My Father-in-Law Announced the Sale Before We Finished Picking Crabs

Bernard waited until my hands were full before he told everyone I would be out of work.

I had a crab shell in one hand and a small fork in the other. Brown paper covered the picnic table. Across the Choptank, the far shore had gone soft in the July heat.

"Sold the waterfront," he said. "At least, the deal's agreed. Good money, too."

My wife stopped peeling her shrimp.

"Which waterfront?" Eliza asked.

He pointed his wooden mallet at me.

"The pond boy's place."

I set down my fork.

I was thirty, a Hmong American man with straight black hair clipped close at the sides, brown skin, and a thin white scar across my left thumb.

I had earned that scar cutting feed hose. My job was growing algae for oyster hatcheries. I kept starter flasks clean, counted cells under a scope, and raised dense green and brown cultures that fed oyster larvae smaller than grains of sand.

Bernard liked to call all of that pond work.

"It's a hatchery feed business," I said.

"Whatever helps you sleep, Xai."

Bernard Keene was a broad white man of sixty-two, with a red neck, silver hair brushed flat, and a gold watch that slid over his thick wrist.

He had invited fourteen people to his place outside Cambridge, Maryland. Every family meal had a test. Eat his hot peppers. Agree with his story. Laugh when he picked someone smaller.

That day, I was the test.

"I've carried him four years," he said. "A hired pond boy gets a building, then starts thinking he's a businessman."

"I pay eighteen hundred a month."

"Family rate."

Eliza reached for a napkin, though her hands were clean.

She was thirty-one, white, and a marine electrician who could climb into a hot engine space and find a bad ground by touch. Around her father, she sometimes seemed afraid to lift a fork wrong.

"Dad means the place needs investment," she said.

I looked at her.

She lowered her eyes.

On my way there, I had checked six starter cultures. I always whistled softly while I worked: two short notes and one long. My mother had used that little tune to call me home when I was a boy. At the hatchery, it helped me slow down and look.

I had finished all three notes that morning.

At the table, I couldn't get air past the first.

"Who bought it?" I asked.

"Calder Voss. Marshlight Marina Development. He sees what that lot could be."

Bernard's sister Ruth looked toward the creek below his lawn.

"Doesn't Xai have a lease?"

"An operating lease. The purchase option ran out June thirtieth. He never exercised it."

My phone lay beside my paper plate. Beneath its case, I had tucked a small card with my attorney's office number. I could have said her name then.

Instead, I asked, "Did you check your notices?"

Bernard laughed.

"A man who could buy that property wouldn't come here in a van with a cracked mirror."

The mirror had cost me nothing because I hadn't fixed it. The money had gone somewhere else. So had the money from ten years of packed lunches, weekend shifts, and used equipment repairs.

Eliza knew about our household bills. She knew I had saved for the purchase. She didn't know that the bank had cleared the last condition while she was away wiring a survey boat.

I had planned to tell her that evening, alone.

"We should talk at home," she said.

"We're talking now," Bernard said. "Tell your husband this was always temporary."

She looked at him, then me.

"Maybe we should hear the offer."

I wiped my hands with a wet towel. It took longer than I needed.

"My cultures aren't furniture," I said. "I can't load them into a truck and find another wall outlet."

"Calder needs it vacant by August first. He'll give you five thousand for moving."

Five thousand dollars wouldn't replace my smallest production tank.

"You promised him vacant possession?"

Bernard leaned back.

"I promised him my land."

I stood. The table went quiet except for someone cracking a claw at the far end.

"I'm going to check my feed lines."

"There he goes," Bernard said. "Can't take a joke."

Eliza followed me to the van.

"You could have stayed," she said.

"You could have answered him."

She held her keys so tightly the teeth pressed into her palm.

"You know how he is."

I had heard that sentence for four years. It always meant everyone else had to bend.

"Yes," I said. "I do."

At the hatchery, I checked the air stones and held a white card behind a flask. The culture looked even and gold. Healthy.

My attorney, Mara Bell, answered on the second ring.

"He announced another sale," I told her.

"Don't argue with him. Bring your lease tomorrow. I have the originals here."

I was locking the lab when my phone lit up with a message from Bernard.

Monday. Eight sharp. New locks. Have your things out.