She looked up at him then, for the first time since he'd come in, and he saw something cross her face that he had not seen there in a long time. It wasn't anger. It looked almost like fear.
"Where did you hear that name?"
"He comes into the Anchor Light. He's been coming in for a month. He's old, Ma. He's got nothing. He's been sitting on the same stool every afternoon and I've been feeding him off my tips. Then on Thursday the Coast Guard called, and he heard my name, and he got up and left."
His mother put the pencil down. She folded her hands on top of the timecards, very neatly, one over the other.
"Sig Aasen," she said, "was the second mate on the Corvallis Trader. He had the watch the night of the collision. Your father was his helmsman." She stopped. "I thought he was dead. I thought he'd been dead for years. He went up to Seattle, I heard, after. Or Alaska."
"What happened?"
"You know what happened."
"I know what people say happened. I want to know what happened."
She looked at him for a long time. Then she got up and went to the stove and lit the burner under the kettle, although nobody had asked for tea, and stood with her back to him, with her arms crossed.
"I don't know what happened," she said. "That's the God's honest truth, Duncan. I wasn't there. Your father went to that hearing and told them whatever he told them, and they took Sig Aasen's license, and after that he never talked about it. I asked him for fourteen years. And he would just sit there and look at me." She turned around. "You know what they said about him."
"That he was asleep. That he blamed Aasen to cover for himself."