The Merman Who Wouldn't Sing, The Tears He Saved For Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Hundred Dollars
Marnie buys the cheapest, most battered merman at a dockside yard sale and he hands her a scale; at midnight the seller is at her gate offering double.
On the first Saturday of the month I paid four hundred dollars for the worst merman at Moss Tide Yard.
Forty people stood around the tanks with coffee and bid on the pretty ones.
Nobody bid on mine.
He was in tank thirty-one, at the end of the row, in two feet of cloudy water.
His back was a map of old brand scars.
His tail was dark green with copper in it, and half the scales on one side had been scraped away.
The tag on the glass said LOT 31, DEAD STOCK.
"Dead stock" is what the yard calls anything it can't sell.
Garrick Moss came down the row with his steel thermos, smiling at everyone, as he has smiled at this town my whole life.
He sold my grandmother her first bait tank.
He gave my mother a ride home from the hospital once.
"Marnie Dunphy," he said. "Don't tell me you came for thirty-one."
"What happens to him if I don't?"
Garrick scratched his neck. "Unsold dead stock goes on the cannery truck Monday."
"How much?"
"Honey, I'd sooner sell you the nice mermaid in twelve. She sings."
"How much, Garrick?"
He sighed and looked at the sky.
"Four hundred. That's a loss for me, and you didn't hear it from me."
I had nine hundred dollars in a coffee tin at home.
I had never in my life paid full price for anything, and I wasn't going to start with the one nobody wanted.
"Four hundred," I said.
"Cash only," he said. "Card machine's down. Sign here."
The bill of sale said sold as is, no returns, dead stock.
I signed it on the lid of a bait cooler.
The merman had not looked at me once.
He floated with his eyes on the far wall, and every few minutes he hummed one low note.
The people at the next tank laughed.
"He's a quiet one," Garrick told me while he strapped the crate into the bed of my truck. "Never sings. Never cries. You'll hardly know he's there."
"Is that good?"
"It's very good. A stubborn one never gives anybody trouble." He slapped the tailgate. "Be nice to him, though. They warm up to nice."
He waved at me all the way out of the lot.
The boathouse was my grandmother's.
It has a flooded slip under the floor, open to the cove, and a loft above it with a bed and a hot plate.
I backed the truck up to the double doors and slid the crate across a ramp of boards until the water inside it met the water in the slip.
I unlatched the lid.
He didn't move.
I sat on the edge of the dock with my boots over the water and said, "I'm Marnie. I bought you. I'm sorry that's how this works."
His head came up an inch.
His eyes were gray-green and wet at the corners, and not one tear fell.
He hummed.
I looked at my watch.
Five minutes later he hummed again.
"Okay," I said. "That's your thing."
I had the first-aid kit from the loft and a jug of sea salt from Aggie Lunt's shop.
I held the salt up. "This goes in the water. I read it twice. Is that right?"
He looked at the jug, and then at me, and then he nodded.
It was the first thing he'd done on purpose.
While I poured, he swam to the edge of the slip, close enough for me to see how many cuts there were under the scars.
He lifted his forearm out of the water.
There was a patch of dark green scales along the inside of it, small as fingernails.
He worked his thumbnail under one and pulled.
It came away with a thin line of blood.
"Hey, don't," I said. "Stop that."
He held out his hand, palm up, with the scale in the middle of it.
His fingers were shaking.
He wasn't looking at the scale.
He was looking at my face, and he looked scared to death.
I took it, because he was scared and I couldn't stand it.
It was warm, and heavier than it looked, and the copper in it caught the light from the doorway.
"You don't owe me anything," I said. "I'm not charging you rent."
He closed his eyes.
I thought I'd said the wrong thing, though I couldn't tell what.
I carried the scale up to the loft and dropped it in an empty pickle jar on the windowsill.
Then I sat on the bed with my knees up and felt, for the first time in two years, like I had done something right.
I told myself I'd scored a bargain.
That is what I told everyone, all week.
At midnight, headlights swung across the loft ceiling.
I went down in my socks.
Garrick Moss was standing at my gate with his thermos, and his truck idling behind him.
"Marnie," he said. "I am so sorry about this hour."
"Is something wrong?"
"A little mix-up. The lot numbers got switched at the yard. Thirty-one was supposed to be a different animal." He smiled. "I'll give you eight hundred for him. Right now, cash, and I'll haul him off tonight so you don't have to touch him."
Eight hundred was double what I'd paid.
It was the most money anyone had ever offered me for anything.
Behind me, under the floor, the water was quiet.
Then it hummed once, low and steady.
"No," I said.
Garrick kept smiling.
He said goodnight, and thanked me for my time, and got back in his truck.
He didn't drive away.
His headlights stayed on my gate until morning.
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