I push back from his work bench. “Scouring the darkest corners of eBay for something worse than the FeeJee mermaid sounds like nightmare fuel. I’m going to leave that to you.”
“Thought you wanted to have a say in things like this?”
I keep heading for the door. “Not when all we show around here is made-up.”
“Wren?”
I turn back to face him expectantly. He just looks at me at first. He’s been giving me space since the night we talked, which I took to mean he’d said all he was going to on the subject of Mom and my relationships. I start to wonder if that’s about to change. “Yeah?”
“What would you put out if we didn’t have all this?” He gestures to the shelves full of “specimens” in various stages of construction and repairs, some inherited from his predecessors, some cobbled together by his own two hands.
It wasn’t so long ago that I would have just shrugged and said nothing. The idea of trying to feature anything real in this place would be like trying to get ramps on all the buildings in Nantucket. In other words, a complete waste of energy.
“I don’t know, Dad. But we’ve got another back room in this museum, and those shelves are a lot fuller than the ones in here.”
Tate is restocking the Nerissa T-shirts in the center of the gift shop before we open. He doesn’t seem to be going out of his way to keep his back to me, though it’s still early, so he might just be too tired to put up the effort. But in that moment, with the morning sun streaming through the porthole windows like spotlights, I decide it doesn’t matter.
I’m not quiet as I push toward him. I’m not trying to be.
He doesn’t react when I stop on the other side of the table, just keeps stacking shirts. And I’m pretty sure I know why.
“Eryn told you about Paris?”
He cuts a glance at me, then reaches for another shirt.
“If it helps, I told her I wanted her to stay.”
“She said you told her to send the application.”
I scratch at the back of my neck. “Because it’s what she wants, not because I want it.”
“I know that.” A shirt fists in his hands before he relaxes it. “Now, I know that.” He looks down at the wrinkled shirt and smooths it out. “She told me about what you guys talked about and realized, I guess.” He’s still smoothing the shirt when he adds under his breath, “Should’ve figured it out before you almost kissed somebody else.”
There’s a hint of a familiar teasing note in his voice, a lightheartedness that I don’t at all feel like I deserve. “She never told you either? About wanting to go to pastry school?”
“She did, but she never talked about it like it was real, you know? She’d come sit with me on the boat sometimes, and I’d tell her about my charter company plans and she’d tell me about the bakery she was going to open. Do you know she already has a menu planned out?”
I shake my head.
“It changed all the time, but I knew she wanted it. And I knew there aren’t any schools for her around here. Can’t take that kind of stuff online either.” He sighs. “But Paris, damn, that’s far. I looked it up, and you want to know how much a round-trip ticket to France is going to cost me when I go visit her?”
“Half a grand or more.” I’d looked it up too.
He nods. “She’s gonna be okay.” And this time I know he’s saying this solely for my benefit. “Maybe better than okay. She thinks you are too. She wants that for you, so I guess I can again too.”
The tightness in my chest that I was beginning to think was permanent eases slightly. “Thanks, man.”
He nods but doesn’t look at me. “I need to eat something. You got any Sour Patch Kids on you?” He doesn’t wait for my answer, just suddenly turns away and beelines for a shelf of mermaid-shaped neck pillows that have never sold well due to the scratchy iridescent fabric on the scales. He shoves his arm in between a pile, reaching all the way to the back with an intense look of concentration on his face until, with a triumphant grin, he pulls out a bag of candy. “Ha!”
“Didn’t you get in trouble for hiding food around here last month?”
He hops up on the table of T-shirts and stuffs a couple of Kids in his mouth. “Yeah, well, Bethany’s not around to rat me out.” He holds out the bag to me.
I try to avoid candy since sugar isn’t a paraplegic’s best friend, but I take one anyway because he is, and this is the first time he’s offered to share anything with me in what feels like a very long time. Sharing snacks is kind of his love language. “Thanks. You know, you don’t have to waste your money on plane tickets. You could take theSiren’s Call, or whatever you decide to change her name to, and sail it straight across the Atlantic till you hit France.”
He lowers the gummy he’s about to drop in his mouth, then stares down at it. “Turns out the boat is a no go. My uncle got back and basically told me he can’t afford to sell it to me for the price we agreed on, so.”
“That’s such a massive load of bull—” I shake my head and will my sudden temper back into check. “You’ve been deckhand and captain of that boat for years and he pulls this on you now?”
