Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lace looked tired.
More tired than last week.
Not that Vincent should have been able to note the difference between how she appeared now, and how she’d presented then, but he felt oddly in tune with her, and he noticed.
“Everything still going, uh, according to plan?” he asked tentatively as they walked toward the peds unit. Lace was rolling her IV pole alongside him like a pro. She’d been given permission from her nurse to head down the long hall with Vincent, provided she didn’t go into any “public” areas.
Lace glanced over, one corner of her pretty pink top lip turning upward.
“Like, is my entire life proceeding the way I thought it would when I was younger?” she returned teasingly, sending him an arched brow.
“Uh. Sorry. No. That’s not what I meant,” he responded sheepishly. “But…I’m okay if you want to talk about how you’re dealing with all that. I’m here any time to listen.”
Damn. This was all be new territory for Vince, but he wasn’t one to shy away from tough situations.
Lace gave a self-deprecating groan. “Thanks. And pay no attention to the bitch behind the curtain,” she quipped. “I know what you meant.” She sighed, giving him a crooked smile. “I’m just a little out of it. I’ve had a pretty rough week at work.”
Okay. Vince could wrap his head around that one.
“Like how? It seems like the weather has been cooperative for fishing,” he noted. “Which leads me to believe your problems have to do with either the catch or the crew,” he speculated.
“Both,” she spat out with a little pique in her voice.
“And?” Vince prompted.
“And the problems started because we had more than our usual number of throwbacks over the course of the last six days, as well as some really soul-crushing bycatch. Both of which pissed the captain off, and lowered the entire mood onboard.”
Vincent was very familiar with not only the terminology she used—having worked long hours on fishing trawlers for two summers during his high school years—but how a good day or a bad day could alter the atmosphere in the small confines of a boat.
“What kind of bycatch are we talking?” he asked.
“Sea Turtles,” she sighed. “Leatherbacks. In one of our hauls yesterday, there were fourteen of them, and four didn’t survive coming aboard.”
That sucked. But there was more to it than that. Vince could tell. He probed a little deeper. “What about the other ten?”
There it was on her face. The edge of anger he’d previously glimpsed. But now, Lace was no longer holding back.
“The crew was just so freaking callous,” she lamented with full blown ire emerging. “Nobody took care to make sure the rest of the turtles weren’t injured when they came off the hooks. Not one crewmember. I’d be surprised if half of those leatherbacks survived being released.”
“That really sucks,” Vincent commiserated, upset on the turtles’ behalf and on Lace’s. He hated animal cruelty of any kind, and her having to witness it up close and personal when she couldn’t do anything about it, had to have been horrific.
“I hope you reported them all,” he growled.
“I wrote them up,” she acknowledged almost defeatedly. “But nothing will happen. My higher ups are more concerned with the tuna numbers, and even if they did sanction the behavior, Captain-Fucking-Hook doesn’t give a shit about reprimands. He’s a hateful man.”
“Captain Hook?” Vincent snorted, trying to find some humor in her tirade. “That can’t be his real name.”
“No. It’s not. But I equate the bastard with every evil captain I’ve ever come across in literature and movies, so I don’t have to say his real name, out loud or in my head.”
Vincent wanted more. No. He needed more. “Am I familiar with this guy?”
Lace shrugged. Vincent could see she was trying to let it go.
“Have you heard of the Water Wrestler?” she asked. “That’s the sixty foot longliner I’m currently serving aboard that he captains.”
“Can’t say that I have,” Vince admitted. “But I’ve been away from Maine for twenty years, so that’s no surprise.”
“Well, the man is an asshole. And a misogynist,” she added as a bitter afterthought.
“He treats you poorly?” Vincent’s back was instantly up again.
“Phht. You think? He barely tolerates me. Any chance he gets, he either tries to undermine what I’m assigned to do, or denigrate me to his crew.”
“And the crew allows it?” Vincent was incredulous.
In this day and age—and even when he was growing up—a lot of women worked on commercial fishing boats, so this captain and his mates were some kind of dinosaurs.
“All except for a couple youngsters,” Lace explained. “The two have made it their job to hang close to me so the prick doesn’t do me bodily harm.” She grunted.
Vincent’s blood chilled. “Has he…? Is there a reason for the young mens’ overprotectiveness?”
“Up until late last week? No,” she told him. “But the day after I saw you, he not only dumped a batch of cookies I’d baked over the rail, he proceeded to hip-check me so hard I almost tumbled into one of the refrigerated seawater wells.”
“What?” Vincent was instantly incensed. “That’s completely unacceptable,” he strangled out, trying not to let his ire take control. Here in the hospital, it would do neither of them any good if he blew his stack.
Vince’s first inclination, however, once he left, would be to head to the docks and confront the arrogant moron, but that wouldn’t help Lace at all. It might even put her in more jeopardy if Vince couldn’t keep her name out of things. So that was off the table. Unfortunately.
But, oh, he was so going to be looking into that guy. The minute he left the hospital, he was calling Mason and Kyle to see if the asshole was on either Bangor or Orono Police departments’ radar.
“How did you save yourself?” Vince switched gears, biting back all kinds of retorts.
Who picked on a woman who looked like she weighed no more than a feather?
“Not my first rodeo,” she actually chuckled wryly. “I cut my teeth on fishing boats, so my sea-legs did their job. Lucky, too, I saw him coming, so I was able to plan my trajectory.”
What she wasn’t saying, was that if the prick had blindsided her, she might not have been so fortunate.
If Vincent had anything to say about it, the douchebag wouldn’t get another opportunity.
Lace falsely brightened. “But let’s not talk about my week, Vincent. I’m so over that. Let’s talk about Inez, instead. Do you know much about her other than her foster-status, and the care she’s not receiving from the grown-ups in charge?”
Vincent couldn’t have put the situation more succinctly.
“Not much. I’ve been given her infusion schedule, which I think pretty much matches yours.”
“What is it?” Lace asked.
“Every Friday she has to arrive by ten in the morning, and depending on how busy things are, she’s normally given her preliminary blood draws within fifteen minutes.
If her labs are okay, she’s then hooked up for her infusion, and is normally ready to leave by twelve thirty or one-ish.
What I haven’t been given details on, is some other treatment she receives every one or two weeks.
And I’d like to see if I can be with her during those, too. ”
“That first bit is very close to my agenda,” Lace concurred, tapping her lip and obviously pondering. “Do you… Do you know what kind of cancer she has?”
“Not a clue,” he answered. “I’m just the clown on duty. But maybe…?” Vince grew hopeful.
“Maybe I can finagle it out of the nurses,” Lace finished for him, then gave his upper arm a light punch. “Just one cancer patient advocating for another, huh?”
Vincent wanted to groan. “No. I… Geezus, that comes off as me sounding like some callous opportunist. I’m so frigging sorry, Lace.”
Lace grabbed his arm this time, stopping him in his tracks. She shook a finger in his face like an old-fashioned schoolmarm.
“Nope. Do not be sorry. If you start apologizing for everything you say about cancer and its associated fucked-up-ed-ness, you might as well hang things up right here and now,” she told him with another tsk.
“There’s nothing pretty about cancer. At all.
But it needs to be discussed. Hiding all mention of it under a bushel only makes the subject seem even more taboo to most people than it already is.
It needs airing, not a head-in-the-sand, ostrich treatment. ”
Wow. Vincent hadn’t ever had to think about any of this before. But she was right. What little he knew about cancer would fill about half a paragraph.
He was lucky, and he knew it. He came from a family that wasn’t genetically prone to cancer. None of his close relatives had ever had to deal with it, so this was all a brand spanking new learning curve for him. He was determined to ace it.
“Okay. Got it,” he affirmed. “Any questions I have, ask. Any help I might be able to give, offer. If you take exception to anything I say? You’ll let me know.”
She grinned up at him. “Nice. You’re a fast learner.”
Vincent sucked in a deep breath before he asked the next question he’d been dying to pose.
Here’s where the rubber hit the road.
“So, Lace, what kind of cancer do you have?”
Instead of recoiling, she snickered. “Ooh, going for the big guns right away,” she teased, “The emphasis being on big guns.” She then sobered to look him right in the eye. “I have breast cancer, Vincent. Stage three. My left boob will soon be history.”
“And the right?”
Vince couldn’t help but look down at the front of her sweatshirt; more out of reflex than being a perv.
“Undecided as of yet,” she told him with a forthrightness he was coming to expect from her. “I’m currently weighing the pros and cons.”
She began walking again, this time with a little more spring in her step, as if getting that information out to him and…off her chest… (Could he make that joke, even in his head?) …had lightened her load.
“I’d like to hear about those pluses and minuses,” Vincent told her sincerely.
“Another day,” she answered chipperly. “If you decide to come back,” she added.