Chapter 5: The Table of Strangers

On Sunday night Ben's crew came to dinner without being asked.

There were five of them, and they showed up in work boots with foil trays, a cooler of beer and a folding table under one arm.

The crane operator was a big woman in her fifties with thick, tattooed forearms.

She looked me over on the dock and said, "So you're the pen in the champagne."

"I'm sorry?"

"Nine times," she said. "I watched it nine times. My husband made me stop."

The rest of them cheered.

I didn't know what to do with my hands.

I had eaten three years of dinners at a steel table, in silence, with my arm around my tray.

Now somebody put a paper plate in my hand and a fork in the other, and the old welder pointed at the chicken.

"Eat that. It's my wife's. Don't tell the diver kid the good piece is hers."

"I heard you," said the diver kid, who looked about twenty-three and was already on his second drumstick.

They talked over each other. They argued about a tide table and a broken winch and whose turn it was to bring the ice.

Ben sat at the far end of the table with his sleeves rolled and said almost nothing.

Every few minutes I felt him look at me, and every time I looked up he was looking at his plate.

"How'd you two meet?" the welder asked. "He's been tight about it."

I opened my mouth.

"Through my mother," Ben said, flatly.

"She's an old friend of the family," I said. "She set us up."

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