My Mother-In-Law Put My Life Beside The Harbor Dumpster

My good wool socks were floating in a puddle beside the harbor dumpster. Eunhee had put them in a paper bag. The bottom had let go.

I picked up each sock before I touched my wedding picture.

From the bunkhouse steps, my husband's mother watched me bend.

"Take everything," she said. "The truck comes at four."

I was a short Korean American woman of fifty-eight, with a blunt gray bob, wide hands, and a pale rope scar across my right thumb. That morning, my hands shook so badly I could hardly close the wet bag.

I had buried Min three days before.

He had died after a wave took him off a working deck outside Kodiak. The search boat found him before dark. The report called it an accident, a small word that did nothing to explain the empty side of our bed.

"My tools are upstairs," I said.

"They'll come down."

"You can't throw my tools in the rain."

Eunhee was eighty, a small Korean American woman with a straight white braid, sharp cheekbones, and a dark wool coat buttoned to her chin. She held the new door key between two fingers.

"My son is gone. This isn't your home anymore."

Behind her, the bunkhouse windows shone with the yellow light Min always forgot to turn off. Our room was on the ground floor. My net loft was above the old gear shed, joined to the house by a covered stair.

I had mended fishing nets there for eight years.

I remembered every repaired tear the way other people remembered a familiar scar. A long rip from a broken block. Six meshes cut by a bent hook. A bite near the leadline where a seal had fought for a fish.

I could close my eyes and find those places with my fingers.

"I have work hanging," I said. "Other people's nets."

"Then tell them to collect their property."

A deckhand stopped at the lane. Eunhee raised her voice for him.

"A net mender has no place in the family business. She was here because of Min. Everyone should understand that."

The man looked at my wet bags. Then he looked down and walked on.

For years, Eunhee had told people her late husband, Taesuk, had carried us. After he died, she said she carried us herself. I had let the words pass at dinners and launch days. Min always asked me to let one more dinner stay peaceful.

He had also kept a copy of our blue folder in his chart drawer.

I set the picture in a dry grocery crate. Behind it lay the folder I had carried to the funeral, because the church office had needed Min's full name and dates.

There were other dates inside. One was in 2038.

"Did you empty the desk?" I asked.

"Everything worth keeping is outside."

That answer told me she had never opened its bottom drawer. She had always thought anything near my twine was just more twine.

I took a length of red cord from my coat. I used it to tie the broken bag shut.

At the end of each repair, I left three red turns on the edge rope. The small mark helped a crew find the mend when they spread the net. It wasn't there to make the net pretty. It was there so nobody had to guess where the work had been done.

"Where will you go?" Eunhee asked.

Her voice had grown softer now that there was no one in the lane.

"Back inside."

She gave a short laugh.

I lifted the crate. "Not with that key. With the papers."

"Don't make a scene, Hyejin. We've had enough shame."

She shut the door before I could ask whose shame she meant.

I made two trips to my old station wagon. My rain gear smelled of fish and cold coffee. Min's knitted cap was missing. So were my mesh gauges and the cedar box holding his father's letters.

I wrote those things down on the back of a fuel receipt.

That was when Jonas Skan came along the dock road in his gray maintenance cart.

He stopped without calling out. He put a folded tarp over the bags still on the ground.

"You eaten?" he asked.

"No."

He handed me half a cheese sandwich wrapped in waxed paper.

Jonas was fifty-four, an Alaska Native man of Alutiiq ancestry. As harbor caretaker, he usually saved his words for broken gates, loose boards, and things that could hurt someone if left alone.

I ate standing beside his cart.

"I need access to my room and loft," I said. "There is a lease."

He looked toward the new lock.

"Then you need to act today."

"Why?"

He took a folded arrival sheet from his pocket.

"She took an $8,400 deposit. Four crew members. She promised them your room and bunks in the loft."

The wind lifted one corner of the tarp.

"When are they coming?"

"Tomorrow morning," Jonas said. "Before the next storm."