Fly by Night (20 page)

The back screen door was rickety and the son held it open for Amelia. Piles of crates to be hosed out sat under a sign that ordered:
WASH
.

Amelia heard shuffling around in a tiny office the size of a bathroom stall—a desk touched both walls on either end and it was piled with papers, envelopes, an adding machine, a dog-eared Rolodex, and a wheeled desk chair.

“Hey, Mom?” the son called as he walked down a short hallway that led behind the counter.

“Hay is for horses,” she heard a woman's voice grumble. “I'm in here.”

“This person's looking for a job.”

Mrs. D'Agostino looked up with a curious and hopeful expression that soured once she saw Amelia.

“Uch. No more girls, no more girls, no more girls.” The woman launched into a diatribe half in Italian with enough English peppered in for Amelia to catch the gist of it. The woman stood, untied her apron, and threw it on the desk. Storming out of the front door without a coat, the bell at the top of the door jingled to announce her departure.

It was too cold to be out without a coat. Amelia looked from father to son, wondering who wore the pants in the family.

Both shrugged an apology.

Just then the shop door burst open, ringing the bell again as Mrs. D'Agostino popped in to holler a final warning in English. “You mark my words, that girl's gonna be trouble.”

The woman glared at Amelia just long enough to elicit an adrenaline jolt at the truth of the woman's words. And she wondered how long she could hide it.

Then the woman stormed back to her office and slammed the door.

Both son and husband turned to Amelia.

“Well,” the father said, and then threw Amelia a rubber apron and a pair of gloves, motioning for her to follow out back to finish unloading.

*   *   *

After each day of work Amelia trudged back along North Country Road to the tiny one-room cottage she'd managed to rent.

The bungalow was originally built as a summer rental and not suitable for year-round occupancy. Its insulation was nil, not to mention the roof's viability. In the corner was a wood-burning stove that when fully torqued made the place suffocating and a window or two had to be cracked in order not to break a sweat.

On the plus side, a huge woodpile had been stacked to cover the entire side of the collapsing wall of gray weathered shingles so that she never had to worry about running out of wood even if she kept a fire burning 24/7. The landlord, who lived in Smithtown and had inherited the place from his family, was almost slap-happy at receiving a rent check before Memorial Day and even more grateful that Amelia was so young and ignorant as to not report him for the shoddy, code-violating conditions of the house.

She'd stand gutting and cleaning fish in the back room, elbow to elbow with the D'Agostino men, shoveling fresh ice chips into the cases before rearranging the fish. Propping up filets of Atlantic salmon and white bass, she'd garnish each with parsley and kale to separate from the cooked lobsters, fresh steamers, cherrystones, and littlenecks, working behind the scenes until a customer had a question.

“Amelia?” One of the D'Agostino men would call her out.

“How's the best way to cook this?”

She'd explain in detail whether or not to wrap in foil, bake, broil, pan fry, steam.

“Now this one…” She'd hold up a bluefish fillet as if it were the guilty party as she'd begin to tell the story of at what ocean depth the species lived. “These guys have nasty bites.” She laughed, remembering having been bitten by one and showed the sickle-shaped scar on her right hand as evidence. “They reproduce in spring, can live up to nine years,” she said as the customer's eyes widened. “Found from Cape Cod to North Carolina but also in the Mediterranean.” Customers would listen as Amelia would create an entire undersea eco-world so vivid that even young children would listen. “They mature as females but then change into males during winter.”

During her first few weeks at the Fish Market, Amelia began a tradition of drawing and posting pictures of the catch of the day just inside the glass of the front door. The practice prompted a surge in sales and within weeks the catch of the day began selling out by noon. Freehand on butcher-block paper she'd draw the likenesses of various fish in their habitats, sometimes surrounded by coral reefs, others in eel grass. The images were so beautiful and detailed that many customers would offer to purchase them along with the fish.

“How such a tiny thing could inject such new life into this store,” Mrs. D'Agostino had marveled after only a month and gave her a dime-an-hour raise. “My God, I eat my words in spades about girls,” the woman swore and guilt tortured Amelia in direct proportion with the swell of her pregnant stomach. “Ammy,” Mrs. D'Agostino went on, “you're our lucky charm.” The woman bent down and leaned her dyed-red curly head on Amelia's shoulder as a sign of forgiveness. “God brought you to us for a reason.” The woman beamed as Amelia's chest tightened in a heartsick way, feeling like a scamp. She was on a collision course with the truth but banished such thoughts just as quickly as they'd bob to the surface.

Before Alex was born she'd stay after-hours, wiping down the entire place as if it was a laboratory at the New York Aquarium to comply with New York State health regulations. Making sure the lobster tanks were clean, the composition of salt water and oxygen were in the right balance along with temperature.

Luckily it was winter.

She'd managed to hide her increasing girth by wearing a man's down vest beneath a barn jacket, all covered up by a rubber apron. And since it was cold, the D'Agostinos never saw her without being all bundled up. During the course of the workday she was outside, unloading fish, packing ice, and unloading ice chips, everything that required that she be covered up and bundled in many layers.

One afternoon she'd felt Alex's foot pushing out against her abdomen wall. She'd paused and smiled, pressing back with her fingers at the tiny foot through the many layers of clothing.

Amelia looked up to see Mrs. D'Agostino watching. The woman's eyes narrowed as she dragged Amelia into the fish cooler and shut the door.

“You lied to me,” Mrs. D'Agostino said.

Amelia had no response.

“You made me the fool!” She raised her voice, more hurt than angry.

“No. You gave me a break.” She smiled with sadness.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because you wouldn't have hired me.”

“You got that right, I wouldn't have,” Mrs. D'Agostino hollered.

Amelia raised her hands and eyebrows like,
see?

They sat in silence on two boxes of frozen shrimp, looking at anything but each other.

“So what now?” Amelia asked, relieved that the secret was out and yet curiously not worried at all about getting fired.

“I can't believe you wouldn't tell me,” Mrs. D said, shaking her head, looking wounded. “That you wouldn't have enough faith in me to have mentioned it.”

“Ha!” Amelia laughed out loud and grabbed her stomach like Santa Claus. “You weren't going to hire me, remember? You just said it.”

“That's right, but I didn't know you then.” The woman rushed back in her defense.

“And you never would have, 'cause you wouldn't have hired me.”

“True.” The woman sat looking at Amelia as if wondering if she'd been tricked in more ways than one.

“I needed a job,” Amelia said. “You needed an employee.”

“So what the hell were you planning on doing?” The woman slapped her thighs as she turned and hollered at Amelia. “Opening your legs to give birth behind the counter?”

At that Amelia was laughing so hard, she tried to hide it, feeling relieved as Mrs. D fought to stay angry.

“I didn't have a plan.”

The two of them stood. Mrs. D touched Amelia's shoulder.

“Does the father know?” she asked in a soft voice.

Amelia looked down at her steel-toe boots, her feet so small they looked like stubs.

“He doesn't, does he?”

Amelia didn't answer.

“Any reason why not?”

She maintained her silence.

“Who's gonna help you, Am?”

Amelia looked at the woman.

“Who are your people?”

She didn't have any, and was more ashamed of that than afraid of what lay ahead.

*   *   *

After Alex was born Amelia worked part-time until two years later when she graduated from the marine biology department down the road at Stony Brook. She'd lined up an off-the-books babysitter who smoked incessantly and did tarot card readings out of her home. It was close enough for Amelia to either bike the six blocks or walk with the stroller to pick up Alex.

Between medical assistance and student loans to cover tuition, daycare bills, plus her cheapo off-season summer bungalow, she was able to make it to graduation. Mrs. D would show up with grocery bags filled with baby and toddler clothes from the people in their church and with bundles of fish.

Once Alex had turned two years old, Amelia had walked across the stage at Stony Brook to receive her undergraduate degree with high honors. She'd been accepted into the graduate program in marine biology at Cornell where she was awarded a fellowship that included a stipend to pay for family housing on campus.

Amelia had always suspected that the family had kept the fish market going for an additional two years longer than they'd planned so she could graduate. At her graduation, Mrs. D'Agostino limped along with her new artificial knee, the whole family attending the ceremony, bringing Alex along so he could yell “Yay Mommy,” the minute he spotted her in cap and gown crossing the stage.

The D'Agostinos had been the closest thing to grandparents Alex would ever know. After moving to Cornell, Alex would ask for them. They'd sold the fish market soon after and had retired down to Florida along with their son and his family—the promised land for the elderly first-generation northeastern immigrants. Neither had lived much long after.

*   *   *

Standing at the Mall of America bus stop, Amelia spotted her bus. She wondered if any of these young mothers were lucky enough to have a Mrs. D'Agostino showing up with grocery bags and hand-me-down baby and toddler clothes. She remembered with crushing humility, wondering if she'd ever have made it without them.

She watched and listened as the young Maller women checked their phones and made calls to babysitters. How well she knew the torque and strain of such responsibility that never lets one fully relax. Perpetual worry, always on the brink of getting a major utility disconnection or having a grocery store checker load milk on top of bread to squash it all because you'd paid with food stamps.

The crowd looked up as a line of buses rushed in to snuggle up to the curb. Nearby a garbage truck's engine whined as it struggled to get free from a fortresslike snow pile that surrounded a set of Dumpsters.

Christmas music was piped outside, though the Mallers had stopped hearing it weeks ago. “Silent Night” and “The Little Drummer Boy” were lost on most, though a few silently mouthed the words as they stood curbside.

The bus pulled up. Amelia's heart pierced. So grateful for all those years, so hard, yet in some ways they'd seemed like they were where the real living had taken place.

 

17

She paced the living room. It was too early to leave to meet Myles. Having rearranged the coffeemaker and toaster, and emptied the crumb trap that she didn't know existed, Amelia then tackled the refrigerator with a bottle of Clorox, wiping it down like some laboratory protocol. She still had a few minutes.

Emptying her clothes from the stackable dryer into the white vinyl laundry basket, she carried it over and sat down alongside it on the coffee table next to where Bryce was laying, watching reruns of
Deadliest Catch
after his shift.

She glanced at her watch. Not enough time to start anything, too much to be milling about and she certainly wouldn't show up fifteen minutes early. It was too cold to sit in the Jeep.

“You hate me,” he said.

“If only.”

He glanced at her. Beer bottle in one hand, an open bag of convenience-store popcorn lay on his chest with stray kernels that had missed his mouth littering the collar of the Sea Life polo shirt he'd neglected to change.

“I told you he'd show up,” he said.

“So what you did was right.”

He turned and gave her a look. “That's not what I said.”

“What are you saying?” she said.

“Nothing. You're still pissed.”

He resumed watching as the crew of the
Northwestern
pulled another empty crab pot over the ship's starboard side from the Bering Sea. “Damn,” he said for them.

“I think you're the one who's pissed,” she said and began to pick out socks from the laundry basket and drape them over her thigh, looking for the mate.

“And how do you figure that?”

“Why don't you tell me?” She looked at him.

He met her eyes and then looked back to the crew pulling another empty crab pot over the side of the ship.

“Letting Myles in like that was an act of aggression.” She felt as angry as when she'd punched a captain of a trawler who, through drunken negligence, had collided into their ship.

“Oh please…” He shifted on the couch. “Enough with the Greek drama.”

“Fuck you.”

He turned and looked at her hair. “Ni-ice,” he said.

She got up and entered the bedroom, carrying folded jeans just to cool down. Why were they fighting? She thought to explain that she would have washed her hair anyway, but that was so defensive, and why did she have to explain anything?

“What do you want me to say, Amelia?” she heard him call to the bedroom.