NO RETURN

The light is on. Not like my father. He never makes it this late. He crashes by eight or nine. But then he never leaves a room with a light on. What could we begin to have to talk about? Tell him, don’t make me sneak any more shrimp? I’ll just take it, okay, ’cause selling your shrimp is my last chance to keep you home.

When I see the light on, a part of me feels a reprieve and it’s joyous. My father and me. We could go back to the way we used to be. Before all the things that have started spinning. For one brief second, I would be so happy to go back to just my father and me. And Luke? I don’t know.

Snow blows into my jacket and chills my neck. I open the door.

“Where are you selling these?” Grim lines cut into my father’s face.

“What, Dad?”

He hauls up a sign I’d made, Sweet Northern Shrimp.

“I sold every one,” I tell him. “It was an experiment.” I keep talking under his grim gaze, hoping it will turn when he understands. “I processed one of the totes. I wanted to see if I could sell them. I undercut Atlantic and sold them all.”

“Where?” He is clipped.

“Right here. People really like it when it’s processed.”

“All you put in the ice chest?”

“I wanted to prove to you,” I say again, as if that would explain everything. It is all for my father. Snow falls around us. I imagine the house disappearing. I wait for him to get it. Get how much money we’d made toward paying the bills.

“You said you were taking it over to Atlantic.” My father shoves some papers on his desk. “I was letting you do it. Be the businesswoman.”

“We can make a third more selling the shrimp ourselves. Atlantic wasn’t offering much more than the wholesalers. They were robbing us. Don’t you see?”

“Here’s what I see.” My father is stone-faced with rage. He cannot even look at me. “There’s an ocean of paperwork behind selling. The law says you got to have a license to sell. You got to have a peddlers’ permit. You got to get inspected. Got to get a state license. Got to get a federal license.”

I feel my arms droop by my side as he blasts these words.

“The reason people don’t do what you did is because the fine the government lays on you could be enough to shut a boat down.”

“What do you mean?” He is too angry. He is enraged. He is red with fury. “Did they shut you down on account of what I did?”

“You’re shut down. That’s what I mean.” He turns his rigid back and strides away, then bellows, “Get all that stuff out of here. They cited me, on account of what you did. They said, ‘Grear, you got your daughter up to something on the side?’ Do you know what they fine fishermen for illegal sales? Do you know there’s not a breath a fisherman takes that doesn’t have a law attached to it?”

I burst into tears.

“It was so you didn’t have to go. I don’t want you to go.”

I run after my father. “Please don’t go.”

“Leave me alone, Sophea.”