Free Children of the Sea 02 - Sea Fever by authors_sort

kitchen.
     
    She reached for her apron, her cheeks flushed. “What was he doing here?”
     
    Regina raised her brows, surprised by the faint hostility in her tone.
    “I’m thinking of hiring him.”
     
    “What for?”
     
    “Scrub floors, unload deliveries, stuff like that.”
     
    Antonia sniffed without turning around from the cook top. “We don’t need some man around to do our work for us.”
     
    They hadn’t needed a man eight years ago, when Regina showed up on Antonia’s doorstep with Nick in her arms. Whatever her faults, whatever her feelings about providing for her estranged daughter and a three-month-old grandson, Antonia had done everything that needed to be done. But her mother wasn’t getting any younger. Regina watched her mother’s hands on the spatula as she turned hash on the griddle— strong, veined hands, the knuckles growing knobby with age, the nails yellow with smoke— and felt a surge of love and panic tighten her throat.
    Antonia would never admit it, but she couldn’t do as much as she used to.
    Margred was great with customers, but she went home to her husband at night. And Regina . . .
     
    70
    “Things change,” Regina said shortly.
     
    “Sex changes things,” she’d said to Dylan.
     
    Oh, boy, did it ever.
     
    Her period was late. Only a day late. One day.
     
    Maybe she wasn’t knocked up. But she felt the weight of worry like a live thing pressing on her abdomen, burning beneath her breastbone.
     
    “It’s those damn catering jobs,” Antonia told Margred. “She took on another one, family reunion, week after Frank Ivey’s birthday party. Now she wants to hire help.”
     
    Regina grabbed a knife and started chopping scallions for the pasta salad, ignoring the ball in her stomach. “Six bucks an hour, a couple hours a day, a few days a week. Big deal.”
     
    “We can’t afford him. Not once the season’s over,” Antonia grumbled.
     
    Chop chop chop. “He won’t last that long. He won’t want to stay here in the winter.”
     
    “He could. He looks crazy enough.”
     
    Maybe he did at that. Her knife faltered.
     
    “I don’t like him,” Margred said.
     
    Regina glared at her, feeling betrayed. “You were okay with him before. He’s a vet. Like Caleb.”
     
    “He smells bad.”
     
    Regina remembered Jericho’s freshly scraped jaw, the line of dirt around his neck, and felt an uncomfortable prickle of guilt. “So would you if you didn’t have a place to take regular showers.”
     
    Margred shook her head. “Not that kind of bad. He smells . . .
    wrong.”
     
    71
    Antonia slapped a plate on the pass. “As long as he doesn’t touch the food or scare off the customers, I don’t care how he smells.”
     
    Regina gaped at this unexpected support from her mother.
     
    Antonia set her hands on her hips. “You going to stand there jawing?
    Or are you going to serve this hash before it gets cold?”
     
    The next few hours passed in a haze of work and steam. At eleven o’clock the menu changed from eggs, hash, and home fries to sandwiches, subs, and pizza. The tables filled with summer people who didn’t want to cook, campers in search of a hot meal, yachters ashore for shopping or some local color.
     
    No Dylan. Regina caught her gaze wandering to the pass, watching the door for his tall, lean figure, and pressed her lips together.
     
    “Shit, oh, shit.” She jerked her hand from the cutting board.
     
    Her mother looked over. “You all right?”
     
    “Fine,” she said, examining her white fingers. She’d only caught a nail this time, under the knife’s edge. No blood, no foul.
     
    No blood.
     
    She’d run to the bathroom three times to check, as if the act of pulling down her underpants could somehow transform the sweat of the kitchen into good news: Not pregnant.
     
    She needed to go to Rockland and buy a damn test.
     
    She needed to keep her mind on her work. She loved cooking, took a deep satisfaction in feeding people.