Served First

Matteo Falcone had handed his family's restaurant account to a woman with one borrowed van and a two-woman fish counter, and Maura had not asked him why. The light was on in the back of the counter when she turned off Wickenden Street, which meant Graça had beaten her in again, which meant Graça would mention it.

She brought the box van around into the alley with the window down, because the side mirror on that side had been cracked since before she borrowed it and she trusted her own neck more than the glass. The refrigeration unit on the roof hummed and rattled over every pothole between here and the Point Judith road. It was ten past six and still full dark, the kind of dark that sat on Fox Point in late December and did not lift until the trucks were already out on the highway. The river was somewhere behind the buildings to her left; she could smell it under the cold, flat and a little brackish, nothing like the smell of the dock she had stood on at five, where the boats came in with the diesel still running and the gulls already knew which crates were cod.

She backed up to the steel door, set the brake, and got out into air that bit the inside of her nose.

Graça had the door propped with a bucket. Inside, under the long fluorescent tube, she was on her knees on a folded feed sack in front of the blue plastic tub she kept beneath the end of the counter, with her sleeves pushed past the elbow and both forearms in the water.

"Second change," Graça said, without looking up. "Second change and it's not even light. My sister called me last night at ten o'clock to tell me last year it was too salty. Last year. She's been telling me it's too salty since nineteen ninety-something, and every year she eats three plates of it, and every year she calls."

"Good morning," Maura said.

"I told her, you want it less salty, you soak it yourself. Three days, three changes a day, cold water, you don't cheat. She wants me to do two days. Two days." Graça lifted a slab of salt cod out of the water, gray-white and stiff as a shingle, turned it over, smelled it, and laid it back down with a care she gave very few living things. "I'm not doing two days for a woman who puts ketchup on eggs."

Graça Monteiro was fifty-six and had been born four streets away, back when the streets around here still had more Cape Verdean grandmothers on their front steps than wine bars, and she had a way of saying so that made it clear the wine bars were on probation. She was five foot three and wide through the hips, with strong round shoulders that had been carrying fish boxes longer than Maura had been alive. Her skin was a deep warm brown, and her hair was cropped close, gray-black and tight to her skull, under the white cotton cap she wore at the counter the way some women wore a hat to church. Her reading glasses hung on a cord of small wooden beads her granddaughter had strung, and they swung against her apron when she leaned over the tub. She filleted faster than Maura. She had said so on the first day they worked together and on most days since, and it was still true.

Maura's own tub stood beside hers, a smaller one, square and white, with a sheet of plastic wrap over the top and a strip of tape on the side that said FALCONE in marker. She crouched and lifted a corner of the wrap. The baccalà under it had been in water since the twenty-first. It had started paler and harder than Graça's; now it was beginning to give at the thick end when she pressed it with her thumb, and the water smelled of the sea and not of the salt barrel.

"You changed mine," she said.

"I changed mine. Yours was next to it." Graça sat back on her heels and dried her arms on a towel. "Cold water, three times, you don't cheat. That's not me doing you a favor. That's how it's done. If I left yours sitting in the same water as I'm changing mine, it would offend me."

"Thank you anyway."

"Don't thank me, it's my method. If it comes out salty at that house, it's my method they're eating." Graça looked at her then, over the top of the counter, a short assessing look that took in the watch cap, the braid stuffed under it, the oiled-wool sweater that had been her father's before it had been hers, and the white boots already wet to the ankle from the dock. "You look like you slept in the van."

"I slept in my bed. For about four hours."

"That's the van," Graça said, and got up off her knees with one hand on the counter edge, and went to wash.

They unloaded together, because that was the arrangement and because neither of them would have let the other carry alone in Christmas week. Maura passed the boxes down off the tailgate in the order she had loaded them at Galilee: the littlenecks in their mesh bags, the mussels, the calamari tubes and tentacles packed in shaved ice, the smelts silver and stiff in rows, the shrimp, the cod. Graça's own orders came next — a box of hake for the restaurant on Thayer, sea scallops for a woman on the east side who had been ordering the same quantity every December since before the counter had a sign, and called on the twentieth each time to make sure. They went into the walk-in in Graça's arrangement, which was not negotiable, and which put Graça's boxes at eye level on the left and Maura's on the right and the lower shelves for whatever had to be gone by noon.

The walk-in was not big. Neither of them had ever pretended it was. It was a steel room the size of a good closet, with a fan in the corner that ticked and a door that had to be shouldered closed, and in Christmas week it was the most valuable floor space in Fox Point. Maura stood in the doorway with her breath clouding and looked at the right-hand shelves, at what she had brought for the Falcone house, and did the sum again in her head without meaning to. She had done it on the dock and in the van and twice at the light on Allens Avenue. It came out the same every time: one good order, from one house, and the counter's rent was safe through February.

She had been up the hill to Dario's kitchen door most mornings since the beginning of the month. The restaurant with no sign. She had stood on its back step in her boots with a crate on her hip and argued with Matteo Falcone about whether a cherrystone was a clam or an insult, and he had given her the account at the end of it, in a camel overcoat at seven in the morning, as if he were doing her a courtesy over coffee. A man in that coat did not owe a woman in this sweater a reason, and she had a lease that renewed by the month.

Headlights came down the alley.

The truck that pulled in behind her van was white, with BRAGA'S SEAFOOD — EAST PROVIDENCE across the side in blue letters that had been repainted over older blue letters, and a reefer unit that was louder than hers. The driver did not turn the engine off. He climbed down out of the cab with a clipboard he did not look at, and Maura saw a boy of about twenty-two in a Braga's Seafood jacket, zipped to the chin, thin through the neck and wrists, with a ginger moustache he was clearly working on and which was not yet working back.

"You Carney?" he said.

"I'm Carney."

"These are for you." He went around to the back of his truck and lifted the door and started pulling crates off the bed onto her stretch of asphalt, one after another, waxed cardboard boxes iced and lidded and banded with Braga's tape, each one with a printed label on the end. "Dario's order. For today. They cancelled."

"Then take them back to Dario's and tell him."

"They cancelled," the boy said again, patiently, as if she had misunderstood a very simple thing. "Said leave them with the new supplier. For return." He set another crate down on the stack and straightened up. "So I'm leaving them with the new supplier."

Maura looked at the stack, then at him. Behind her she heard Graça come to the door, and stop there.

"I'm not a return depot," Maura said. "I'm a fish counter. You want them returned, you put them back on your truck and drive them back to East Providence, and that's a return."

"Not my call." He wrote something on the clipboard, or pretended to. "Somebody'll be by."

"When?"

"Somebody'll be by," he said, and got back up into the cab, and backed the truck out of the alley with its reverse alarm going, and did not wait for her to sign anything. There was nothing to sign. She realized that after he had gone. He had not asked her for a name on a sheet, or a time, or a receipt; he had simply put the boxes down on her ground the way you put down a bag of trash on the curb for whoever comes.

Graça stood in the doorway with her arms folded over her apron.

"No," she said.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You were going to say the walk-in. No. That's my Thayer Street hake in there. That's my east-side lady's scallops. That's my Christmas." She came out onto the asphalt in her clogs and looked down at the stack the way she looked at a short-weighted bag of mussels. "That's not your fish and it's not my fish. That's Braga's fish. You want to keep Braga's fish cold, you call Braga and ask him to pay for the electric."

"If I leave them out here till somebody comes, it'll be on me when they turn."

"It'll be on Braga."

"It'll be on me," Maura said. "His driver put them down at my door. Nobody's going to ask him. Everybody's going to ask the woman who just took his account off him why his fish went bad behind her shop." She heard herself say it and knew it was true, and knew also that it was exactly the sort of thing she always assumed, and that she had never once found out she was wrong.

Graça did not argue that. She said, "Not on my shelves," which was a different argument, and went back in.

Maura crouched over the nearest crate and slit the band with her knife. Under the lid the ice was packed hard and deep, more ice than she would have put on anything going across town and up a hill on a morning this cold, and under the ice, when she dug her fingers in, she felt the cold slick backs of littlenecks. Dario's clams. The irony of it would have been funny if she had been more awake.

She carried the crate inside and hung it off the hook of her father's scale.

It was the only thing on the counter she had not bought or borrowed. A brass hanging spring scale, the face round and yellowed, the needle a little bent at the tip where it had been knocked against a wheelhouse rail some winter before she was born; it had come off his first boat when that boat was sold, and he had given it to her the week she signed the lease, without saying anything, in a paper bag. It hung from a chain bolted into the beam over the counter. The electronic scale beside the register was certified and stickered and she used it for customers, because she had to. For anything that mattered she used this one, and she weighed twice.

The needle swung, settled. She lifted the crate off, let the spring come back, and hung it again. The needle came to the same place.

She bent and squinted at the printed label on the end of the box. The label gave a net weight for the clams. Even allowing for the box, and the lid, and the band, the scale said a good deal more than that, and more than a reasonable person's ice.

"Braga ices like he's paying for the water by the pound," she said aloud.

"Braga ices like a man who sells you water by the pound," Graça said from the sink, which was more or less the same sentence and which Maura recognized, a beat late, as agreement.

She lifted the crate down. It was nothing, she thought. A heavy hand with the ice scoop was the oldest trick on any dock she had ever stood on; you iced heavy and you labeled light and you let the buyer's eye do the arithmetic for you. It was exactly why Dario's kitchen had stopped buying from him, if Matteo's version of the clams was to be believed — sold the same clams twice, Matteo had said, at the back step, with his jaw going a dull red at the hinge, and had not said anything more. Maura had not asked. It was not her business how a family on Federal Hill lost its temper with a supplier. Her business was that they had needed a new one, and that she had been standing on the step with a crate of littlenecks at the time.

She carried the crates in one at a time and stacked them in the walk-in on the bottom right, behind her own boxes for the Falcone house, so that hers were at the front where she could reach them, and Braga's stood in the dark at the back against the cold steel wall. It took a while. She did not bang anything. She did not move a single box of Graça's by so much as an inch.

Graça watched her do it from the door of the walk-in with her reading glasses on, which was how she watched anything she disapproved of.

"Behind yours," Graça said, when Maura came out wiping her hands.

"Behind mine."

"On your side."

"On my side. Not an inch of yours."

Graça considered the stack for a moment longer, then took her glasses off and let them drop onto the bead cord. "When somebody comes," she said, "you give them back with my compliments, and you tell them the woman with the salt cod says Braga ices like a man who sells water." She turned back to her tub. "Go on, then. You'll be late to your fancy house."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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