‘You boys figure on haulin’ down?’ asked Gabe.

Rollo looked to Conrad to reply. They had planned to take the morning off, treat themselves to a well-earned rest, maybe set a gill net off Shagwong later in the day.

‘Seeing as we’re up,’ said Conrad, and Rollo beamed.

‘Set’s on the turn. Be one hell of a chop out there come noon.’

‘How else we going to make you earn that wage?’

‘That ain’t no wage, it’s a goddamn insult.’

‘Man your age, scavenging for his lunch?’ said Conrad. ‘The shame of it.’

Gabe glanced at the dead flounder and laughed. ‘That’s the truth.’

Everyone knew that Gabe had squirreled away a small fortune over the years, largely thanks to a case of temporary blindness contracted during Prohibition.

‘Wouldn’t bank on much of a haul,’ said Gabe. ‘When the wind’s from the east, the fish is least.’

He wandered up the beach to the Coast Guard station, a grandiose weatherboard affair perched high on the frontal dune.

Conrad turned to Rollo. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘For waking me.’

Rollo smiled. ‘Told you it was good.’

They ate a full breakfast on the front deck of Conrad’s house as they did every morning, weather permitting. The menu never changed—pork belly and eggs fried side-by-side in a skillet, sourdough bread smeared with butter, and strong coffee, black as caulking tar, thick enough to float a nail. Afterwards, over a smoke, they would discuss the fishing prospects for the day ahead, trading the little hearsays that were the lifeblood of the fishing community. ‘Old Emmett took a full charge of cow bass on the Two Mile Hollow set, none of them under thirty pound,’ Rollo would say, or ‘Lindy says the bluefish is running off of Cedar Point.’