“Remember the other day, I told you I’d done a stupid thing and let my father down? Well, the story Minor told this afternoon was it. When I tried to beat the storm home. Paps sent the others back to the hotel with Major. He held me back. Right here on the dock, in the pouring rain…” He laughed a little. “We throw that expression around—oh my father’s gonna kill me. But that night, I really thought he would. Actually, I hoped he would…”

“You damn punk,” Major shouted in Kennet’s face.

“Take them home,” Emil said to his brother, indicating the four younger Fiskares. He put a palm in the center of Kennet’s chest, holding him back. “You stay.”

“Paps, I—”

“Shut your mouth.”

Kennet rolled his lips in, frightened in every bone of his body.

“Did you watch the clouds?” Emil asked when the others had gone.

Kennet stared at his sodden shoes.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you. Did you watch the clouds?”

Now Kennet looked through the rain, met his father’s gaze and wished he were dead. “Yes, sir.”

“Did the clouds divide?”

“No, sir.”

The hand on Kennet’s sternum drew back a few inches, then it shoved him, hard. Sneakers slipping and sliding on the wet dock, Kennet went sprawling. A yelp of surprised pain as his hip bone collided with wood. Another yelp, this one full of fear, as his father’s feet planted on either side of him.

“You could’ve killed all your mother’s children tonight,” Emil shouted, tall and terrible. “You could have sheared this family tree down to the goddamn ground. You would’ve left it to me to tell your mother it was the end of the family. To tell my brothers it was the end of our name.”

He may have had a lame leg, but the blood of the Old Bear bellowed in Emil’s upper body. His hands reached, his fists curled around Kennet’s wet clothes. He hauled the boy to his feet and shook him, as if trying to loosen teeth. “If any of them drowned and you lived, I’d make you sleep in the graveyard the rest of your days. I’d build a goddamn shed for you in the family plot and make you live among your dead siblings.”

“I’m sorry,” Kennet cried, wanting to throw himself overboard.

“My only daughter,” Emil roared above the rain. “This family’s sole girl in two generations, you damn fool pathetic excuse of a…”

Kennet was drowning in shame now, reduced to worm food, to chum, to insignificant sand and pebbles beneath the tromp of his father’s rage. To a miserable punk in the eyes of his adored uncle.