Chapter 3

The crowd came apart.

"He's set on putting that old man in an early grave."

"Seventy years I've lived here. I've never seen a son this shameless."

Thomas's cane shook in his grip.

"If your mother could see you now, she'd come up out of her grave to curse you!"

Ray Cole slapped his thigh.

"A man like that has no business fishing out of our harbor."

He called across the room to Dale Ferris.

"Pull his offshore license. As of today Jack Sutton doesn't set foot on a boat out of this harbor."

Dale nodded right away. "I'll file it this afternoon. We don't need his kind here."

The next few days were about as bad as days get.

Ray read a statement over the co-op's radio channel every morning and every evening, and by the second day other people had started reading their own.

"Jack Sutton has walked out on his family and repaid the wife who saved his father with cruelty..."

"Every decent person in this harbor has an obligation to condemn behavior that poisons a community..."

Somebody nailed a copy of it to the harbor office door, and it stayed there.

An older woman spat at me on the road.

"Ungrateful trash."

It caught me on the cheek.

A group of boys hid behind a wall and threw stones. Most of them hit my back. One caught the back of my head hard enough to black out my vision for a second.

When I got home there was one word painted across my front door in red. MONSTER.

The windows were smashed in. Rotten vegetables and dead fish were scattered all over the yard.

A reporter came out from the county paper to interview Linda, the harbor's new hero.

He set her up on the dock with the boats behind her and asked her to walk him through it.

Linda cried beautifully for him.

"The wind was screaming and the waves were so high. There was only one life jacket. Jack's young and he's strong. His father's an old man. I knew if I didn't get to him, he was going to die."

"So you gave the life jacket to your father-in-law without hesitating."

"Yes. I wasn't thinking about myself at all. I just knew I had to save Dad."

The reporter turned and spotted me standing back from the crowd.

"Is that Jack Sutton?"

Ray Cole nodded and dropped his voice. "That's him. The ungrateful one."

The reporter came over with his pencil already moving.

"Mr. Sutton, is it true you intend to divorce the woman who saved your father's life?"

I met his eyes.

"Yes."

He frowned. "Are you jealous that your wife went for your father instead of you?"

I smiled at him.

"Of course I'm jealous. My father's got a daughter-in-law so devoted she'd trade her own husband's life for his. Who wouldn't envy a blessing like that?"

"What are you saying about me?" Linda's face went scarlet. Her whole body was shaking.

"You're spreading filth!" Frank came at me swinging, and it took three men to hold him back.

By the next morning the radio had new material.

"Jack Sutton has openly admitted he's jealous of his wife's courage..."

"That kind of small, selfish thinking has no place in this harbor..."

That evening my oldest friend, Ben Marsh, sat down beside me on the front steps and handed me a bottle.

"Give them what they want, brother. Apologize."

He sighed.

"A wife like that is hard to come by. You let her go, you'll regret it the rest of your life."

I looked at the man I'd learned to fish beside, who'd taken every scraped knee and every hiding right along with me.

"You think I'm wrong too?"

"I'm not trying to hurt you," he said. "But your dad's an old man. What was Linda supposed to do? You're taking it too personally."

I put my head down and laughed once. "You're right. I am taking it personally. I just can't stand my father."