Spindrift

Chapter Six

1701

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"Lee's home," Ian announced, running along the shoreline to where Ariel worked on a few fishing baskets.

She lifted her head, trying to get the tension held in her shoulders and spine to release itself, and shielded her eyes as the waterplane glided into the makeshift dock.

Lee was not alone; her in-laws disembarked with him to the flatbottom boat, loading up the few pieces of luggage they brought with them.

It was moments like these were Lee's background and her own her largely divergent. Yes, both of their father's were officers in the space force of their world, having served together. It was more than that: Searlas never rose in his thinking, or integrity as more than an enlisted man.

He drank away his paycheck, even before he was discharged from the force. Felt a great deal owed something that he could never articulate, and it took a lot of work and willpower for Ariel to look at life differently.

She remembered standing before Searlas for the first time, dripping wet because of the ocean water and the rain, as her mother introduced them. The houseboat was old, even then. The man smelled of piss and stale liquor. And when Ariel awoke in the morning, her mother was gone and her introduction of how to live with the man took a rude turn.

It took a few good conversations growing up with Perrin Khols bringing his two sons to the houseboat for their annual summer break to break into the understanding of what her father went through. And it was only an understanding.

It took a lot of hard work before she ended up in prison to recognize that there was a cycle of poverty and abuse coming down her family line – a cycle that Searlas wanted nothing to do with breaking, because when he was at his sanest moments, he was too overwhelmed to know where to begin. And when he was at his craziest, didn't even realize there was a problem.

No, Perrin Khols the man, and his very presence in Ariel's life – and therefore, his importance – began long before he became her father-in-law, and these visits meant as much to her as they did to her husband. For one, these visits were a reminder of how she and Lee met.

Ironically, as she surfaced from the water for a fishing trip of her own – he and his brother stood on the dock, poles almost ready to go over the edge with their sharp hooks and she came so close to snagging her tailfin on one of them.

Perrin Khols had the polish of a politician, certainly a man who knew grace and carriage and the importance of such things. In the military, he hobnobbed with and bred people, and brought literature and art into Ariel's life. He showed her that, even in the rank and file of the military, there were good men who tried, buried under the crass nature of people like her father.

That he ended up married to a former secretary of the president of the planet was no surprise to Ariel, and certainly not to a woman who was as classy and suave as Roslin Mateo. She didn't know how to weave or repair a fishing basket, but knew how to negotiate.

Tough as nails broad was a cliched term, but it worked for Roslin. Ariel never knew the woman to back down from a fight in the amount of time she knew her, not without good, solid reasoning and evidence to back up the opposing side. Logical, disciplined; Roslin worked hard and wasn't afraid to get a little grease under her nails if it mattered, even as she was booking an appointment to get the manicure fixed the next day.

That kind of class didn't belong here; and yet here it was.

"Come on," she told Ian, putting her material in the basket. "Put these to soak in the tide pool, where they won't float away, and then come get ready for dinner."