The Alaskan Laundry Read Online Free Page B

to the side as he went for the coffee machine behind her. He filled his stainless-steel mug, shook a cigarette from a pack, and turned. “Late your first day. Classy.”
    â€œI’m a classy girl.”
    He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist. “Follow me.”
    They went into a concrete room packed with white plastic bins, water cascading between them. He walked like a featherweight boxer—on the balls of his feet, hips thrust forward, shoulders pulled back. Outside in the sunlight she followed him between circular vats of gurgling water, stopping on a knoll, the flat blue-gray ocean stretched out beneath them. Waves lapped on the rocks below. Islands dotted the horizon, and behind them mountains, which appeared cut out from the blue sky, the peaks delicate, like the tips of drip castles she had made on the Jersey Shore as a kid.
    A briny, spruce-tinted wind shivered the grass. Newt cupped his hands around a cigarette, squinting as he exhaled. “You do that yoga shit?” he asked, his eyes roaming her body.
    â€œI box,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Or I did, back in Philly.”
    â€œGirl boxer? Makes sense anyways, where your whole ‘I’m gonna kick your ass’ act comes from.” He clamped the cigarette between his teeth, went up on his toes, and threw a convincing three-punch combination, ducking his head, bobbing and weaving, surprisingly nimble, finishing with a knockout right cross. He pivoted on his back foot, just like Gypo had taught her. Tara brushed hair from her face.
    â€œBack in Kentucky we fought just to get mean,” he said.
    He leaned in closer. A light down covered the skin where his eyebrows should be. She caught a whiff of fish oil. “Don’t let Grandpa get to you. He’s so thin-skinned, it’s barely enough to stop him from bleeding to death. Ends up taking it out on others.”
    â€œWho’s Grandpa?”
    He eyed her. “How old are you?”
    â€œEighteen.”
    â€œBirthday?”
    â€œMarch eighteenth.”
    He flicked his cigarette butt into the rocks. “I’ll tell you one thing: old man’ll burst a blood vessel if he sees us holding our dicks out here. Word to the wicked, keep your hands out of your pockets, otherwise he’ll shitcan your ass.”
    He started back to the building, tossed a scoop of pellets from a plastic bucket over his shoulder, then another behind his back as he passed by the green vats. Tara stopped to watch as a dark cloud gathered in the water, followed by flashes like knife blades, sun reflecting off the scales of fish as they rose. Newt shouted back. “Pockets!”
    She hurried to catch up, lifting her hands from her jeans. They went down the mossy concrete steps, back into the basement.
    â€œYou ever jack off a fish?” he asked.
    â€œWhat?”
    He turned to her. “You got those good boxer’s wrists. Might even make you top salmon jacker. Great honor here at the hatchery, something to shoot for, as we like to say.”
    â€œI’ll make it a goal,” she said, again trying not to laugh. She liked this stunted man in his overalls. Maybe, she thought, despite what her mother said, she just didn’t match well with quiet men like Connor.
    Newt led her to a corner. “So listen to me good here—out of the few thousand salmon eggs in those bins some eight hundred fry will hatch, just like the ones we fed in those tanks. Come May we take the fry out to the open ocean, dump ’em into a holding pen to get them acclimated. That way they’re protected from seals and otters and other ocean varmints. At which point they become smolts, maybe four hundred count. Smolts get released, go out and enjoy life, reach adulthood, maybe two hundred make it back to home sweet home. Then we kill ’em, and the process starts over.”
    â€œKill them?”
    â€œThey’re anadromous—means they die