Swim That Rock (4 page)

“Stop bending your knees, Jake. Stand up, stand up the whole way,” he orders. I stand up. “Holy crap! You’ve grown eight inches since . . .” Tommy is squinting at the wall. “Since last July. If you keep it up, you’re going to be the tallest kid in Warren.” I quickly move away from the wall and knock the pen out of his hand before he gets a chance to write it down.

“I hate that stupid wall! It’s like a billboard letting everyone know what a freak I am.” I ball up my fist and punch the wall right where Tommy started writing my name. It dents just a little, and the rest of the damage is to my knuckles. It stings like crazy.

“Oooh. You showed that wall who’s boss.” Tommy moves in to inspect the dent. “Your mom’s going to throw a fit.”

“Who cares? She’ll just take another Valium and get all fuzzy and forget it ever happened. Besides, she wants to give this place up and have us move in with Gram,” I say, rubbing my knuckles. They’re starting to swell into ripe cherries, but I feel calmer, as if I punched some of my anger straight into the wall.

“Wait, doesn’t your grandmother live in Arizona?” Tommy asks.

“Phoenix, yeah. Doesn’t that suck? I won’t go. She can take that idea and shove it. My dad’s coming back and I am going to be here when he does.”

Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I’m not sure if he thinks I’m nuts or what. We never talk about it. I plop down on one of the chrome stools in front of the counter, and Tommy does the same. We both sit there in silence. Tommy starts spinning around like he’s a little kid. We both used to do that until we were dizzy, and then we would try to walk a straight line. My mom and dad would laugh like crazy. I can’t spin anymore because my knees just jam into the counter.

“Darcy’s here.” Tommy points to the street, where Darcy Green is standing on the sidewalk, using the front window as a mirror while she ties her jet-black hair back into a ponytail. Darcy is in our grade, and she started working here last June. She is wearing her usual outfit: worn jeans, black Converse sneakers, and a long-sleeved Lycra shirt. The shirt is like something a gymnast might wear: skin-tight with sleeves that go all the way to her wrist. On top of that she always wears a T-shirt with the name of some obscure band that I’ve usually never heard of. Today it says
THE RAMONES
. I grab the keys from behind the register and let her in.

“What’s up, Stretch?”

I only let Darcy call me that.

“Morning, Darce.” I smile just a little as she glides past me toward the coffeemaker.

“Leaving us to go fishing again?” Darcy asks as she pulls the filters down from the shelf.

“It’s quahogging. You always say going fishing, like I’m just messing around on a boat all day.”

“Quahogging, of course.” Darcy mocks, slapping her forehead with her palm. “Are you going
quahogging
today?”

“Yeah . . . no. I don’t know. With the storm, we might not be going out for a few days. Gene will be here any minute.”

She suddenly stops what she’s doing and stares down at my right hand. “What happened to your hand?” Darcy grabs me by the wrist and drags me over to the ice machine.

“Jake got in an argument with the wall. The wall won.” Tommy smiles and points to the small dent.

Darcy fills a dishrag with ice and presses it down onto my bruising knuckles. I wince and suck air between my teeth. The ice feels cool on one side, and Darcy’s hand feels warm on my wrist. I look down and notice the shiny spiderweb of skin peeking out from her sleeve. I wonder what the rest looks like, if it’s as bad as kids say. Some of them have said it looks like her arm was wrapped in bacon, and others like it was covered in Silly Putty. I’ve never seen it, so I don’t know. It must be bad if she’s wearing long sleeves in the middle of summer.

“Hold still, Stretch,” Darcy says, pulling her sleeve down.

“Yes, doc.” I wince.

“So why
are
you punching walls?”

When I hesitate, Tommy answers for me. “Mrs. C. told Jake that she was giving up the diner and they were going to move in with his gram in Phoenix.”

“Give up the diner? She can’t do that.” Darcy’s eyes are shooting back and forth. “I can’t handle that!” She slams the ice machine door and storms through the kitchen and out back.

“I thought
I
was pissed. What’s
her
problem?” I ask Tommy.

“Cut her some slack, Jake. This is like her place too. She’s had to deal with a lot of crap, and now to add
this
. . .”

“I’m not
adding
anything.”

“You remember what she was like before she started working here. The Riptide is her safe haven,” Tommy says.

Darcy suddenly walks back in with a serious expression on her face, arms crossed. “So, what are we going to do?” she asks, slumping down on one of the stools at the counter.

“We?” I ask, joining her at the counter.

“Yeah, this affects all of us, Jake,” Tommy says.

I don’t have it in me right now to explain about the money we owe.

The three of us just sit on the stools, listening to Warren coming back to life outside the Riptide: chainsaws ripping through felled trees, the rattle of trucks hauling debris down Water Street, seagulls crying out for their breakfast, and the dull hum of fishing boats making their way up the river.

Suddenly the sound of my mom’s footsteps coming down the stairs makes Darcy and Tommy jump off the stools like they’re about to get detention.

“Morning, Mrs. C.,” Darcy says while hurriedly wiping down tables. “Did the laundry come yet? This apron is getting funky.”

“Check with Trax. I think it’s delayed because of the storm.”

“Hooo-weee! Here we go again!” On cue, Trax punches through the double doors and snaps a starched white apron around his waist. Trax is the only Native American that I know. Well, half Native American. His mother is Narragansett Indian and his father’s Irish, so he’s probably the only Indian with freckles. Now he’s got his nose deep into the stainless-steel tins next to the grill, and I can hear him taking big whiffs.

Tommy quietly slips through the double doors to leave through the kitchen.

“Damn. Did you lose power last night? This stuff is rank.” Trax starts dumping tins of food. Tomatoes, peppers, onions, and cubes of grayish-looking ham all go flying into the wastebin.

“What do you need? I’ll go prep some more,” I offer.

“Everything on the line. Gotta start fresh with all of it. Get choppin’, Skipper.” Trax whips my leg with a dishtowel and continues rummaging through the cooler, trying to find more victims to toss. In the kitchen, I find my mom already chopping onions.

“I heard,” she says, wiping tears on the back of her hand. “We have to get that cooler looked at. God knows what that’ll cost. I’m out of favors.” She starts hacking away at another onion.

“Geez, Mom, get Gene to take a look at it. Do I have to think of everything?”

“I don’t want to bother Gene with my problems. It’s nice enough that he pays you for going out on his boat every day.”

“I work hard for that money, Mom,” I say sharply.

“Oh, I know you do, Jake.” She puts the knife down and leans heavily on the cutting board. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, it’s just . . . it’s just . . .” She looks up at me. Her eyes are red and streaming, and it’s not just the onions. I can feel the small tug at the bottom of my stomach, telling me to put my arms around her and say it’s okay and that everything is going to be all right. She sends out this vibe every so often, and I have learned to ignore it. I snip that invisible string that is trying to pull me close. I haven’t hugged her or anyone else since Dad went missing, and I am not going to start now. Not today. Anyway, she’s supposed to be the strong one, not me. She is supposed to tell
me
the diner is doing fine, and we can stay here forever, and Dad’s coming home, and everything is going to be all right.

The kitchen is suddenly too hot and cramped.

“Morning!” Robin McCaphrey walks past me, and I follow her through the double doors as she kicks off her big yellow boots and strides in her bare feet over to the first booth, pulling sneakers out of her gigantic canvas purse.

“Don’t leave those boots at the door, Robin.”

“Yes,
Mo-o-om.
” Robin stretches out the word
Mom
the way she always does when she thinks my mom is treating her like a little kid. I think she’s twenty-three, but I’m not sure.

Darcy and I pull the red vinyl padded chairs down off the tables, and every time she sets one down, she sort of slams it into place. I can tell she’s pissed because she has this little wrinkle between her eyes that only shows up when she’s upset. Tommy is right; she loves this place. Before she worked here, she used to sit by herself in the school lunchroom, hiding her face with her hoodie and never talking to anyone. It’s because of the burn. The fire. Maybe she didn’t want to have to tell one more person about how her house burned down and that her drunk father did it and how she was in therapy and why she never goes to the beach or swimming and how she doesn’t go to gym class because she doesn’t want to change her clothes in the locker room or any of those things. She’s got her private stuff, just like me. But at the Riptide, she talks to everybody. Trax is like a big brother to her, and Robin’s the sister she never had. And there’s me.

After another twenty minutes of scurrying around, the five of us have managed to get the diner ready for the day. I karate-chop the main switch, and the lights above the booths flash on. Robin plugs in the
OPEN
sign that sits on the window ledge next to the door. I watch as the red glow of neon flickers to life and wonder how long we can keep this place going.
There’s no way I’m moving to Arizona.

By 8 a.m. the diner is packed for the first time in months. Every quahogger I know is here. With the whole bay closed, they’ve got nothing better to do than come here, drink coffee, and talk about last night’s hurricane. There are at least four men crammed into each booth, the counter is full, and guys are leaning against every open wall spot.

“Your savior is here.” Trax cracks a smile and nods over to the front door. I spin around and there’s Gene, taking off his salt-stained Red Sox hat and holding it to his chest with both hands like he just entered church. He nods over to me and I smile back.

Gene’s not big like most quahoggers. In fact, if it weren’t for his thick, calloused hands and his weathered, sun-freckled face, you’d think he had a desk job, like one of those real-estate guys who come in for the lunch special on Sundays. But I know Gene has never had a job like that. He’s a quahogger through and through. Quahoggers have salt water in their veins and barnacles on their backs; that’s what my dad always says. I must have salt water in my veins too; that’s probably why I feel more at ease on the water and totally Unco on land.

Everybody’s staring at the little TV that’s attached to the wall above the register. Darcy is standing on a chair and wrapping aluminum foil around the coat hanger that is sticking out of the back.

“A little to the left.”

“No, to the right.”

“That’s it right there.” The fishermen yell out instructions.

“Where’d you get that crap antenna, dahlin’?” Mel Ghist asks, pointing with his coffee cup at the TV.

“I called in specialists from NASA . . .
daaaahlin’,
” Darcy shoots back at him. Everyone applauds as the picture comes onto the screen. Darcy takes a bow and leaps from the chair.

The TV picture is crystal clear as a reporter shows the damage caused by Hurricane Marion. Shaky camera shots of trees ripped out of the ground, downed telephone poles, and capsized boats fill the screen. Dean Clements, the local postman, gives out a painful
Oooohhh!
every time they show a damaged boat, almost as if it were his own, but he doesn’t even own a dinghy. I’m half hiding behind the counter, pretending to be looking for something, crazy scared that they might show some of the boats that Captain and I “salvaged” last night.
They might even interview the DEM cops.

“Can you believe this?” a fat guy named Red yells out as they show another overturned sailboat. “You’d think when those rich bastards heard the weather report, they’d have half a brain to pull their hundred-thousand-dollar sailboats outta the water.”