Cully sees the fin whale as he’s leaving Nantucket Harbor. A mother with calf; seventy-foot whale, and a forty-foot boat. She’s gray as Wellington rubber, lined with long parallel lines. She rolls on her side to show him an eye big as his hand, dark and sweet. Dreaming.
Looking back at him. Her breath mists his face like a benediction.
“Put in a word for us, would you?” Cully says. “I’ll pay you back. I’ll pay for it somehow.” He watches her a minute before turning away. The sun’s half over the eastern horizon, gold ripples flat on green water, rolling along the rim of the world like a great golden wheel. The Brant Point light’s gone dark with morning.
It’s the quiet before the work. Morgan is drinking coffee in the galley. There’s nothing between them and the Atlantic but an arrow-straight line.
Cully doesn’t tell Morgan about the whales.
Pen owns the Sweet Katrina—most of the Sweet Katrina—and stays on shore. Minority business owner, fifty-one percent. The government gives them a little boost, because of that, as if Pen Cullen was somehow different from Allan Cullen. As if she were somehow separate, not the same, flesh of one flesh. More worthy, somehow, than her husband.
Allan thinks she is. Fifteen years, three children, hard times, and hurricanes. Pen keeps her own counsel about who the worthy one is. She works nights at Nantucket Cottage Hospital. That gives them another little boost. Just enough, maybe, to stay afloat. So far.
