Desperation Reef

Three days later, Jen, Casey, Brock, and Mahina huddle around a table in Barbara’s Fish Trap, Half Moon Bay’s most popular restaurant. It’s cold inside, but packed with customers, the waitstaff bustling between the tiny kitchen and the dining room.

Jen’s mother and father — Eve and Don — are there. As are Pastor Mike and Marilyn Stonebreaker, who flew into Half Moon Bay just an hour ago and drove to the Ritz-Carlton.

FreakZilla is arriving tomorrow, as predicted by NOAA, Surfline, the National Weather Service, and other big-wave prophets around the globe. The heart of it, with the biggest surf, is expected for late morning the day after. There’s no doubt the swell is coming. The question is how big and exactly when. NOAA says it’s a thirty-foot swell, which means fifty-foot faces, with clean-up waves possibly bigger. The biggest worry now is not the waves, but the wind.

Barbara’s is packed with Monsters surfers eager to compete. Jen knows at least half of them. Both the men and women wear their big-wave, cold-weather uniforms — beanies and hoodies or puffer jackets with fur, thermal shirts, flannel lounge or ski pants, and shearling boots.

Jen looks out a window toward the bay, where a firm, cold breeze drives little whitecaps toward shore. If it whips up strong and doesn’t change direction, she thinks, it’ll blow out the waves and it’s adios, Monsters.

But none of this wave worry has rocked Jen Stonebreaker’s soul as hard as the arrival of Bette Wu, now being seated by Casey, who holds out the chair opposite his mother. Bette’s dressed like the surfers — in a Rasta beanie, an orange CaseyWear hoodie, snug black pants, and boots with puffs of shearling below her knees.

Before sitting, Bette waves and looks at each person around the table, then slings her purse over the seat back.

“Hi, everybody,” she says. “I’m Bette Wu, Casey’s friend and business associate.”

Jen barely hears it, but half the crowd cheers, and there’s a few hearty whoops. The other diners are silent, having seen Casey’s videos — now taken down from his feeds — that show this Bette Wu working with shark finners, and illegal fishermen and — women, and maybe having something to do with Casey’s dog disappearing. And that suspicion about her family burning down the restaurant.

Jen knows she should just get up and walk out, or maybe — just maybe reach across the narrow table and shake her hand. But she can’t move. Just like she couldn’t move her hand on the jet ski throttle for the split second she took that day twenty-five years ago, when she paused to tell John that she loved him.

Is this a waking nightmare? Is this really her naïve and beautiful son Casey, bringing a criminal into his life? Into hers?

She looks at him in numb disbelief. Sees the shame on his face.

Fact is: Jen doesn’t view the arrests of the Monterey 9 arson suspects as a vindication of Jimmy Wu. Not by a long shot. Jimmy might not have lit up the Barrel but he definitely tried to buy it for a pittance, to extort her acceptance by threatening her son’s fucking dog. And who knows — what if the Monterey 9 guys were hired by “rival” Jimmy? Or even framed by him?

And Jen sure didn’t view Bette’s threats against Mae as forgiven, just because Casey vouched, very emotionally, for Bette’s “misunderstood intentions” and “saying things she didn’t mean.” Casey, god bless him, actually had tears in his beautiful ice-blue eyes.

Now she’s his friend?

Not on my watch.

She stares at Casey but he won’t meet her eyes. Bette gives her a humble, lips-pursed kind of look, which Jen does not answer.

Brock looks amused. He stands and nods, reaches across the table, and shakes Bette’s hand. Jen takes his betrayal almost as hard as she does Casey’s. A smile parts his dark, hard face and his locs sprout and glisten.

“So we meet again,” says Brock.

“A lot has happened.”

Jen knows she should do the same, just shake the pirate’s hand, make peace long enough for her sons to fully and wholly compete with the immense, now-inevitable FreakZilla.

Pastor Mike stands and clears his throat. “May we bow our heads in a prayer of thanks, for guidance and great waves, and for the wonderful food we are about to receive?”

The spirited din of the dining room respectfully lessens as many of the customers recognize Pastor Mike from his streaming Hillview Chapel show on Hulu, his ubiquitous freeway billboards and online vids.

“Bless this food to thy service, Lord, and welcome Bette to our lives. Show us your way forward, that we may follow and learn, and make amends. Our thanks to you, Lord. Amen.”

Jen hears the smattering of “amens” that follows. Could almost puke. She’s way too rattled to say an amen of her own, not at all feeling thankful or like making amends with Bette Wu.

Pastor Mike sits.

The dining room noise hasn’t returned since his prayer, but there’s a steady buzz — customers sensing something important at hand.