There was a pause, then her father’s voice, low. Gia strained to hear over the rabbits rustling. She stuck her finger through the wire to calm them.
“A man provides for his family and is good to his word. You have to clean this up, Leo, because I see how your face is moving right now, and I don’t like it.”
“He’s nervous, Eddie,” Agnes said. “You’re upsetting him.”
“Starting tomorrow,” he pushed on, “you’re getting a job. I don’t care what it is. Bag groceries. Fix bikes. You’ll pay for the fence first. After, you’ll keep half; the rest helps your family.”
He knocked at the table with his knuckles. “You didn’t use your time well, so now it doesn’t belong to you.”
Leo knew better than to talk back. Sometimes Gia couldn’t imagine her father at war, but other times, like now, she could picture him locking a torpedo into place, shooting without hesitation, without mistakes.
“Tomorrow, I want a full report on who you spoke to. Understand?”
Leo mumbled. A shadow shifted on the porch as Leo climbed the stairs to his room and slammed the door so hard the rabbits stopped drinking.
Why shouldn’t he work? She helped her mother. The sting of being used eased with the new fairness, not that Leo would actually listen.
If Leo got a job at the supermarket, Gia would go just to see him in that stupid uniform. Or as a movie usher, tapping people on shoulders with a flashlight to stop them from necking like perverts. But her brother wasn’t so bad. When Joseph Salerno had lifted Gia’s skirt in front of his friends as a joke, Leo had rolled up his sleeves in the lot behind the rectory, wiggled his jaw, and knocked Joseph Salerno on his ass. Joseph’s friends had carried him home on one side of the street as Gia and Leo had shared an ice cream cone on the other, Leo smelling like dust, Gia dizzy with the fact that no one would bother her again.
“You see that?” Her father’s voice startled her. The moon above the canal was a perfect circle. “It explains everything. Always does.”
The moon and sports were the only things her father was superstitious about, but the storm in Gia’s rib cage couldn’t be explained by the moon.
“You used me,” she said, wishing for the calm of the boat, though the water terrified her at night, even with a full moon.
“When I was a kid, your grandfather made me pick coal from the street to heat the house.”
“I heard that story already. And how you got an orange for Christmas. Or a baseball. Or how the milk bottle had the same crack every week. You told me a million times.”
“And sometimes he told me to pick pockets to feed the family. If I got caught, I’d go to jail, and no one would bail me out. How’s that for fair?”
That part of the story was new. Gia hugged her knees to her chest. Who would send their own kid to jail?
It was quiet between them. Tree bugs hummed. Heat lightning lit the clouds over the water. A car peeled off in the distance, maybe Ray’s if they hadn’t given up and gone home.
“You gonna stay with the rabbits all night?” He held the screen door for her, though it would’ve stayed open on its own.
“Going to.” She sighed, thinking of his GED books. Kids weren’t supposed to help parents with their homework. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he always said. “All you have to do is go to school.” She went on, “Gonna’s not a real word.”
“All right. Are you going to stay out here all night?”
The storm in her chest quieted. She followed her father inside, retracing her steps to the bathroom, and started the shower. Steam coated everything in a light dew as she stepped inside, ignoring the pink plastic razor her mother had left for her. If it didn’t matter what Leo did, shouldn’t it be the same for her? She could take care of her family, be good to her word, if it meant she could be anything.
Her father banged on the door. “Water’s not free.”
If it was true about streams and rivers and water running back to the same place, it must be true for water pipes and showers and the things Gia washed away. She shut off the tap. No need to burden fish with everything Gia couldn’t be.
Gia woke to voices in the hallway. Her room was stifling hot. Hair stuck to her forehead, her nightgown to her back, the air thick. Dawn was breaking in the distance, a line of orange and blue hinting in the sky. Gia had a hard time sleeping, one of the few things she had in common with her brother. She tiptoed to the door. Even the floor was warm.
“And what do we do about this?” her father whispered.
“Maybe he got an early start. You gave him a lot to think about,” her mother hissed back.
“If you really think—”
Gia opened the door, squinting at the light. Her parents were in their pajamas, damp with sweat, startled as if she’d crawled out of the linen closet instead of her own bedroom. Gia pushed away the annoyance that they’d forgotten about her again.
“Morning, Gia.” Her father changed course as abruptly as a new weather front pushing the old away. “I’m taking the boat out if you want to come.”
Heck yes. She scurried off to change, the mood shifting again in the hallway, sliding under her door, raising the hair on her arms. She should’ve listened longer before startling them quiet. Stupid. She brushed her hair and teeth, changed, put a few cookies into her pocket for breakfast, and waited for her father on the porch all before the light drifted up any farther on the horizon. It was still a wavering orange line. She wanted to see the sun come up on the water, turning the waves colors, but her father finished a cigarette in the kitchen, then stopped to pull up the crab traps at the dock, all three, before dropping them back in the water.
Gia untied cleat hitches, coiling rope on the dock.
“Can I do it?” she asked as they motored through the canal, the bay smooth ahead, no whitecaps, just shimmering sun.
“Sure.” He slid aside as Gia climbed over the middle. The motor hummed in her hand. She couldn’t see very well over her father’s shoulders, his blue tattoo especially bright in the sun, but she knew the canal well enough to stay centered and prayed no floating sticks or branches or fishing line would tangle them up, proving she wasn’t ready to go out alone.
“Which way?” The bay opened up ahead. She kicked the motor up to handle the current.
“Left.” Toward the airport, a short trip, but at least there was one at all. The sun was already hot on her shoulders, the breeze finicky, keeping sailboats moored in the bay.
“Kill the engine,” her father said when there was enough room to drift, threading fishing line through a hook. Gia’s stomach rumbled, but she couldn’t eat when the boat was drifting. She needed to be alert. The boat warmed in the sun, heating the soles of her shoes, as an airplane drove lazily on the ground, positioning for takeoff. He was using rubber bait, which meant he didn’t care if they caught anything. She never felt bad for fish dumb enough to fall for rubber bait; they didn’t belong in the gene pool.
They weren’t far from the marshy shore. The bay was only a few feet deep, too shallow for whales or sunken ships, a disappointing fact that made the whole bay seem like a lie at first, but she’d gotten over it. He cast off. The hook splashed in the distance, reeled in, the rubber fish catching bits of marsh grass. Gia bit off a chunk of cookie, scattering crumbs in the wind for gulls, wishing she’d brought her binoculars. There were osprey nests around here. The babies had hatched a few months ago and would be leaving the nest soon, following the males and begging for food before hunting on their own.