Sig looked up at her. His mouth opened and nothing came out of it.
"Joaquim cooked that pot roast," Ilda said. "Every Sunday. Thurman would come in and buy two plates and I'd wrap the second one. I never knew who it was for." She looked at him a moment longer, and her face was hard, and her eyes were wet. "Now I know. Can you wash a pot?"
"I can wash a pot," Sig said.
"Then you'll start Monday." She turned and went back toward the kitchen, and stopped at the swinging door without looking around. "Go get his bag out of your car, Duncan. He's dripping on my floor."
He went to see Lieutenant Commander Speck on Thursday, the sixth of November, two days after the election, with Carter having conceded before the polls even closed out here. The Marine Safety Office was a low tan building on Terminal Island, and Speck's window looked out at the back of the StarKist cannery, so the whole room smelled faintly of cooking tuna, the way his mother did.
Speck listened to everything. He listened to the plates on the freeing ports and the tape on the alarm wire and the cement in the hatch coaming and the small craft advisory and one more set. He did not write anything down until Duncan was finished. Then he took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes.
"Why didn't you tell me this in April?" Speck said.
Duncan looked out the window at the cannery. Women in white smocks and hairnets were coming out a side door, lighting cigarettes, and he looked for his mother among them.
"Because I was there," he said. "Because I'd helped him bolt on the plates. Because I found the crack in the hatch and I let him put cement in it and I didn't say no. Because I heard him say one more set, and I wanted my share of forty tons as much as anybody on that boat. And because I handed Davor the light." He stopped. "He said, stay there, hand me the light, and I handed it to him. I could've gone down. I didn't. I want that in there too. I want it in the record. Everything about Branko, and everything about me."
Speck looked at him for a long time. Then he put his glasses back on.
"I read your father's testimony," he said. "On the Corvallis Trader. Did you know that?"