Roz Fox - A Mom for Matthew

“Then how in hell can you work on offshore rigs? Or set marker buoys? What if you got swamped by a wave and fell in, Gav?”

“Unless somebody fished me out, I guess I’d drown. I try not to think about it. That’s why I don’t want anyone I work with to know. It’d be just like some smart-ass to toss me in to see if I’m telling the truth.”

“Holy catfish!” Zeke closed his eyes and rubbed at the lines forming between his brows. “Didn’t it occur to you that something like that could negate our broad policy insurance?”

“I’m careful out there.”

“Accidents happen.” Zeke leaned forward in his chair. Damn, he didn’t need this on top of everything else.

Gavin bellied up to the desk. “You thinking about firing me, Zeke? I don’t know any other kind of work. I’ve been doing this since I was sixteen. First down in Louisiana, then California, now here.”

“I’m not going to fire you. I came here only knowing land wells, for God’s sake. You taught me almost everything I know about offshore drilling.”

“So, you won’t tell Pace? ’Cause he’d have a fit over the insurance thing. I reckon he’d ax me, Zeke.”

“I won’t tell him. But I will insist that during this slow period you find a swim instructor in town and take private lessons. I refuse to believe you can’t learn. I want your promise that you’ll keep at it until you can swim twice the length of a pool.”

The crew chief didn’t look overjoyed, but he agreed.

Zeke didn’t like where that left him. Back at square one when it came to diving with Grace Stafford. “Go on,” he growled, “buy the stuff on that list. I’ll start making those calls.”

Gavin looked decidedly happier. So happy and relieved that Zeke didn’t have the heart to tell him it’d been his own assignment all along.

After Davis departed, Zeke rose and snatched up the binoculars again. He spent the next ten minutes panning the point where sky met bay until at last he saw Grace’s red-gold head surface. “Fool woman shouldn’t dive alone.”

Disgusted, and more irritated by the fact that he’d been grinding his back teeth because she’d stayed submerged for so long, he muttered a totally uncivilized remark and swung aside. This time he dumped the field glasses on his messy desk, poured a cup of strong black coffee and bent to his tasks.

The calls to his subcontractors made his head pound. David Decker, owner of the flatbed barges they needed to transport everything out to the site, was especially nasty. As was the steamfitters’ union rep. Both threatened Zeke with loss of body parts. In the old days of oil exploration in Texas, those would have been very real possibilities. Nowadays, it was saber rattling. Pace’s lawyer would probably be dragged into court to settle breach-of-contract issues, and Kemper would pay delay fines if Zeke didn’t fix the problem.

He ran some calculations, then signed correspondence and the time cards a part-time secretary had left on his desk. After sealing them in a larger envelope to send off to headquarters where the main bookkeeping was done, he grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair.

“Hey, Possum,” he called to the chunkier of the two men working at desks in the outer office. He was Ramon Trujillo the sixth or something, and everyone always called him Possum. “Are either you or Gramps certified to dive?”

“As in deep-sea?” Norm Steel, the old-timer of the crew, known as Gramps, asked as he exited the bathroom, hitching his saggy jeans up over skinny hips.

“Not deep-sea. Scuba, with fins and snorkel,” Zeke said, pausing in front of the two men to display a hopeful expression.

“Not me. Too much water inside or out will weaken a man,” Norm said with a laugh.

Trujillo was already shaking his head. “Why do we need an extra diver? Ain’t the union requiring our sonar specialist on Number Four?”

Zeke slung his jacket over his shoulder, hooking it with an index finger. “Pace thinks we oughta help our obstacle in the bay locate that WWII plane she thinks is under our buoys. I’ve got plenty on my plate here, but if I’m the only certified scuba diver, I’ll have no choice but to give her my time.”

Possum pulled his double chins down until it looked like he had no neck. “Gramps, what did I tell you when we found that woman out there? Told you Jorge Boudreaux shouldn’t have rented her his boat. Bad luck to let a woman on the deck of a shrimp boat. Her being there’s already causing trouble.”

The very last thing Zeke needed was to have his men spouting dire superstitions or warnings that might distract everyone and jeopardize the whole project. Oil crews were a superstitious lot, and offshore drillers some of the worst.

“The only trouble she’s causing, Possum, is a slight delay. I have Gavin otherwise occupied. If you can hold down the fort for a few days, our operation will be back on track in no time.”

Trujillo didn’t look convinced. He rocked back and forth in his chair, the squeak getting on Zeke’s frayed nerves. “Mark my words, Zeke, things is only gonna get worse.”

Zeke laughed, but it sounded hollow even to his ears as he left the two somber men who’d been the backbone of the team since he’d come on board with Kemper.

It took longer than expected to assemble what he needed for diving. He had to make a trip home to find his certification before the shop would rent him air tanks. Matthew thought he was home for the day, and sobbed uncontrollably when Zeke attempted to leave again.

“Stay and eat lunch, at least,” Celia suggested. “Matt’s favorite cartoon comes on right after that, and it’ll distract him.”

“I didn’t know he had a favorite cartoon.” Zeke frowned, wondering how much else he’d missed. Surely that was a positive step toward more focused awareness-development—an issue Ms. Burnham harangued him about constantly.

“Matt loves watching the children in the interactive shows, Zeke. I know I let him sit too close to the TV, but the other day I saw him bobbing and swinging his shoulders,” she said excitedly. “I think he might feel the beat of the music.”

“You do? Jeez, that’s great! I wonder if the library has a book that might tell us how to capitalize on that?” Zeke suddenly recalled a conversation with Grace, who’d said a person could learn virtually any skill on the Internet or by reading.

“Have you forgotten that we got books on Matty’s condition after you moved here? They were too technical for us to make heads or tails of.”

“Yeah, but the research assistant gave us medical texts used by students at the nursing college.”

“Right, Zeke. I wish you could go with me to Matt’s regular checkups sometime. The doc and his nurse talk over my head. I never finished high school, you know. Maybe they think I know more than I do because I was a nurse’s aide. Really, I was basically just a maid.”

“Ma, you have more common sense than those medical folks who should’ve explained a lot of stuff to me and Trixie Lee about our newborn.” Zeke’s bitterness at the system that, in his opinion, fell far short of helping scared, confused young parents reared its head as he patted his mom’s shoulder.

He glanced at his watch, then swung Matthew high in his arms. The boy had been clinging to Zeke’s leg practically since he’d entered the house. “I’ll stay for lunch, but then I’ve gotta take off. I’ll pick up my gear, then I guess I’ll be breaking the unpleasant news to Ms. Stafford that she’s gonna have a partner, like it or not.”

“It’d probably go a whole lot smoother, Zeke, if you’d start with a better attitude.”

He let the remark pass. He was the busy manager of a vital oil company, dammit. He didn’t have the time or inclination to babysit a schoolteacher on a fool’s mission.