“You need it more than I do.”
She smiled. “I’ve had such a craving for seafood lately. Could you start bringing more home?”
“It’s the one thing I can do well, I guess,” I said. “No one else seems to want to hire me.”
She touched my hand. “It’ll happen when it’s time, just like everything else. Until then we’ll be just fine.”
And so throughout the next week I brought her the food she requested. Lobster, shrimp, tuna, cod. Some I caught and others I purchased from the market beside the harbor. Despite the jubilation at our relationship rekindling, a small part of me was growing more and more concerned. It was Del’s requests for how her food was to be cooked. Increasingly she wanted the fish cooked less, the shrimp boiled for only minutes. At times she caught me watching her tear through a limp and slightly slimy cut of fish, and I’m sure she saw a hint of revulsion on my face. I couldn’t always hide it, and she assured me that anything from the sea was perfectly safe to eat even raw. She would shrug and say the cravings must have come late, before popping another jellied piece of seafood into her mouth.
It was a Saturday when I brought the three small squid home for dinner. I’d spent the day in Portland, checking on several applications I’d dropped off and shaking hands with various managers at the businesses, making it a point to introduce myself personally each time. The need to be off of the boat was nearly a physical thing by then. I had even started to get seasick on days that the swells climbed anywhere over five feet. I hadn’t been seasick since my seventh birthday.
When I got home, Del was doing a load of laundry and humming something to herself. I carried the squid to the kitchen sink in the container the market had provided, the six inches of water inside slopping against the lid. I could see their shapes through the semi-transparent plastic the container was made of, their alien bodies interwoven and claw-like where their short tentacles trailed out. They propelled themselves through the water, bumping against the plastic barrier with soft thuds. Del had asked for them specifically the night before, saying she had such a craving for fresh calamari it wasn’t even funny. I had only cooked squid twice before and wasn’t relishing the thought of dispatching the live creatures with my fillet knife.
I left the container in the sink and returned to the truck to retrieve the last of the groceries. The air was cool and picked at my flannel shirt as well as the tops of the pines that bordered Harold’s yard. As I was pulling the last bag from the truck bed, I heard the old man himself call out to me from his porch. I hadn’t seen him in well over a week and had meant to call his son to see if he had gone on a trip or been hospitalized again by the pneumonia that had afflicted him the prior winter.
“Harold, where’ve you been? We were starting to worry about you,” I said as I approached the porch. Harold sat, reclined in one of his chairs, a steaming cup of coffee on the table at his elbow. His white hair, normally in slight disarray, had been trimmed and combed, and I noticed the jacket he wore appeared to be new.
“Went and visited my daughter down in South Carolina. She and her husband were goin’ ta’ come here but they got waylaid by his job. He’s a good man, but a lawyer, so I’m not overly certain he’s completely human.”