The Cove's Last Catch

Francine had been telling herself all week that she would skip the thing, and then of course she went anyway. The fishing cooperative had been winding down for two years, and this was the last feast they would ever hold in the old quarantine cove, so somebody from the valley farms had to show up. She was forty-four, single, and she supplied half the vegetables for the feasts anyway, so it was not like she could pretend she had nothing to do with these people.

She parked the truck on the gravel above the beach and walked down the path with a crate of tomatoes on her hip. The cove looked exactly the way it always had. The stone building squatting against the cliff, the rusted iron gate hanging open, the pebble beach with too many folding tables on it. Somebody had strung lights from the beams. And there, hanging from a nail near the doorway like it had always been there, was the dented theater crash cymbal that some performer had left behind decades ago. Somebody had hung a paper sign on it that said RING FOR SECOND HELPINGS.

So, people had been drinking already. Good. She could drop the tomatoes and leave early.

The cove still smelled like salt and the dry herbs growing out of the cracks in the wall. She liked that smell. She did not like the smell of grilled sardines mixed with somebody's cologne, which was what hit her when she got closer to the tables, and she did not like the voice that came with the cologne.

"The farmer arrives," the voice said. "And she brought actual dirt on actual vegetables."

Hassan was standing by the drinks table with a glass of white wine and that jacket he probably thought was casual. He was thirty-eight, some kind of corporate designer, the nephew of one of the older fishermen, and he had been coming to these feasts for three summers now without ever once helping haul a table. Francine set the crate down harder than she needed to.

"Evening, Hassan."

"Look at those hands." He nodded at hers like he was admiring a painting. "You can see every season of the last twenty years on them. It is almost educational. I should bring my colleagues from the office, show them what real work looks like."

"Show them what real work looks like," she repeated. "And what do you look like, exactly? Besides a man who holds a glass all evening?"

"I create learning experiences," he said, and he smiled while he said it, which somehow made it worse. "Corporate training. When a company needs its people transformed, they call me."

"Well. Somebody has to get called."

He laughed like she had said something clever instead of rude, and this quality of Hassan drove her crazy. Nothing landed on him. She could say the meanest thing she had and he would just turn it over like a coin and hand it back polished.

The feast itself was fine, she had to admit. Sardines and grilled peppers and her own tomatoes in a big salad that Anton the oldest fisherman kept pointing at proudly. She sat at the end of a table near the gate and mostly listened. There was talk about the auction of the boats next month, and who was keeping which nets, and a long argument about whether the cooperative's shed in the harbor should be sold or just left to rot. Francine held opinions on the shed but kept them to herself. She had learned a long time ago, since that brief unsatisfying affair when she was twenty-one with a fellow farmer who wanted her to be softer than she was, that the less she said in a crowd, the better the night went.

Then Hassan, from halfway down the table, said, "So who is actually cleaning this place after tonight?"

Nobody answered, because it was a fair question and nobody had an answer.

"Because I heard the town wants the cove cleared out for tourists," he went on. "So someone should organize it. I would volunteer, but I have no idea how you people work. Francine, you seem to enjoy telling everyone what to do. Maybe the cleanup is your project."

"I have never told anyone here what to do in my life," Francine said.

"Oh, come on. You told Petar his tables were set up wrong before you even put your crate down tonight. I watched it happen. You walked in and corrected something within ninety seconds."

Petar, down the table, laughed and said, "She did, she is right."

"There is a difference between correcting a table and telling people what to do," Francine said. "One is just noticing."

"Is it?" Hassan swirled his wine. "From where I sit, you have spent the whole evening deciding things. Where the crate goes. What is worth listening to. Whether the shed should be sold. You have not said a word about the shed but your face has been running the meeting for an hour."

The table went a little quiet in that way tables do when two people start something. Francine put down her fork.

"And what has your face been doing?" she asked. "Because from where I sit, a man who designs training for companies that nobody needs has been taking inventory of everyone else's work all night, so he does not have to think about the fact that he has done none."

"Ohh," said Anton, delighted, and somebody refilled Francine's glass.

Hassan did not laugh this time. That was new. He looked at her down the length of the table and the smile was still on his face but only the way a lid is still on a pot.

"Come on," he said lightly. "I only tease."

"You mock," Francine said. "There is a difference between teasing and mocking. One is just talk."

The table laughed harder at that, at the echo, and Hassan stood up like he was getting more wine, and Francine, for no good reason, got up too, and somehow they ended up standing by the gate, out of earshot of the tables, with the cymbal hanging next to them and the sea working at the pebbles below.

"That was unnecessary," he said, quiet now.

"You started it at the drinks table."

"Yes, well." He looked out at the water. "I did not expect you to actually have teeth."

"You thought I was a farmer who grows tomatoes and says nothing clever?"

"I thought you were sensible," he said. "Sensible people are rarely interesting."

"And you are interesting? A man who gets paid to teach office workers how to feel things?"

"You would be surprised what I get paid to do," he said, and something lurked under his voice now, something she had not heard all evening, and he seemed to hear it too, because he stopped and took a breath. "Anyway. This is silly. We are ruining Anton's last feast with bickering."

"We are not ruining anything. They love this. They have been waiting all summer for two people to finally go at it."

He laughed then, a real one, short. Then he got quiet again and looked at her straight, and this close she could see he had a small scar through one eyebrow she had never noticed from a distance.

"Can I say something rude?" he asked.

"You have said nothing else all night."

"This is different." He glanced back at the tables, at the lights, at the old men arguing about the shed. "You act like you need to run everything. Every room, every table, every conversation. I have watched you for three summers. You correct, you fix, you decide. And I keep thinking, that is a woman who has never once let anyone else hold the wheel. Am I wrong?"

Francine did not answer right away. The cove was getting dark around them and the herbs on the wall had gone quiet, no more bees.

"You are not wrong," she said finally.

"And it is not because you want to. It is because nobody has ever been worth handing it to."

"That is rude," she said. "And also possibly true. Why do you care?"

"Because I am the opposite," Hassan said. "I have spent sixteen years doing exactly what companies pay me to do. I hold the wheel for people who do not want it. I make other people feel transformed and I go home to a rented flat and feel nothing. So when I see somebody who clearly wants control as badly as you do, and will not admit it," he shrugged, "I poke. It is rude. You are right."

The voices at the tables rose and fell. Somewhere behind them, Petar was calling for everyone to come down and look at the nets one last time, the last inspection, a little ceremony they had planned, and chairs started scraping.

"Come on," Francine said, because she did not know what else to do with any of that.

"In a minute." Hassan did not move. "You did not answer the real part."

"Which was what?"

"Whether you want control." He said it plainly, no smile left. "Not running a table. I mean all of it. Someone on their knees in front of you, doing exactly what you say. Because I have seen how you look at the world tonight, and I do not think you have ever been offered it, and I think you want it more than you want anything."

Francine stared at him. Twenty-three years of sensible solitude, one long boring affair, a farm she ran alone, and this slick city man in a nice jacket had just laid it all out by the gate of a dying cove like he was reading her mail.

"You are out of your mind," she said.

"Probably. But answer anyway."

"Everyone is going down to the nets."

"Let them go," he said. "Answer."

And Francine found that her hand had already come up and closed around his throat, not squeezing, just resting there, and Hassan went completely still, and his breath went shallow, and he said, "Oh. There it is."

"That is not an answer," she said. "Is this all right? Say it out loud. Say what you want."

"I want you to decide everything," he said. "Tonight. All of it. I want to be told."

Her fingers tightened, just a little, and he let out a breath like he had been holding it for fifteen years.

Francine did not let go of his throat right away. She stood there with her hand on him and listened to the last of the voices drift down toward the beach, chairs scraping, Anton's laugh bouncing off the cliff, and then it was mostly just the water.

"Inside," she said. "Now!"

He went. She followed, and in the dark of the stone building she shoved him back against the wall, harder than she meant to, and he made a small sound that she would think about for weeks. His jacket was already off somewhere behind him at the feast. She pulled her belt out of the loops of her jeans in one motion, the leather hissing, and pointed at the iron gate.

"Wrists. Up."

He put his wrists up through the bars of the old gate, both hands, and she looped the belt around them and cinched it tight. She tested it with a tug. It held.