THE ASHWORTH

The fear is the first thing. Of the rawness of him. Of his eyes, acutely on guard and tender at the same time. He watches me come. When I’m closer, I see the line of his lips. He takes me in, my eyes, my cheekbones, my hair.

I stop. I slowly slide the Dunkin’ Donuts cap off my hair. His eyes soften.

Something almost like a smile crinkles in his eyes. We are not in color, like we were when the sun splashed in the sky. We are gray beneath hooded streetlights with streaks of white headlights cutting through us.

I start to shiver.

First my teeth. Then my shoulders and knees. At home, maybe my mother is still talking to my father. With her big belly. With that new baby. I see her more clearly than if I’d stayed at home. I can’t picture my mother with me and Dad at the Formica table, fretting over the piles of papers—bills for fuel, bait, the new GPS, crew, boat mortgage, taxes, fish brokers, federal permits, documents for days at sea, what it cost one time Pete rammed the Karma over a rock in the channel.

Luke and I stand with our arms crossed against the cold. The sky allows haze from the moon to seep through. The moon is waning but bright.

“You’re cold,” Luke says, beside my father’s truck.

“I’m scared,” I say.

“Of me?”

I shake my head.

“Should I go?”

“Jesus,” I whisper. “You better stay.”

Then a laugh, a roaring laugh. We are nothing like we were on the beach in the snow and splotchy sunrise, when I was in shock over the gun and then lost with him. He is laughing. “Aren’t you your father’s daughter. Jesus. On the boat it’s like he’s calling up the spirits.”

I smile. My father’s daughter. Luke drops his boot to the ground. We face each other. He is laughing, but his hand shakes until he rests it low, on his thigh.

“Come on,” he says.

Yes, I think. “Where?”

“Get some food.”

It seems natural to go. I’ve been waiting for this. We get in his car. The seat cracks with cold, and I wonder how long he’d been standing with his boot on my runner. We drive out of the streetlights of the city, heading east. We pass the cemetery and follow out the dark roads and I know where these roads are leading, toward the ocean. We follow along the road that hugs the ocean in the winter dark and can hear the waves beat on the rocks as the tide crashes in. We are silent. It’s late, and we’ve come so far, but my father will be asleep and when we come to Hampton Beach, I feel like I am the only place I could possibly be tonight. I know the beach, the strip. Rosa and I have come here all our lives to the shops and arcade along the boardwalk.

Luke pulls into one of the diagonal parking slots. I take him in as we walk. He’s wearing a jacket that swings open over a thick, navy blue sweater, a baseball cap. He gives me a crooked smile as we walk along the strip. That’s what they call the stretch of Ocean Boulevard with the boardwalk and Blinks Fry Dough, the casino, bead shops with shells and stones from all the wide world, Jerri’s Breakfast, Ice Cream, Subs. Toe rings. On Memorial Day, in the crush of people, the police start patrolling. Break up the rowdies. Track the walkaways and reunite them with their moms.

“No place open,” I say.

“One place. Ways to go. I just like walking the strip.”

We keep walking. It’s natural. Like we do this. I have school, Mrs. Bennett’s cream filled, then race down the boardwalk with the soldier. We come to the arcade where you can put a quarter in to get the mannequin fortune teller to turn her gray head and spit out your fortune on a card, arcade games, shooting gallery, bowling lanes.

The arcade is closed. Light snow falls against the shuttered wall.

“I want you to listen and listen tight,” I imitate the words that play on a loop in the shooting gallery. “I want you to shoot it and shoot it right,” I recite. “It’s the gunfighter in the shooting gallery.”

“First weapon I fired when I was a kid. My friends and I used to come up from Nashua,” Luke says. “I always went for the piano player.”

“And the piano plays jive.”

Then we list all the animated creatures in the shooting gallery and the sounds they make when you shoot them with laser guns on their small triangle targets.

“The bear . . .”

“Growls,” I say.

“The clown . . .”

“His nose flashes.”

I am laughing.

It’s okay. He is okay about the bridge. And the pier. And the gun. He is okay talking about a shooting gallery everybody in the Merrimack Valley and everybody from the Seacoast over generations—the Italians, the Scots, even the Cambodians,

everybody—knows. It’s our history.

Luke knocks his cap down half over his eyes. “Where the hell did you come from?” he teases.

We cross the streets, D Street, C Street, B. “I walk the strip a lot,” he says. We come to the Ashworth By the Sea. My father and I don’t come here. But I know this is where we visited that Christmas years ago, a motel room on a side street that my mother rented. I know that some fishermen’s kids work here as waiters and dishwashers in season. Luke opens the door.

“Food here?” I say.

We enter a dimly lit dining room with white lights strung across the ceiling like stars. We have entered a universe. I glance at this guy I am with, then around the Ashworth overlooking the seawall and the ocean. It’s a dream to come here with him to eat dinner, two people who are very nearly strangers, but I can’t remember not knowing him.

We have our pick of tables since the only other people here are zipping their parkas and paying their bill. We sit at a window table where we hear the waves crash on the seawall. I take off my coat. Then I take off my Dunkin’ Donuts apron. I stuff it inside my coat to hide the scent of sugar and chocolate and coffee, but the smell is in my hair. Luke drops his cap on the table. Then he folds it and puts it in his pocket. I see his hands shake on the table. His eyes are green, wary, and bloodshot. His hair is dark. He plants his palms on the table. I think this is to steady them. We scan the menu and order fish and chips from the waiter.

He gives me his crooked grin. “Found you,” he says.

“Maybe ’cause you gave me this,” I say and slide his dog tags from my pocket. He glances at them.

“I wanted to set your mind at ease,” he begins.

“I’m at ease.” Like a challenge.

I look at him through my hair that I know is blown wild.

He shrugs.

“You mean about the gun,” I say with an airiness I don’t feel. “I’ve seen guns. This is New Hampshire.” I laugh at my joke about a state where people come across the border to buy any kind of gun, rifle, handgun, AK-47.

I pull my hair back off my face and glance at him. He shrugs. It occurs to me there’s no room with him to be fake.

“Maybe it’s my mind I’m worried about,” he says. “I’ll quit obsessing over yours.”

His eyes shift to the door, to the waiter bearing water. We hear the click of saltshakers that a busboy gathers on a tray. Is it like the click of a weapon when it’s engaged? We’re not going to talk about what he was doing with the gun. The question just sits on the table, a little groggy, while we watch each other and glance away, trying to pretend we’re not.

The waiter is vacuuming. We are the only customers. Snow has begun to fall harder over the boulevard and into the sea. The food comes, and we dig in, famished.

“This place haunted?” Luke says, shifting his eyes to a dark hallway where the waiter turned off the lights.

“Oh, probably.” I press my palms to my head, laughing. “Maybe it’s the statue of the lady across the boulevard. It says, ‘Breathe soft ye winds.’ She’s asking the waves to be gentle to sailors who died at sea.”

He eats fast. He’s cleaning up. He motions, eat, eat, at me and my plate that brims with golden fries. He eats, and I begin to tell him things. I tell him my mom is moving in.

“Heard a few things about that,” he says, and I think of the long hours my father and he had on the boat. Did they talk about me?

I say, “She was sixteen when she had me. I hardly see her. When I was little I told my teacher she was a selchie, a seal woman, and she’d gone back to live in the ocean. Dad had to go and talk to the teacher.”

Luke hoots. “A seal woman?” He lifts his chin, downing a beer. I smell the beer. I smell some scent, maybe the wool of his sweater. Some smell that is him. “You said she became a seal?”

So I tell him the Scottish tale about the carpenter who fell in love with a woman and they had a child. But she was also a seal, and when she found her sealskin, she swam back to her seal family in the ocean.

Luke leans in toward me, his head on his fists. His green, bleary eyes are staring at me like I’ve got something mysterious he could use. I can’t turn my eyes from his. He says, “I’d like to try on a sealskin. Get out of this skin.”

Then I pull back. We both do. He calls for another beer. I hug my coat around myself, chilled beside the black windowpane. I say, “Since this threat of seeing my mother, I keep having these flashbacks about her.”

His eyes narrow, like I’ve become dangerous. “Did something happen you can’t let go of?”

“Just moments. Just smells. What about you?” I say. “I want some secrets, too.”

He downs half the new glass of beer. He says, “Zurmat. Paktia Province.”

I know these names. Afghanistan.

“So you’re back, you’re not going.”

He nods. “I think about going back, all the time.”

“What did you do?” I say.

A tiny squinting of his eyes. He had shaved. But I can see a shadow in the valley over his lips. “Medic,” he says. “Cordon and search missions.”

I don’t know what that is. “I’ve seen photos of Afghanistan,” I say. I place myself in a classroom with Mr. Murray showing photos on the screen. “Mountains and valleys,” I say. “They need to irrigate the little farms.”

His eyes shift to mine. “You’re so pure.”

I don’t know what to say. I just nod. Then, “I need to go.”

“I know,” he says.

“Where do you live?” I say.

“Near Rye Harbor. A winter rental. One of those cabins. That’s why I got this habit now of coming down here and walking the strip. Not much life, but enough.”

“My father lived in one of those winter rentals. It had everything. Near Rye Harbor? The ones in a horseshoe by the stone ledge?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s fine.”

It’s not.

I can tell from his face. He doesn’t want to go back to it. I’m not pure. I feel like I’m old, like the way I felt when he took off his sunglasses and dared me to look at him on the beach.

“Wanted to say thanks.” He is standing.

“For what?”

“Bad night, that night. Thanks for stopping. You could have run for your life.”

I stand to go, too, even while I’m pretending we are going back to his cottage, in the center of the horseshoe of cottages. From there it’s a short walk to a stone breakwater reaching out to the Isles of Shoals.

His phone beeps.

He zips his coat over his sweater and answers.

“Yup,” he says. “No problem.” Puts the phone in his pocket.

“Don’t tell my father,” I say.

“Tell him what?” Luke says. He’s distracted. He doesn’t look at me.

“That we’re doing this. He thinks I’m perfect, that if he warned me, I would never do this.”

At the door, he looks at me. Straight on. We are so close I imagine the hardness of his jaw under the shadow of beard.

“We’re not doing anything,” he says. He shoves his hands in his pockets when we step into the wind.

“Why do you say it that way?” I ask.

“I don’t want to get used to you,” he says. His jaw has hardened, and he moves ahead of me. He had not hesitated. But I know why he’s trying to put dark and space between us. I can name a dozen reasons why we should not get used to each other.

I catch up but let it be. We walk across the boulevard, our chests and hair quickly layered in snow. I am aware of his body and my body. He is barely two inches taller. Something happens to my walk. I feel it in my toes and my heels as my boots make silent prints beside his. I feel every part of them, making an arc as I am simply walking.

I’m already used to him.