"That's what they said."
"Was it true?"
"I told you, I don't know." Her voice went up, and she brought it back down. "I know the union men stopped speaking to him. I know Bill Erstad came to this house the week after the hearing and told him a sailor who hangs a shipmate in front of the Coast Guard is finished on this coast, and he'd see to it personally. I know your father never shipped out again, and he could have. He had a bosun's ticket. He could have gone to Seattle or the Gulf. He chose to stay and be a watchman and let them look at him like that, and at me, and at you." She pressed her lips together. "I married a man who was going to be a captain. I got a man who stood up in a room one day and told the truth, or a lie, I'll never know which, and then sat in a chair for fourteen years and let it eat him."
The kettle started to tick.
"That's what talking does," his mother said. "Whatever you say in that room, it doesn't come back out. It just stays in you. And it stays on your family." She came back to the table and sat down and looked at him. "Branko Perovich was at the cannery yesterday. He came to see me on the line. He stood there in his good jacket in front of all my girls and asked if he could have a minute, and I took him in the office."
Duncan felt his stomach go tight. "What did he want?"
"He didn't want anything. That's the thing." She shook her head. "He sat in my office and told me Vesna doesn't get out of bed most days. That his little girl is having trouble at school. That the bank takes the house in the spring if the insurance doesn't come through. And that he knows you're a good boy and you'll do what you think is right, and whatever you do, he doesn't blame you. Then he thanked me for my time and walked back out past all my girls with his hat in his hand."
Duncan didn't say anything.
"That man buried his son," his mother said. "Whatever he did. Whatever he didn't do. He buried his son."
"I know."
"Then what is there to say in that room that's going to make anything better?"