Free By The Sea, Book Three: Laura by Antoinette Stockenberg Page B

most
important thing in the world. And besides, he still had to confess
about having gone aboard it.
    "Mama," he began cautiously, "Dad says to
keep supper warm for him tonight."
    His mother paused mid-stroke in her painting
and looked at him. "When did you talk with your father?"
    "I saw him when I got kind of near the Rainbow," he said, pressing a cornbread crumb into his
forefinger and licking it carefully clean.
    "Just how near the Rainbow were you,
exactly?"
    "Well, sort of on it."
    "I don't believe it!" she said, shocked.
"What did your father say?"
    "He didn't yell or anything. He just said,
have supper warm."
    "But he isn't free until Sunday. Did he say
why he was coming tonight?"
    Neil made an odd, nervous little smacking
sound with his lips. "I think to talk about the trip."
    His mother's dark eyes glittered. "Neil! You
didn't tell him!"
    "I didn't mean to, Mama. Honest. It just
slipped out."
    Her face was flushed and angry. "Oh, never
mind. It was absurd to entrust something like that—"
    Dismayed, he seized on the word. "You can trust me, Mama. You always can trust me! You know you
can!"
    "Oh, yes," she said dryly. "You've just
proven that." And she went back to her painting in stony
silence.
    He wanted to point out that he hadn't said a
word about the horrible dance party on board, but then he would be
breaking his promise not to mention it. How unfair could you
get?
    That night he went to bed when it was still
light out, claiming that he didn't feel well. He heard a school of
snappers jumping madly around the boat, but he wouldn't have
ventured out of his berth even if it meant filling the whole
cockpit with them.
    Eventually he heard his father's voice:
"That's too much. I'm not hungry. Give me half that."
    There was a pause and then his father said,
"Well? What are you up to now?"
    And then Neil heard his mother's voice, low,
indistinct, the tone she used when she did not want him to hear.
She knew how to speak some French, and some Swedish, and even a
little Polish. But none of them did her any good in keeping things
from Neil, because his father only understood English. Most of her
English, anyway.
    "Are you daft?" shouted his father in
response. "I said we'd go back to hauling, not you'd go back."
    His mother again, low, urgent.
    And then his father: "I don't give a rat's
ass if he can hear me! He should hear this. God knows
it affects him. If you think you're going to go sailing off with my son and my boat—"
    In a voice goaded into combat, his mother
interrupted.
    "Our son, our boat. Half of
this boat is mine, paid for fair and square. You accepted my
inheritance easily enough—"
    "And the reason your brothers bought out
your share of the farm is clear as rain to me: you're like a mare
that won't train to harness, a boat with fierce weather helm. You
won't be steered nohow!"
    "Why should I be steered? I've paid my half,
in money and in sweat. Why can't I make a decision once in a while?
You didn't ask me whether you could sign on as one of Mr.
Vanderbilt's 'black gang'—you just went and did it, because we
needed the money and because you knew it would be exciting for you.
And I understand that; that's what life is all about. Well, my
motives are exactly, exactly the same. There's no difference."
    Neil heard a fist come down on wood. "There is a difference—you could lose the boat!"
    "The boat can take it, we both know
that."
    "It can't take a hurricane, and we're in the
thick of the season for 'em."
    "We won't sail offshore; we'll follow the
coast down—"
    "Who 'we'? You, my brother, and the boy?
Don't make me laugh."
    "I ... I've lined up a first mate; he's
sailed around the world on a three-master, and he comes highly
recommended, and he's a mechanical genius—"
    Neil sat up in his berth. His mother never
told him about any geniuses.
    "Hold on, now," said his father in the voice
that Neil dreaded. "You mean to say you've already taken on a
crewman?"
    "No, of course not. I'm just trying to