My Maid of Honor Took My Groom, So His Best Man Took Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: Low Tide
My father's oyster flats lie on the bay side of Wellfleet, and at the bottom of a spring tide they run out a half mile into the light.
On Thursday the water pulled back at noon.
Brennan and I walked out over the wet sand in rubber boots, carrying a mesh bag each.
The whole shallow world shone, silver and brown, with gulls standing in it.
My father was out ahead of us in his old orange waders, bent over a rack of cages.
He was seventy-one and had retired three times and never once stopped working.
He heard our boots, and he straightened up slowly, with a hand on his back.
He looked at me.
He looked at the man next to me, six foot three in a borrowed pair of waders that stopped at his shins.
"This him?" my father said.
"This is Brennan."
"The ferry man."
"Yes, sir," said Brennan.
"You brought her home."
"She brought herself, sir. I carried the bags."
My father considered that.
Then he held out one hand, black with mud to the wrist, and Brennan took it without a flicker.
"Good grip," my father said. "Can you cull?"
"I can learn."
"Then pick up a knife."
We culled oysters for two hours on a half mile of wet sand.
My father put Brennan at the end of the rack with a bucket and a gauge and showed him once.
He watched him do the second dozen.
"Your hands are steady," he said.
"I drive a boat for a living."
"Mine are steady too. I never did like that boy Todd's handshake."
I laughed out loud.
Brennan laughed too, a surprised bark, and my father's mouth twitched in the corner.
It was the first time I'd seen him smile since August fifteenth.
I stood in the sun with a knife in my hand and thought, this is it, this is the whole of what I wanted.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Maid of Honor Took My Groom, So His Best Man Took Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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