The Girl From the Fish Market

Chapter 4 Two Acceptance Letters

The first letter came in March of her senior year.

I was at the stall. She called me at eleven, which she never did, and when I picked up she did not say hello.

"I got in."

"Where?"

"Carver."

I had to sit down on the ice bin. Carver was a college on the coast, a real one, the kind with a crest and a library that had a name. The kind that costs fifty thousand dollars a year and does not hand out money without a fight.

"How much?" I said.

"Financial aid covers most of it. I have to write a statement. And there's still eleven thousand a year."

"Okay."

"Ellis."

"Okay," I said. "We'll figure it out."

I did the math that night, twice, on paper, and then a third time on the back of a receipt. Eleven thousand a year for four years. I had thirty-one thousand in a savings account that I had opened when she was seven and put every extra dollar into, and I had the stall, and I had a freezer that was going to die within two years, and I had a brother who was still holding a quarry parcel over my head like a knife.

I could cover the first two years. After that, I would need to remortgage the building, or take on a partner, or sell the second stall, and any of those would mean the whole thing I had built for twenty years would become something else, something smaller, something that could be taken.

I did not tell her any of this. I told her we were fine, because we were, in the way that a man standing on a plank over a hole is fine.

The second letter came in April.

It was addressed to Nora at our address, in a heavy cream envelope, with a return address in a city four hours north. She brought it downstairs and put it on the counter and we both looked at it.

"Open it," I said.

"Not yet."

"Nora."

"Not yet." She took it upstairs. She came back down ten minutes later without it, and we did not talk about it, and I told myself it was a waitlist or a rejection from somewhere she did not care about.

Two weeks later, a black car pulled up on the pier.