Chapter 9: Forty Years

Lahti Marine turned forty on the last Saturday of June, and Gunnar threw a party in the yard for four hundred people.

There were grills and a walleye fry, a band on a flatbed truck, and a half-built tugboat on the ways with a banner across its hull.

Gunnar stood under the banner in a blue shirt, shaking every hand.

My mother stood beside him with a plate she was not allowed to put down.

I stood at the edge, with a beer I didn't want, watching Nils be seen.

He wore a clean white shirt, and everyone wanted him.

The yard hands slapped his back and called him the boss's boy.

Every time he looked over their heads for me, I looked at the lake.

At dusk the paint-shop foreman found me by the beer tent.

He was a big man, red in the face, with a union cap and a lot of fish fry on his breath.

"You're the new stepdaughter," he said.

"Annika," I said.

"Gunnar's got himself a pretty family." He swayed closer. "Dance with me, sweetheart."

"No, thank you."

"Come on."

He put his hand on the small of my back, low, and it slid.

I stepped away and the hand followed.

I opened my mouth to say something sharp.

I never got to say it.

Nils was there.

He did not say a word.

He took the foreman by the collar of his shirt and hit him once in the face.

The man's nose broke with a sound I heard over the band.

He went down in the gravel with blood pouring through his fingers, and the tent went silent.

Nils stood over him with his fist still closed.

His chest was heaving.

I saw something cross his face that I had never seen on it.

It was not triumph.

It was recognition, and it frightened him.

"That's my son!" Gunnar's voice boomed across the yard.

He came through the crowd with his arms open, laughing.

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