Dumped on His Wharf, I Married His Brother and Set Their Price novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Step Out, Miss Lunt
Told to leave the Seavey family photo, Susannah hands back the shirt, walks to the one Seavey not in it and proposes; he says yes and kisses her in front of the camera.
Forty-one people in matching navy shirts stood on the wharf steps for the family picture.
I was in the front row, in a shirt Wyatt had handed me that morning.
It had the wharf's name stitched over the pocket, and it hung a size too big.
"Mom wants you in it," Wyatt had said, and kissed my forehead.
I had been his girlfriend for fourteen months, and nobody had ever asked me into this picture before.
The photographer from the weekly paper backed up to the end of the float and raised his camera.
Wyatt's father looked down the steps at me over his reading glasses.
"Step out, Miss Lunt," he said, kindly, so the whole supper could hear. "This is the family."
Two hundred people stood around the lobster pit with paper plates, and every one of them stopped chewing.
A girl in a white sundress came up the steps with her hair curled and a ring on her left hand.
She stopped in the place beside Wyatt, which was mine, and he put his arm around her waist.
"I was going to tell you, Mar," Wyatt said.
He did not say it quietly.
He said it with his chin up, and I knew he had practiced it.
I looked at his mother, who was adjusting the girl's strap.
She did not look back at me.
Ned Seavey owned this wharf and bought from thirty-one boats, and he called himself the harbor's honest dealer.
Behind the steps, in the lot, Wyatt's new black truck sat in the sun, paid for in cash in June.
At the far end of the wharf stood a white truck with PHILBROOK LOBSTER on the door.
Its engine was off, on a Saturday when nobody loaded anything.
Philbrook was my father's name.
Nobody on this wharf knew that, because in all my life I had never told anyone outside the family.
I had not told Wyatt.
I had not told his mother, who called me "the girl" to her friends and "dear" to my face.
I took hold of the navy hem and pulled the shirt over my head.
Under it I wore a gray tank top that I had chosen myself.
I folded the shirt once and held it out to the girl in white.
"It's a size too big," I said. "It'll fit you better."
Her mouth opened, and she took it, because nobody had told her what else to do.
Nobody laughed.
Somewhere behind me a child asked loudly why the lady took her shirt off, and was shushed.
I walked down the steps.
I walked along the wharf, past the steaming crates and the bait shed.
Every person I passed found something to look at on a paper plate.
My heart was going fast, but my legs were fine.
At the end of the boat shop, under the chain hoist, a man was lying on a creeper with his boots sticking out.
He was the only Seavey not in the picture.
His mother had said the photograph was for the calendar and he had grease on him.
"Torsten," I said.
He rolled out from under the engine with a wrench in his fist.
Torsten Seavey was six-foot-five and weighed two hundred and forty pounds, with dark hair going gray at the sides and a short beard.
I had sat across from him at his parents' table for two years of Sundays.
He had passed me the potatoes and said "Sue" and nothing else.
He sat up and looked at my face, and then past me at the empty place on the steps.
"That was loud," he said. "I heard it from in here."
"Marry me Monday," I said.
The wrench stopped in his hand.
"One year," I said. "I'll pay half the mortgage on whatever you live in. You will never have to explain me to anybody."
He looked past me.
Down the wharf his father stood on the steps with his hands at his sides, and his brother had gone red to the ears.
"Torsten," Ned called. "Get back under that engine."
Torsten set the wrench down on the concrete, very gently.
Then he stood up, and the shadow of him covered me.
"Is this for them?" he said.
"It's for me," I said. "I'm tired of being walked out of rooms."
He laughed.
It was a big laugh, and it went up into the rafters of the shop.
"I've been asked for a lot in that family," he said. "Never that."
"Is it yes?"
"It's yes, Sue."
He wiped both hands on his jeans.
Then he took me by the waist and lifted me, the whole way off the ground.
He set me on top of the blue bait barrel, so that my eyes were level with his.
His hands stayed where they were, wide and warm through the thin tank top, and I could feel every finger.
"I'm going to kiss you," he said. "Where they can see."
"Do it."
He kissed me.
It was not careful.
He tasted of coffee and diesel, and his beard scraped my chin.
I got both fists into his shirt and pulled him in until the barrel rocked.
Behind us somebody dropped a plate.
Someone else said his name, and then mine.
When he lifted his mouth, he was breathing hard, and he did not step back.
I turned my head.
The photographer stood twenty feet off with his camera at his chest and his mouth open.
"Take it now," I said.
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