Ten Years of Public Breakups, Then He Ran After My Bus novel · Chapter 19 of 40

Chapter 19: Channel Nine

The red lamp burned on the radio.

I looked at it, and Eben looked at it, and neither of us moved.

Outside, the singing had stopped altogether.

Every bulb on the Dorcas Jean was still shining, and every person aboard had gone silent on the deck.

"Hit the button," I said. "Turn it off."

Eben picked up the handset.

He turned it over in his hand.

The push-to-talk bar was jammed down on one side by the knot of cord, and it would not come up.

"It's stuck," he said.

"Then pull the cord."

"I could," he said.

"Eben."

He looked at the lamp for a long moment.

Then he looked at me, and I saw him decide.

"No," he said.

"What?"

"I'm done being polite about it."

He lifted the handset and spoke into it, in a voice I had never heard him use, level and carrying and rough.

"This is Eben Dyer on the Dorcas Jean. Six years ago this January, my father was on a table at Maine Med for nine hours."

"Eben, stop," I said.

"I was in the third row of the waiting room. At ten past three in the afternoon, my phone went off. It was a text from Bernie Cyr."

The radio hissed in the quiet.

"It said, I can't do this. Don't call me."

I put my hand over my mouth.

"I sat there six more hours," he said, into the handset. "I didn't call. I didn't text. I didn't know what I'd done. Nobody walked through the door."

"That's not what..."

"My father woke up. And she wasn't there. And she's never said a word about it in six years."

He held the handset out to me.

His hand was perfectly steady.

It was a thing I had never seen him do, and I knew I could refuse it.

I took it.

I stood in the wheelhouse of a boat strung with eleven hundred Christmas lights and spoke into a radio that every boat in Penobscot Bay was listening to.

"I stood in the garage under that waiting room," I said.

My voice shook.

"I watched you through the window. I was supposed to go up. I'd brought a casserole. I could see the back of your head, in the third row, and your hands hanging down between your knees."

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