THE SHALLOWS

Chapter 5: Eel Rice Bowl

Eel Rice Bowl

Halloran Pier was the biggest wholesale market on this part of the coast, and it opened at four in the morning and did its real business before seven.

Quinn got there at ten past six, in the middle of it. The ice grinder was going. A hose was running into a bin of clams. A pallet of salmon came up the aisle sideways with a man behind it yelling at nobody in particular, and the floor was wet from the door to the far wall and had been since four.

The smell came out through the doors ahead of her and she walked into it without slowing down. She'd hated it as a kid — her mother used to tell people she was the only child in the neighborhood who cried at the fish market — and now she didn't smell it at all until she was back out on the street.

She had a hundred and forty dollars folded into her jacket, which was the week's fish money, and a list she didn't need to write down. Crab, shrimp, clams, and a supplier.

At the fourth stall she stopped, the way she stopped at all of them, and looked at the shrimp in the second tray. Pale at the seam, soft at the head.

The man behind the counter caught her looking. He slid that tray back a row and put the good one out front and sold her two pounds off it without being asked, and neither of them said anything about the other thing.

She needed somebody to do this for her by the case. Delivered at six in the morning, on ice, at a price that left something over. She had left the house at five with the stock not yet on, and there were five orders of dumplings promised for tonight, one refrigerator, and not enough uni to fill them.

There had been a supplier. He'd started with Erin, years back, and he'd kept selling to Quinn for the first three months after she came home, and for two of those months the fish was good. The van came on Tuesdays and Fridays with Cobb Seafood on both doors, and he carried the boxes in himself and stacked them where she wanted them.

Then the crabs came up light — a shell that looks like a shell until you open it and get water — and the shrimp ate like wet paper. Bad week on the boats, he said. She believed him. Two bad weeks, and she believed him again, because he'd known her sister and because believing him was cheaper than a fight. Then a customer sent back a crab in front of eleven other people, and the next morning she called him and told him the shop was done with him.

He'd been surprised. She still turned that one over some nights.

Nobody at the next three stalls would deliver, either. The man with the clams sold to whoever was standing in front of him, and he pointed at the floor when he said it, and Quinn said thank you and moved on.

That was when she heard it.

"I'm going to throw up in a fish market."

The one who said it was standing in the middle of the aisle with a mask pulled up over his nose, holding it flat against his face with one hand, bent forward at the waist, breathing carefully through the cotton.

The other one had his phone up on a short black grip with a mic clipped to his collar, and he was filming him.

"Say something."

"I'm breathing."

"Say something else."

"I'm going to throw up in a fish market."

Quinn stopped next to them.

"Get a calamansi," she said.

The one with the phone brought it down. "A what?"

"Little citrus. Green on one side, orange on the other, about the size of a grape. Half the stalls sell them by the bag, because that's what people do with shellfish around here. Squeeze it right at the tip of your nose." She touched her own. "Hard, like you're trying to break it. The oil sprays out of the peel and covers the smell for a while."

The masked one pulled the mask down half an inch.

"Does that work?"

"Not sure it'll work for you," Quinn said. "It works for me. Try it."

Her mother had taught her that one, out in the parking lot of a market like this one, when she was small enough to be carried past the door.

"Thank you," he said. "Seriously. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"I'm going to buy you something. Two pounds of shrimp. What's — Miles." He snapped his fingers without looking. "Little oranges. Go."

Miles went down the aisle at a jog with the mask still on his face.

"I'm Cole," the other one said.

"Quinn."

"Quinn. Okay." He was still folded forward, but he was looking at her now, the way you look at a woman with two dozen clams who's handing out advice in a fish market. Then Miles came back with a plastic bag, and Cole took one out and held it up to his nose and squeezed it against his own face like he was punishing it.

The peel spat oil.

He breathed in through his nose. Then he breathed in again, and then he stood all the way up for the first time since Quinn had seen him.

"Okay," he said. "Okay, that's — okay."

"Told you," Miles said.

"Quinn told me."

The phone came up an inch, angled at her, and she stepped back out of the frame without saying anything about it.

"I'll get the shrimp," Cole said. "Two pounds, whatever kind. Where are you going?"

"Keep it," Quinn said. "You're fine."

"I'm getting it."

She picked up her clams and went south, and he was still talking behind her, and the market was loud.

She saw them once more, twenty minutes on, at the mouth of the far aisle. Miles had a white bag in one hand and his phone hanging at his side, and he turned in a slow half circle. Cole walked a few steps, stopped, and looked down the row. Then a forklift came through with a stack of crates on it and they were gone behind it.

They were still shooting their video, she assumed. She had a supplier to find and two dozen clams going warm against her hip.

It was past seven when she finished the south row and still didn't have a supplier.

"Quinn Salter."

She turned around. Warren Cobb, coming up the aisle with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, in a jacket that was too heavy for the weather.

"Warren."

"Buying your own fish." He looked at the bag under her arm. "That's rough."

"It's fine."

"I figured you'd have shut it by now."

"We're open."

"Open." He said it slowly, so the aisle could hear it. "Business good?"

"It's getting better."

"Better." He laughed, once. He moved the coffee to his other hand. "Well. I hope you get all the way through the year, I really do. I'd hate to watch you lose it at the end."

"Thanks, Warren."

She stepped around him and kept going, because she had a supplier to find and he wasn't one.

"You're going to cry about this one day," he said, after her, at a normal volume.

The hose was running. A pallet jack went past between them. Quinn was past the ice machine by then, and she didn't hear a word of it.

· · ·

The tanks were in the south corner, past the shellfish.

Four eels in a blue tub, thick at the middle, lying still with their heads up against the side, and one of them rolled and showed her its pale belly and rolled back.

Erin used to make eel rice on Sundays. After close, at the back table with the door open, and it was never once on the menu.

"Sixty for four," the woman at the scale said.

Sixty dollars, out of a week that had a hundred and forty in it and three more days to run.

"Okay," Quinn said, and paid it, and took them home on ice.

· · ·

It was eight-forty when she got back, and the shop was cool and dark, and she put the clams in the low fridge and turned on the light over the back table.

She'd watched Erin do this maybe thirty times and had done it twice, both times with Erin standing over her saying slower, slower. Skewer through the head, into the board. The knife down the back of it, behind the head to the tail, one pass. Then flat along the spine until the fillet came away and lay open like a book. Turn it. The other side. Scrape the blood line off with the back of the blade until the meat went pale.

Eight fillets. It took her nineteen minutes. Four of them went into the cooler straight away, because she wasn't going to cook eight pieces of fish to find out whether the glaze worked.

The glaze she knew without checking, because it was in the notebook in her sister's handwriting: soy, sake, one spoon of sugar. She had it in a small pan with the grill coming up and the fillets on a rack, and she wanted it thick enough to sit up on the fish instead of running off it, so she left it on the heat to find out.

It went from thin to syrup in about twenty seconds, and she took it off the burner too late.

The fillets went on the grill and the sugar went dark before she'd counted to thirty, and the smoke that came up was sweet and burnt at the same time.

She ate one standing at the pass, off the board, with rice.

The rice was right. The rice was never the question. The fish was candy on the outside and fine in the middle, and the first bite was sugar, and the second bite was sugar with a burnt edge on it, and on the third bite she set the chopsticks down.

The other three she wrapped and put in the cooler.

She got the notebook off the shelf under the register and opened it to the page from the night before. Tomorrow, at the top, in her own hand. Five orders. Market, morning. Supplier, with a line under it.

She wrote under the line.

eel, 4, $60

glaze: 20 seconds too long. took it off late.

again

She capped the pen and put the book back on the shelf. The pan was still on the stove with the sugar gone hard in the bottom of it, and she filled it with water to soak, and went to start the stock for tomorrow.