Rosa and Eddie on the deck of a newer-looking Pacific Lady.“What happened that day?”
Her smile was sad.“On our twentieth anniversary, Eddie decided he was going to take me out on the Pacific Lady to watch the sunset off the headland.He was trying to be romantic, which wasn’t really his thing.But he packed a cooler with wine and sandwiches.The good wine, too, not the box stuff.He even put a tablecloth on the bait bench.”
“Sounds like he put in a lot of effort.”
“He did.”She laughed.“But then about a mile offshore, the engine died.He’d forgotten to check the fuel gauge.My husband, who checked his equipment every single day of his life for work, forgot to check the fuel gauge on the one night he was trying to impress me.”Tears slid down her cheeks, but she kept talking.“We were drifting.No engine, barely any phone signal.Eddie was mortified.I mean, his face was the color of a tomato.He kept saying, ‘I’ll fix it, Rosie, just give me a minute.’He thought I was mad, but really all I was doing was thinking how much I loved him and how sweet he was to try and make the day special.”
“Did he get the boat going?Maybe he had spare gas on board?”
“No, we ended up having to be towed in.”She sniffed, wiping at her eyes.“But first we had our little celebration.I told him I wasn’t mad and that we should just enjoy being together without the kids crying and holding onto our legs for attention.”
I laughed gruffly.It was impossible not to be moved.
“So we ate the sandwiches.Drank the wine.Watched the sunset, which was gorgeous, by the way.We just sat there in the dark for hours.Then we called Ray when we got some signal, and he came out and towed us in.”Her eyes glistened.“That was the best anniversary we ever had.Just the two of us, floating out on the ocean.Nothing to do but sit there and be together.”
I nodded, feeling a little embarrassed that her story had made me feel emotional.But it was obvious how much she’d loved him, and he was gone now.That was just the most awful truth to have to bear.It had hurt when Marcus dumped me, but I hadn’t felt the level of pain she was feeling.Not even close.How did people move on from that sort of grief?Eddie had been her whole world.
She touched the edge of a photo in her lap.“I’d give anything to be stuck on that boat with him one more time.”
“God, Rosa,” I said huskily.“Again, I’m so sorry about Eddie.”
She just shrugged and kept staring at the photo.
“Everyone seemed to love him,” I added lamely.
“Most people did.”She winced.“Poor Gil.He came by earlier, and he looked gutted.They were friends forever, not just business partners.”
I hesitated.“Can I ask you something?”
She glanced up.“Sure.”
“Some people in town have said that Gil and Eddie were fighting recently.Was that true?”
She grimaced and set the photo album on the footstool.“There was something going on with them.That probably makes the fact that Eddie died even more painful for Gil.They didn’t get closure.”
I held her gaze, almost surprised she’d confirmed what I’d heard.“Was it unusual for them to argue?”
“Over big things, yes.”She gave a rueful smile.“They used to bicker like an old married couple over the little things, but not usually anything that would make either of them hold a grudge.”
“But this time was different?”
