Bast brought our food over—a giant oval tray cluttered with paper baskets of food: mozzarella sticks, steak fries covered in melted cheese and house-made chili, deep-fried pickles, fried green tomatoes, chicken wings with a bunch of dipping sauces, onion rings, melted brie cheese with triangles of toasted pita and slices of green apple, and my usual, a triple-decker cheeseburger with fries, and a cup of chili.
I eyed the mountain of food in front of Cassie. “I suppose it’s worth mentioning that the Badd boys don’t skimp on the portions.”
She eyed me, and then the food—each basket held enough food for two or three people to share. “Yeah, you could’ve mentioned that.” She laughed, rubbing her forehead with a knuckle. “There’s enough food here for fifteen people.”
I shrugged. “You seemed to know what you were about.”
She sighed. Eyed me, the food, and a bemused Bast. Then, she tugged over the chili cheese fries, the fried green tomatoes, and the brie. “Give the rest away, so it doesn’t go to waste,” she said. “I’ll pay for it all, either way.”
Bast just chuckled. “You’re family, Cassie. No charge.”
She shook her head. “You’re kidding.”
Bast refilled her beer without being asked. “Your mom is dating my uncle. Makes you family even if you weren’t here with Ink, and family eats and drinks for free, always.”
“But…that’s like, seventy bucks worth of food.”
Bast shrugged. “Family is family.” He winked at her. “I’ll keep the beer coming until you cry uncle.”
She nodded. “Thank you.” A pause. “I need it.”
“Been a bartender my whole life,” he said. “I know when a person just needs to drink themself into oblivion.” He gestured at me. “And there ain’t nobody better to have around you in times like that than Ink.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself, but thanks.”
Bast just laughed. “You do you, boo.”
She stared hard at Bast. “Yeah, don’t call me boo. Ever.”
Bast quirked an eyebrow. “Just jokes.”
Cassie turned her attention to the food. “Shitty day, shitty week, shitty month. Shitty couple of months. Shitty life as of…” she pretended to check a nonexistent watch, “…two months, two weeks, and six days ago.” Another pause as she pulled out her phone to actually look at the time. “And…eight hours.”
Bast and I exchanged looks, and then Bast gave me a look that said that’s all you, buddy, and good luck, and then walked away to take a beer order from the other end of the bar.
A long silence unrolled between Cassie and me as I dug into my lunch and Cassie hers. After about twenty minutes of silence between us, she glanced at me.
“Not gonna ask?”
I just shrugged. “You wanna tell me what happened two months, two weeks, six days, and eight hours ago, you’ll tell me. You don’t wanna tell me, that’s fine too.”
“So you don’t want to know.”
I set my burger down and turned sideways in my chair to face her. “I’m sittin’ here, ain’t I?”
“Yeah, so?”
“I ain’t a social sorta guy, Cassie. I like my solitude. I do my tattoos, I hang out with my cousin when she has time to visit me, and that’s about it. Shit like this,” I waved between her and myself, “ain’t how I live. Me sittin’ here, talking to you, spending my lunch hour with you, that’s me interested in what you got to say, and if you don’t got nothin’ to say, I’ll listen to that too.” I leaned forward, gave her a long hard stare. “You need a friend, Cassandra Goode. That much is real fuckin’ obvious.”
She frowned, swallowing hard. “Why is it so fucking obvious, Ink?”
“Well, you damn near walking off the pier into the channel was the first clue.”
She didn’t answer for a minute or two. “And you’re offering to be that friend, are you?”
Against my better judgment, I wanted to do just that. This girl was high octane, high maintenance. All fire and fury one minute, and then acting like everything was fine the next. Made me dizzy.
But there was something about her that intrigued me. The intensity in her changeable, hazel eyes…stormy gray one minute, and then fiery green the next, and then a muted roiling brown another, depending on her mood, which seemed to change with every breath—they drew me in, made me curious. Curious about her as a person, about how she got here, to Ketchikan, curious about the emotional reasons behind the blinding pain that nearly caused her to walk off the pier and into a channel which would still, even at this time of year, be so cold as to induce hypothermia if you stayed in too long.
I realized I’d been staring at her for a while without answering her question. I just nodded and said, “Yes, I am.”
“And if I don’t tell you what happened, you’re not going to ask?” She sounded outright disbelieving.
I nodded. “Ain’t my business unless you make it my business.”
“You’re weird.” She said this without looking at me, tossing back her third or fourth beer in half an hour.
“Been called worse,” I said, and then finished off my burger and my beer.
“Like?”
I wiped my hands on a napkin. Hesitated. “Jumbo. Dumb ass. Fat ass. Filthy Eskimo. Stinky Inky. Useless. Illiterate.”
“Illiterate?”
I snorted. “Figured you’d fix on that one.”
“Are you?”
I rolled a shoulder. “No, I can read alright. Just…not super well. I grew up in the bush, off-grid. Homeschooled, by which I mean if we finished our chores around the homestead, we were allowed to do schoolwork, which was ratty old textbooks that were probably outdated in the seventies. I mostly taught myself to read, write, and add and subtract.” I sighed. “My family is just weird, reclusive, distrustful, and backward.”
She gazed at me. “And you taught yourself how to do tattoos, too?”
“More or less. I was always drawing on myself. As a little baby, just learning to crawl, I’d get my hands on anything that would mark my skin and just go to town. Pens, pencils, food, pieces of ash from the fireplace. Ketchup was my favorite. They couldn’t stop me. They’d lock up everything and anything, but I’d find something. Shit, if I couldn’t find anything else, I’d just go outside and make mud and use that to mark up my skin.”
“But your name, Ink, was what they named you when you were born? It’s not a nickname?”
I nodded. “My folks’ve been asked about my name as often as you’d imagine, and all my dad’ll say is, ‘sounded like an interesting name at the time.’ No deeper meaning or reason behind it than he thought it sounded cool, I guess. Never heard him or Mom say anything different my whole life. So did my name inform what I do? Maybe. I didn’t know what ink was as a kid. I just knew I liked how my skin looked when I made marks on it.”
“It’s just a compulsion for you, then?”
I shrugged, nodded. “Started off that way. Just me, and Juneau, who lived near me and was my best and only friend. She was the same way. We’d steal pens and hide them in our secret fort in the woods behind our trailers, and we’d sneak out there and draw on each other for hours.”