Chapter 13 #2
The refrigerator door squealed when he yanked it open.
Wes whacked his shins, but at least shielded himself from the waist down.
A blast of arctic air escaped into the overheated room.
His voice cracked, too loud with MORI’s assignment instructions still playing through his earbuds.
“Sorry—I, uh, lost track of time. Give me two minutes and I’ll be ready to—to drive to Moss Landing? ”
Isabel’s chin jerked, eyes still averted. “I’ll feed the octopus.”
“Thanks.” Cursing silently, he covered himself with his waterproof species list and his camera bag in a sidling route to the living room.
Isabel ducked into the refrigerator for a handful of sea snails.
As he extracted gear from his duffel and slathered his own sunscreen over blisters and ink, urging his brain to focus on water temperatures—cold, very cold, colder than the refrigerator, very, very, very cold—instead of that creamy smear on her neck, he willed his voice not to wobble again and told her, “I’ll call the courthouse on our way over to MORI. Sound good?”
She emerged with the two-spot’s breakfast. Her gaze flickered so briefly over his board shorts that he might have imagined it. Then she dropped gastropods into the tank for their drowsy octopus. “Yes. We need to schedule a date as soon as possible.”
Bowls and mugs left soaking in the sink, Nalgene water bottle filled, he dialed the Monterey courthouse while Isabel buckled on her seat belt in the Jeep.
The line rang throughout their stop for a pair of runners crossing Casa Verde Way, and continued to buzz with no menu options or answering service as they merged onto the Pacific Coast Highway.
It rang long enough for Isabel to voice her concern about the courthouse’s staffing schedule, since no one was answering the main line on a Monday morning.
Wes grimaced in the rearview mirror. She was right.
But fortunately an under-caffeinated voice crackled onto the call just before their exit to Moss Landing Road.
“You’ve reached the Monterey County Superior Court. How may I direct you?”
“We want to apply for a marriage license.”
“Transferring you to the county clerk.”
Beep.
“Monterey County Superior Court, county clerk.”
“Hello, yeah.” He slowed over the Old Salinas River and pulled into MORI’s lot. “We want to get a marriage license. Plus an officiant and witnesses. What’s the next date that we can get the legal stuff done?”
“Hold, please.” Silence on the line, the clerk seeming to check a court calendar.
Then, with a crinkle of static, “Summer’s our popular season for petty crime and weddings.
But Judge Hernán Cruz has an appointment available on September twenty-sixth at two forty-five.
If you apply for a license by nine that day, we can process and issue it by noon.
Then he can fit you in before he gives a speech at the bailiff’s retirement party. ”
Twenty-two days.
The date was workable; September twenty-sixth was before Isabel’s end-of-the-month deadline. Tight, but workable.
Book it? he mouthed to her.
Yes.
“We’ll take the twenty-sixth,” he told the clerk. “Can we also get on standby for any cancellation spots that come up sooner?”
“Yes. But no guarantees.”
“Understood.”
“Your names and contact details?”
“Wes Monaghan and Isabel Wright.” He added their phone numbers and emails, which he read back twice.
“Confirmed,” and the line disconnected.
“Well—that was romantic,” he said into the quiet.
Isabel shrugged beside him. “The clerks and officiant don’t seem likely to ask us difficult questions. Besides, if there aren’t any cancellations before the twenty-sixth, we have additional time to prepare evidence for the visa interview.”
“True.”
Maybe he could also figure out how to finance an engagement ring in these next three weeks?
For now, Wes joined her in hopping down from the Jeep and entering MORI’s lobby.
She signed in at the front desk for her shift, picked up her badge, and met the volunteer coordinator: a quick-moving woman with a smile, a headscarf, and a clipboard of chores, who excused herself from shaking hands due to her elbow-length rubber gloves.
Meanwhile, he leaned a forearm beside Brianne’s Stanley cup and told the facilities manager about his plans for his dive.
For safety, and to stall for a little more time with Isabel.
To make sure she was comfortable, too. (No handshakes or touching from strangers so far.
That had to be good.) He added to Brianne, “Just in case anyone’s monitoring the water offshore and thinks they’ve spotted a new kind of humanoid seal?
That’s me. Wouldn’t want to disappoint your researchers.
Apparently, most mermaid sightings are really seals, dugongs, or belugas. ”
He left Isabel shaking her head at her badge with her lips twitching from stifled laughter, and went to collect his dive gear.
But rather than shrugging into a lead-weighted vest, mask, snorkel tube, and fins down on the beach, he found himself calling the local hostel to cancel his stay.
He scrolled through the Monaghan family chat to confirm his availability for tonight’s video call.
(Maybe he’d mention Isabel casually in conversation, introducing his parents and his brother to the idea of her—starting the groundwork for his big news.) Then he opened a web search.
Gasper’s Jewelers, Monterey Bay Silver Company, Peninsula Gem the metal toe-cap and the balled-up sock she’d fitted inside had saved her from injury.
Nearing the end of her shift in the lab after four hours of dicing fish, ray, eel, and otter food under the volunteer coordinator’s instruction, checking filters for the seawater supply entering and exiting the facility, fin-tagging an incoming batch of surfperch, sterilizing quarantine enclosures, and endless rounds of mopping the floors—she was smiling.
She would gladly have signed on for another rotation.
The lab’s practical, focused staff striving to fulfill MORI’s mission were. . . nice.
Being here felt. . . good.
No one demanded small talk. The other volunteers (retirees and summer student interns) and the institute’s researchers were all too deep in their special interests, microscopes, or tanks to require anything from her except her hands.
Conversation was to the point.
“Bury the mollusks in the bat-ray tray at least three inches into the sand,” Mehar Basu had told her, pen poised over a clipboard. “The rays like to hunt at feeding time.”
She did.
Check.
“Good.” Next, Mehar had directed her to a prep table beside a pink-haired woman in her seventies, who was wielding a hatchet above a mass of mackerel.
The retiree greeted them with an enthusiastic wave of her blade and a grin, though was apparently too breathless from her whacking at the fish to engage in longform talk.
“See the size of the chunks that Sabrina’s chopping up?
These are for the leopard sharks. One of our juveniles is recovering from a fishhook injury in her jaw. ”
“—poor—baby,” from Sabrina, tutting and dicing. She elbowed a second hatchet toward Isabel.
Slice, went the blade through Isabel’s own pile of fish.
“Good,” again.
At eleven o’clock she’d just finished making the sharks’ industrial-grade sashimi, when: “Wet spill by the jellies! Can someone get a mop?”
Swish, swish.
“There’s whale-blow offshore. Orcas!” A student volunteer, Jiang, stuck his head inside from MORI’s deck overlooking the bay. His glasses were fogged with moisture and excitement. “A small migratory pod, about a hundred yards past the otter raft in the kelp.”
Most of the lab rushed toward the exterior doors, keen to spot this routine but still thrilling passage of a pack of sea wolves through Monterey’s waters.
The chattering tide of scientists swept Isabel out into the sea air with it.
Someone fiddled with the dials on a telescope fixed to the salt-rusted walkway railing.
Another volunteer passed around a pair of binoculars.
“It’s three females and a calf. The calf’s only about a month old, but it’s already got dorsal scarring.”
“Shark attack?”
“The shark probably regrets it. Remember the orca that killed a white shark off the coast of South Africa, just to eat its liver? Imagine what would happen if a female’s defending her calf.”