I picked up the envelope and set it flat in front of Brittany. “That company is writing to me, honey, because they bought my cast net design for three million two hundred thousand dollars,” I said. “For twenty years I tied nets in the back room of this house, and my son told you it was just a hobby. The little net on this table is the first one I ever made, when Rafael was four. They want to put my name on a whole line of them, in every sporting goods store in America.” Brittany read the first page, and her eyes grew wide. Rafael kept his head down and watched the floor.
“Mama, I can explain,” Rafael said at last. “No, mijo, I think I will explain,” I said. “You told me your father boat, the Miss Odile, sank in the Gulf in a storm. You cried when you told me. Then last month Captain Thibault stopped me at the dock to thank me for the lease. Two thousand dollars a month, for thirty five months, paid to you. Seventy thousand dollars. The Miss Odile has never been under water. She has been fishing for another man this whole time, and all the while I paid you four hundred fifty dollars a month for the back room.”
Brittany turned and looked at her husband, and I will never forget the look on her face. “Rafael, you told me the boat money was your overtime. You said the extra went to the truck.” Rafael could not answer. In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed, and a shrimp boat horn sounded far out on the ship channel, the same sound that Tiburcio used to say was the sound of home. I put my hand on the little cast net on the table. The lead weights were worn smooth by forty years of my thumb, and they felt, for once, like a comfort.
A little cast net with worn lead weights gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the dock in Port Arthur.
I kept my voice soft, because I had no wish to break my son, only to bring him back. “Here is what happens now. You will tell Captain Thibault the truth, and he will pay the lease to me from this month forward. You will repay the seventy thousand dollars in payments that Brittany and I will set, and you will not borrow a cent to do it. The back room is mine for as long as I live, at no charge, and I will keep the key. And the truck goes back to the dealer, mijo. Not because I am angry. Because honesty is more important than any engine.”
The next morning I drove down to the dock, and I found a surprise waiting. Captain Thibault had told the other shrimpers, and a dozen of the old boats were tied up along the pier with their flags out. Men I had known for fifty years came up one at a time to shake my hand. A big deckhand named Mateo gave me a bouquet of bluebonnets. Captain Thibault himself took off his cap. “Miss Marisol,” he said, “I paid every dollar in good faith. If I had known, I would have brought the money to your door.” I told him that I knew, and that I forgave him.
The money consequences came quickly. Rafael sold the truck within a week and took a loss of nine thousand dollars. He gave up the boat he had been planning to buy, and he took a second job unloading trucks at the shipyard on weekends. Brittany moved their savings to an account that required two signatures, and she took over the household budget with a notebook and a pencil. The father of Brittany, a retired machinist from Beaumont, drove down to offer a loan. Rafael refused it, which I thought was the first honest thing he had done in a year.
With part of the net money, I started something that would have made Tiburcio proud. The Miss Odile Fund buys cast nets, bait buckets and life jackets for the children of fishing families along the Texas coast who cannot afford them. Every Saturday in summer, I teach a class at the Port Arthur dock. Forty children came on the first morning, and they stood in a line along the pier, throwing nets into the water that opened like flowers. One little boy caught a single minnow and shouted so loudly that two pelicans took off in a fright.
Brittany came to see me by herself on a Sunday, carrying a pot of caldo. She said she had been ashamed to take part in the toast about her mother in law and the little back room, and that she had spent a week asking herself how she had been so blind. I told her that love makes us believe what we want to, and that she had been brave to look at the truth. She cried for a long while. Then she asked me to teach her how to throw a net, and I said I would be honored.
Rafael came last, and it took him a month. One evening he knocked on the door of my back room, which he had not done for years. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands between his knees and said that his father would have been ashamed of him. I told him that his father would have been ashamed only if he never changed. Then I handed him a ball of twine and a net needle, and we worked side by side until midnight, tying knots in silence, the way Tiburcio and I had done in the early years.
On the first anniversary of the sale, the whole family stood on the dock at sunrise. The Miss Odile slid in with Captain Thibault at the wheel, her paint fresh, her nets glittering. Rafael held the little cast net in both hands, the first one I ever made, and Brittany stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder. “Mama,” he said, “would you throw the first cast of the day?” I took the net, swung it wide, and let it fly. It opened across the water like a prayer, and the whole dock cheered. Tiburcio, I thought, we are all home.