Chapter 5
five
“Luca’s here!”
Daniel shouted the announcement into the house before pulling Luca in for a hug.
One arm slung over Luca’s shoulder, the other wrapped around his torso, meeting in the middle of Luca’s back.
Luca’s arms mirrored the action across Daniel’s, a hug both hard and intimate: the signature Yaeger family greeting.
“Hey, Luca.” Kjell walked down the hall toward them, the sunlight from the kitchen beyond backlighting his form. “Want a drink?”
Luca blinked at him before Kjell initiated the same hug routine. It was slightly less aggressive than Daniel’s, considering Kjell was holding an open can of beer.
Luca should have remembered Kjell would be here this week; his mom must have mentioned it to him.
It was Dagny’s last August sendoff dinner before she headed out of Greyfin Bay for her last year of college.
Of course Kjell would come down from Seattle for it.
Even if he had been the only one to actually leave this town—word was still out on where Dagny would settle after she graduated—he was still the oldest sibling. He still always showed up.
Luca had just been so distracted by what he was going to do today that he must’ve forgotten anything else.
“Yeah,” Luca answered, a moment delayed. Although maybe he shouldn’t drink today. Maybe he should be at his sharpest for whatever reaction his dad was gonna have when Luca informed him he wouldn’t be on the boat next week when it took off on another long stint of finding coho and sockeyes.
Next week. Fuck. He should have done this better, at least been able to give more warning. Maybe a better son wouldn’t have told Emerson King he could start working on his farm first thing Monday morning. I should actually work at least one more run with my dad and my brothers, he should have said.
But the farm had been beautiful, and Emerson King was both competent and sad while wearing the hell out of a pair of blue jeans. Luca had felt semi-good—about waking up the next day, about anything—for the first time in a long while. He hadn’t necessarily made his best decisions.
Luca followed his two older brothers through the family kitchen and onto the back deck, where he headed straight for the ancient Coleman cooler and got himself a fucking beer.
“Hey, Luca.” Dagny padded barefoot over the worn red slats of the deck, giving him a smile.
One he easily returned as they slid an arm around each other’s backs, the more casual Yaeger family side hug.
She rested her head on his shoulder while the beer dripped melted-ice water back into the Coleman. Luca flipped it closed with his foot.
“How you feeling, Dags?”
Dagny didn’t shrug, or look away, or say okay. She always thought about her answers first. Always had, since she was a little girl. It was an inspiration to Luca, over and over, every single time he heard the silence of her thinking, the eventual honesty of her answers.
“A little melancholy. A little scared. But in the nice way, you know?”
Luca looked at her. Her hair was almost bleach-blonde from the sun at this time of the summer, pulled up into a smooth ponytail.
She was both the youngest and the odd one out: a girl for Adrian and Leah, finally, after four boys.
The only one to take on their mother’s fairer Norwegian genes instead of Adrian’s darker hair and Mediterranean skin tone.
“Yeah,” Luca said. “That makes sense.”
He felt the same way—a little melancholy, a little scared—but he wasn’t so sure about the nice part.
“You shouldn’t be scared, though,” he added. “You’ve been ready for adulthood since you were in diapers.”
Dagny rolled her eyes, but she smiled.
“Where’s Jacob?” Luca asked before taking a long sip of his IPA, hoping he wasn’t, in fact, the last sibling to arrive.
“Over with Uncle Derek, judging Dad’s tomatoes.” She motioned behind her to the far end of the deck, where Luca could make out Derek and Jacob’s heads and upper torsos, motioning over the forever-chaotic veggie patch.
“Ah. That makes sense. Jacob’s trying to woo some woman who’s a master gardener.”
Dagny whipped her head back to Luca, eyes flashing with glee, any melancholia over senior year of college whisked away.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. A Hulegaard that I think was in Kjell’s class.”
“An older woman! Huh.”
“Yeah, he might finally be getting his head out of his ass.”
“You better not be talking shit, Luca.” Jacob’s voice carried over the deck.
“What the fuck,” Luca whispered to Dagny.
“How has his hearing survived like that this long.” Jacob, two years younger than Luca, and Daniel, one year Luca’s senior, were the brothers who had stayed.
Who had worked with Luca and their dad and Joe Halpern and Uncle Derek and Uncle Irving and cousin Elijah on the boats.
Every single one of those people, minus Jacob, had steadily declining hearing from a life on the water. The ocean was a loud motherfucker.
“Like a fucking cat,” Dagny whispered back.
“It is very cute,” Leah said, stepping out from the kitchen, “that any of you think those are your father’s tomatoes.”
“Sorry, Mom,” Dagny said. “Your tomatoes.”
Their mother gave them both pats on the cheek—Luca’s with her left hand, Dagny’s with her right—to show that all was forgiven.
“Hey, Mom,” Luca started, while it was just her and Dagny and Jacob’s weird hearing out here on the deck. If he said something now, it would force him not to chicken out later. “I have something I want to talk to you and Dad about later, if that’s okay.”
Both Dagny and Leah stared at him. He scratched the bridge of his nose.
“Is everything okay?” Dagny asked before their mom could.
“Yeah, yeah. I just don’t want to like…discuss it over dinner, with everyone all at once, you know.”
Leah kept staring at him, a dent forming in the middle of her forehead in concern.
But she only said, “Okay.”
Luca could tell Dagny was about to open her mouth again, but then Adrian and Joe came out of the house and Luca gave a quick shake of his head.
His dad ignored them entirely, though, walking straight to the grill while he chatted with Joe, lifting the lid and giving its contents an inspection.
Luca tried to release the tension in his shoulders and took another sip of beer.
Things passed like normal after that. Lots of fawning over Dagny, something she’d always deserved, even before she was on the brink of true adulthood.
Lots of cooing over Summer, Kjell and Amaya’s second child, a still-fresh six months old—Amaya and their first child, Enzo, had stayed in Seattle for one of Enzo’s soccer games.
Invasive discussion about Jacob’s love life.
Careful avoidance of politics, unless it was local enough that they could all maybe, possibly agree.
Dinners at the Yaegers’ were as they had always been, as it had felt to grow up in this house: loud, warm, easy for Luca to disappear into, quiet in the middle of the storm.
The five Yaeger children in a not-nearly-large-enough house were enough on their own, but Sundays and holidays were often full of uncles, aunts, cousins, along with the occasional neighbor who was as good as family: Joe Halpern; Leah’s best friend Molly Riverman; all the closest friends of Kjell and Daniel and Jacob.
Today, that included Gabe Esposito, the most loyal of Kjell’s crew, here with his own young child to meet Summer and enjoy Kjell’s physical presence before they returned to Bellevue.
Luca felt grateful for this world, always. He enjoyed being able to blend in, to be part of the whole without pressure to always be on. He loved the family dinners. The gossip, the camaraderie. The history, the Yaegers’ deep roots twisted inside the sandy soil of Greyfin Bay.
There were things he loved about life on the boats, too.
There just…weren’t enough. It was harder to ignore his own head out there than it was here, on land. The chaos of the sea fucked with him, invaded his quiet spaces. Reminded him of all the other dreams he could’ve had. If he was smarter like Kjell. If he was more focused like Dagny.
If he was more talented in the thing he loved most.
In the end, it was Leah who found him after dinner, where he’d escaped to the far corner of the yard for a moment of quiet. She limped across the grass toward him, Adrian close behind.
Luca frowned as he watched his parents approach. The limp in Leah’s right leg had afflicted her for months now, ever since the fall. The fall no one had been able to explain, the limp no one could make go away.
“Son,” Adrian said. “Your mother says you want to talk with us.”
Part of Luca thanked himself for speaking up when he first saw his mom today, knowing she would find him, make him follow through.
All the other parts of him wanted to sink into the soil where they stood.
The house was nestled into the foothills behind downtown, like most of the houses in Greyfin Bay.
A hodgepodge of homes amongst the green, facing the ocean.
If Luca turned he could see it, the blue sea just visible at the horizon, beyond the bramble that lined their backyard, the roofs of the houses down the hill.
But Luca forced himself to stand still. To face the house and the people who’d raised him.
“This weekend.” He cleared his throat. “An opportunity kind of fell into my lap.”