Page 37 of Everything You Hate
Heat climbs my neck so fast I can feel it in my ears.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit.” She snaps her fingers at Patty Sue, who materializes with two fresh mugs without being asked. “The farmhouse walls are thin. The porch is not soundproof. And Colter has the ears of a fucking bat.” She pours cream into her coffee and stirs. “So. Spill.”
I look at my notebook. I look at Mimi. I look at Sprocket, who has given up on my toast and is now trying to lick the salt shaker.
“He kissed me. Then he said it was a mistake.”
Mimi sets her spoon down. “I told him he’s an idiot.”
“But he’s right. It was a mistake.”
“Honey.” She reaches across the table and pats my hand. Her rings are cold against my skin. “Dean Kinsella doesn’t kiss women. Full stop. He turns them down. He walks away. He sleeps on his boat and talks to his dad’s parrot and that comatose dog of his and pretends that’s enough. For him to put his hands on you and mean it—” She stops. “He meant it. I guarantee you he meant it.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because somebody needs to, and God knows he won’t.”
I should redirect. I have a list of questions in this notebook, color-coded, and not one of them is about Dean Kinsella.
“Why doesn’t he?” I ask.
Mimi settles back into the vinyl like a woman who has been waiting years for someone to ask.
“Henry was already married to my sister when Dean was born,” she says. “Twenty-one years between them. Their mother was forty-five. So Dean grows up in a house where the parents are exhausted and the brother is already gone, and by the time he’s eight he’s an uncle to a baby he babysits.” She sips. “Henry took Lana’s name when they married. Wanted out from under the Kinsellas. Dean never got the choice. He was born into it.”
“Into what?”
“Dock people. Bottom-feeders. The Kinsellas worked the fish plants and loaded cargo and lived hand to mouth, and half of them were mean drunks and the other half were worse.” She says it without heat. A weather report. “His parents were the good ones. Worked themselves into the ground. His mom died when he was fourteen. Cancer. His dad held on until last year—eighty-six years old and still mending nets at the marina, because sitting still would have killed him faster.” She taps a ring against her mug. “They loved those boys. They just didn’t have anything left over after keeping the lights on.”
I’m writing. I don’t remember deciding to.
“He joined the Coast Guard at eighteen. Rescue swimmer. He was good at it.” She turns her mug a quarter turn on the table. “Then something happened, and he came home different, and he’s never once said what. Eleven years, and not a word. Not to Henry. Not to me.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I think it broke him.” Her voice has gone flat. “He pretends it didn’t. We all pretend along with him. It’s easier.”
The wordbrokesits on the page in my handwriting, and I don’t like how it looks there.
“He did security work after. Maritime, executive protection, traveled for years. Came home when his dad died because Bodhi needed the help and Henry couldn’t do it alone.” She drains her coffee. “Eleven years I’ve been trying to set that man up with every decent woman on this island and a few off it. He turns them down flat and goes back to his boat and his dog and his miserable parrot and calls it a life.”
She leans forward.
“Then you show up. And he goes in the harbor after your suitcase. And he brings you to my dinner table. And he kissesyou on my porch.” She sits back. “So you tell me. What’s different about you?”
I don’t have an answer.
“The land transfer,” I say.
Mimi lets me have it, which is its own kind of mercy. “1895. That part’s true. Everything else is bullshit. Thomas Haven didn’t have two dimes to rub together—he was loading fish on the docks. Couldn’t afford boots, let alone twenty acres of waterfront.”
“So how did he buy it?”
“He didn’t. His wife did. Eleanor. Family money out of Seattle, old shipping money. She bought the land as an investment and put it in Thomas’s name because women couldn’t hold property then.” She shrugs. “The truth’s boring. Thomas married well. The end.”
I write it down.Eleanor Haven. Seattle shipping money. 1895.
