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His father, Stuart, was quiet in comparison to his sister and her husband, but his affection for Ethan was nonetheless obvious, as was the pride shining in his dark eyes. It was clear to Toy that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree in the Legare family.
Ethan, while never boisterous, was as relaxed as she’d ever seen him. He clearly enjoyed being with his family. Smiles came readily, as did the laughter.
Then her name was called and she was brought into the room. Introductions were made and hands were shook. They couldn’t have been nicer or more welcoming and she pretended she didn’t see the suggestive eyebrow wriggling of Uncle Will to Ethan as he nodded her way. She ducked her head and took a swallow of her horrid coffee. There was a matchmaker in every crowd.
She was spared more chit chat when a gruff looking man with a cap over greasy hair shuffled over to poke his head in through the doorway.
“The Miss Peggy’s coming in!”
“That’ll be us,” Stuart said and set down his coffee.
Immediately they filed out of the cramped office into the fresh, salty air. Toy lagged behind. Ethan looked back over his shoulder and catching her eye, waved her closer. When she caught up, he bent close to speak softly in her ear.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it? No head chopping or bruises?”
She turned to him “Why didn’t you tell me they were your family?”
“And spoil all the fun? Nothing I love more than to drop the bomb that I come from a long line of shrimpers after listening to a tirade from a Turtle Nazi.”
“I owe you one.”
He replied with a look that, had it not been Ethan, she would have sworn was flirtatious.
The long wooden dock was lined with tall cement pilings, and to these a line of boats, some seventy footers, some but twelve, were tied with thick, coiling rope. She read their names aloud as she walked by Carson Elizabeth, Explorer, Tina Maria, Captain Andy, Miss Charlotte, Miss Georgia.
“Most of the fishing boats are named for women,” he explained. “Wives, daughters, mothers, sweethearts. It’s an old tradition, meant to bring good luck to the men while they are away at sea.”
“Do you have a boat?”
“Nothing big like these. Mine’s about eighteen feet and just for fun.”
“And do you have a name for it?” she asked, shamelessly prying.
“The Wanderlust.” He cast her a slanted glance.
“Suits you,” she replied.
Her attention was diverted by the sixty-two-foot Miss Peggy as it slipped into its watery square of real estate along the dock, growling and churning the waters. With the hanging nets on each side of the boat, she thought they looked like folded butterfly wings. The Miss Peggy was an old girl. White paint peeled from the wood and up close Toy could see the dread rust on metal. But she was still a graceful swimmer and slipped into her space as easily as a younger, smaller fishing boat.
Two men in jeans and white rubber boots climbed out off the high boat to the dock far below as nimbly as ship rats. On board, a wiry, weathered woman with dark gray hair pulled back in a ponytail waved them off, calling out something in a heavy drawl that Toy couldn’t make out. While one of the men bent to tie the ropes, the other, a short, bald, barrel-chested man, came straight for Ethan and sucker punched him in the belly.
Toy gasped as Ethan doubled over. Until she realized that he wasn’t grimacing in pain but laughter. The two men clung to each other, delivering velvet gloved punches like boxers in the ninth round while around them, the other men chortled, enjoying their antics.
“Don’t mind them,” Stuart said to Toy with a good natured grin. “They been fools since they were boys.”
Ethan slapped the other man’s back and turning, caught Toy gaping.
“Toy, come over and meet Bigger. He’s the most conceited, ornery saltwater cowboy on the coast. He’s also my cousin. We went to school together when we were kids, or at least whenever Bigger showed up. Bigger, this is my colleague, Toy Sooner.”
“Colleague is it?” he said with a thick drawl. Bigger lifted expensive black sunglasses to the top of his slightly sunburned bald head and gave her the once-over with eyes as bright a blue as a torch. She felt scalded and knew his mind was up to no good. What he saw seemed to please him, however, because he stuck out his meaty arm emblazoned with a tattoo and took her hand, squeezing tight.
“What kind of a name is Toy?”
“What kind of a name is Bigger?”
Bigger turned toward Ethan, a smile pinching his lips. “She’ll do.”
“Daddy!”
A coltish young girl came running up the dock, all long legs and long black hair flying behind her like a mane. She leaped up to hurl herself upon Bigger, who grabbed her tight and gave her a whirl around the dock.
In a more leisurely manner, a tiny woman with black hair and almond eyes strolled up the dock to join them. On her hip was a little boy, no more than a year, with hair as black as his mother’s. Bigger released his daughter and all bravado fled as, with something akin to reverence, he stepped forward to place a chaste kiss on his wife’s cheek. Their eyes met, his passionate, hers knowing. Toy read more love in that greeting than if Bigger’s wife had run like her daughter and hurled her tiny self into his powerful arms.
Bigger took his son in his arms, pride beaming on his face, and turned to Toy.
“This here’s my wife, Lao. This wild thing is my daughter Lily and this hunk o’ meat is my son, Bill Jr.” He looked at Ethan with bluster. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? Shootin’ blanks… Look at me. I’ve got the Miss Peggy, a beautiful wife, two of the best children to roam God’s earth. When are you going to stop wandering and get you some of these?”
“I don’t know, Bigger. There’s nothing like your family or the Miss Peggy, that’s for damn sure,” Ethan told him.
“You bet your ass.”
“Bill…” Lao said softly, frowning at his language.
“Sorry.”
“You’ve got a fine business sitting here just waiting for you,” Aunt Martha said to Ethan.
Ethan cast a wary glance at his father. Stuart’s face remained taciturn.
“We could use the help,” Uncle Will added. “Bigger likes the sea too much to stay in an office and my Jim, he wants no part of the business. Moved off to Atlanta to be some banker.” He said the last word like it tasted bitter in his mouth. “At least you didn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“Ethan has a three-hundred-thousand-gallon fish tank to take care of right now,” Toy said, jumping into the fray. “One of the largest in the country. And hundreds of fish. I’d say that’s something.”
All talk ceased and everyone looked at her like she’d spoken gibberish. All except Ethan. His eyes warmed as he looked at her.
“You and me,” Bigger added, wrapping an arm around Ethan’s shoulder. “We’ve got saltwater in our veins. At least you came back. I knew the tides would call you home.”
“Daddy, where’s the turtle?” the girl asked, impatient with all this adult talk.
Bigger hoisted his son and bent to face his daughter. “So that’s what you come for? The turtle? Not to see your daddy?”
“But I gotta do a report for school,” she whined with pleading eyes.
Lao laughed lightly and cupped her husband’s cheek. “You’re no match for a sea turtle. So where is it?”
Bigger snorted and waved her over. “Come on, sweet cheeks. Let’s go get it. It’s not looking so good, though.” He looked back at Toy. “The faster you get her off our boat, the faster we can unload this shrimp.”
“Yes, sir, captain.” Toy climbed up the wall of the shrimp boat, surprised by how high off the dock it rose. The deck of the Miss Peggy stretched long before her. At first, it was confusing, there was so much going on. There were winches, chains, cables and ropes. Nets hung full from the riggers.
The wiry man she’d seen before stood at the nets and was busy cleaning out the small fish and crabs. He turned his head when she passed and asked in a gravely voice, “You here for the turtle?”
“I am. Or,” she nodded toward Ethan, “we are.”
“Come and git her, then. She ain’t lookin’ so good. Don’t wanna be blamed for killin’ no endangered turtle.”
“Where is she?”
He pointed a heavily tattooed arm toward the rear of the deck. Bigger led them there and lifted a canvas tarp. Under it, a juvenile loggerhead lay motionless.
Toy hitched her breath, stunned at the serious crack that ran across the length of its shell. All business now, she swung her backpack off her shoulders and knelt beside it. The good news was the turtle was alive. The bad news was the gorgeous reddish brown shell was split near in two.
“That’s a nasty crack,” she said in a flat tone.
“Propeller slash?” Ethan asked.
Toy measured the shell at three feet, noted it and a few other observations, then rose. “That’s no propeller slash.” She turned to Bigger. “What happened?”
Bigger cast a wary glance at his daughter. “We were pulling in the big nets, same as we always do. Damned if this turtle didn’t fall right out of the net.”
“You dropped the turtle?” Toy asked, shocked.
“Hell, no. I didn’t drop it. It fell.”
“Daddy, you would never hurt a sea turtle, would you?” Lily asked.
Bigger’s face flushed and he shuffled his white boots. “No, I wouldn’t. You know I wouldn’t hurt no turtle. But folks like you,” he said to Toy “just can’t believe we care.”
Toy felt tongue-tied.
“She’s not saying that,” Ethan interjected.
Bigger shook his head. “I got a turtle shooter on every net. But hey, it happened. And here she is. I could’ve just chucked her back in the sea. That’s what some others might’ve done. But I brought her in. I called Ethan, didn’t I?”
Ethan slapped Bigger’s back. “You sure did. And I thank you for it. You did the right thing. We appreciate it. Don’t we Toy?”
“Yes. Absolutely,” she blurted out. “Thank you, Bigger. This turtle owes you its life. Any time you see a sick turtle out there, we’ll come out here to fetch it and thank you each time.”
Mollified, Bigger hoisted his son higher in his arms and smiled at his daughter. “Go get your pictures for your project. These folks have to move the turtle and I’ve got work to do. We’re wasting daylight.”
It was no easy task to maneuver the injured sea turtle from the shrimp boat into the crate in the back of the truck. With every move, Toy worried more damage would be done to the badly cracked shell. Ethan’s family went out of their way to help in any way they could, and before leaving, Bigger had promised her a ride on The Miss Peggy, and Lily was beaming that Toy had named the sea turtle Cherry Point.
On the way back to the Aquarium, Ethan was quiet, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. Toy wondered about the family man that she’d seen at Cherry Point, a man in sharp contrast to the loner. With his family, Ethan had opened a window to himself she’d never seen at the Aquarium. There, Ethan seemed as mysterious as the twelve foot shark he swam with every day in the Great Ocean tank.
Toy cast a slanted glance at Ethan, eager to learn more about him before he shut the window completely.
“Your family seems very nice.”
He nodded, eyes on the road. “They’re good people.”
“It sounds like you haven’t been home in a while?”
“Never often enough to suit my mom.”
“But you’re a genuine local.”
“Yep. Born and raised. You can’t go anywhere near Wadmalaw without bumping into a Legare. The whole of Johns Island, really.”
“It must be nice to have a big family.”
“At times.”
“Are you close?”
He cast a quick glance. “I guess you could say we are. We have our spats, like most families. But we’ve been in these parts since before The War. Most everyone’s settled somewhere around Rockville or Charleston.”
“Except Jim in Atlanta.” She said “Atlanta” with the same sour tone Uncle Will had used.
That drew a reluctant laugh from Ethan. “Poor Uncle Will. He’s worse than my mother. He never can tolerate any of us moving off. I reckon it’s because we keep losing bits of our land and he’s afraid we’re losing the family, too. He holds on pretty tight.”
“I find that endearing.”
Ethan barked off a laugh. “I’m sure he’d like to hear that.” He shook his head, muttering, “Endearing.”
“Hey, it’s better than enamored.”
“I don’t know but I was right. My family was enamored with you. Especially Bigger.”
“Your cousin is a real character.”
A grin stretched freely across his face and affection gleamed in his eyes. “Yeah, that he is. One of a kind. You wouldn’t want to mess with him, but he’s got a heart of pure gold. Would give you the shirt off his back if you asked him. He’s saved my sorry ass a few times, I can tell you. Guys like him are a dying breed.”
“Did you ever want to be a shrimper, like him? Or run Cherry Point?”
His hands tightened on the wheel as the tires spun beneath them. “No,” he replied at length. “I never did. It’s not like I don’t enjoy going out on the shrimp boats and lending a hand from time to time. Some of my best memories were on board the Miss Peggy. But it’s a hard life. Long hours, tough work, hard men. The dock can be a pretty rough place at times. I used to work there in the summers coming up and some of the stuff I saw…”
He shook his head. “It’s not for me. Never was. When I was a boy, I got a lot of ribbing for having my nose stuck in a book. I read about exotic places far away—Treasure Island, Narnia, Forty Leagues Under the Sea. If I ever dreamed of being a boat captain, it was Captain Nemo. My blood raced at the thought of getting in a boat and just…” He shrugged lightly. “Going.” He stretched out his arm. “Sailing on and on and on. Seeing the world and not worrying about coming back.”
“So, where did you end up going?”
“I went to Woods Hole in Massachusetts for my graduate degree. It’s beautiful up there, but way too cold for a Southern boy. Once I’d left home, I just kept traveling. Farther and farther away. I did marine research in Fiji, the Caribbean, the reefs off Australia, Indonesia, then ended up in Costa Rica. I spent six years there, the longest I’ve ever spent in any one place.”
“I heard that you discovered some kind of bottom dwelling invertebrate?”
He nodded. “But I’m most proud of the work I did drumming up international support for sharks.”
“When you add all that up, I can see how you were an ideal choice to run the Great Ocean Tank.”
“You never know where the knowledge and experience you’ve gained is going to lead you in life. When I was chasing down black market shark poachers, I didn’t think I’d be caring for sharks in an Aquarium. It’s funny how life turns out sometimes.”
