The Widowed Don Hired a Doctor for His Son, and She Brought Two Boys Who Wore His Face novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Ice House

The shrimp boats go out before light, and I stood on the wharf at Pelican Island at five in the morning in a borrowed rain jacket, watching eleven of them ease off their lines one by one.

Nico stood beside me with a thermos.

He had called me the night before and said, "Come and see what we are."

I had said yes.

The Vasari wharf was a long gray pier with an ice house at the landward end, and above the ice house, up an outside stair, was the office where the leases were kept.

The men on the dock all touched their caps to him as he passed.

None of them looked at me for longer than a second.

I understood that they had been told.

"Those are the Portuguese boats," he said, "and those are the Sicilian ones.

"The Sicilian families came in the thirties and the Portuguese ones before that.

"The island rents the water to them, and we rent it from the island, and the money goes round."

"And what do you do?"

"We keep the leases honest," Nico said.

"Nobody on this wharf goes hungry, and nobody is turned out of a lease in winter.

"If a man's boat goes down, we buy him another.

"If he owes us, he pays me in person.

"That's all it is."

"That's not all it is."

He smiled, just slightly.

"No," he said.

"But it's what I tell the children."

He took me up the outside stair and unlocked the office.

It smelled of coffee and ink and the ice below.

There was a wide oak desk under the window with a ledger open on it, and a wall of paper charts, and a calendar from the ship-chandler's with a picture of a lighthouse.

Beyond the window the boats were turning out into the gray.

I walked to the glass.

"It's beautiful."

"It's cold," he said.

"It's cold and it smells of fish, and I love it more than anywhere on earth."

He came up behind me and stood close, and didn't touch me.

I could feel the heat of him along my whole back.

"Ines."

"Yes?"

"I've been working on a speech," he said.

"Since Saturday.

"It was a good speech.

"It had the word appropriate in it."

"What happened to it?" I asked.

"It went out the window when you got into my truck," he said.

I turned around.

He was very close.

His eyes went over my face, and I saw him decide.

"I'd like to kiss you again, in daylight, in a room with a door that locks," he said.

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