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half-laughed.
    “When I was a priest, that’s what I liked to call a tender lie,” he said. “You were young. Your dad was doing the best he could.”
    She took a deep breath.
    “Yeah, well, he told me she swam away because she was a mermaid.”
    The toaster oven dinged. The tops of browned bread slices popped up.
    “And what, you believed him?” he asked.
    “I was six years old.”
    Allen dropped the spatula and put both hands on Ishmael’s shoulders, looking her in the eyes.
    “Ish, what are you hiding?” he asked. “Did something happen to you in the accident? Did you hit your head or something?” He shifted so he could keep her gaze as she averted her eyes. “We can work this out. There’s no need to be scared.”
    “I’m not hiding anything!” she said. “I’m trying to tell you that—well—I’m—”
    She slid off the barstool and moved away.
    “You can tell me anything,” he said. Genuine sincerity glistened in his chestnut eyes. “Anything. Whatever it is, I’ll help you through this. Just tell me exactly what happened.”
    “Okay. Well. I’m a mermaid,” she said. She exhaled triumphantly. “There. I said it.”
    He raised his eyebrows wordlessly. Perhaps she was just being overly optimistic, but his face didn’t give the impression that he thought she was totally crazy. Now that the first die was cast, she felt emboldened.
    “That’s how I survived the accident. Someone—or some-thing —pulled me from the wreckage. I don’t really remember much, but . . .”
    He looked intensely at her.
    “You don’t believe me, do you?” she asked.
    “Just—tell me more,” he said. “How do you know this? What makes you think that you’re a . . . mermaid?”
    “Well, I—I was pulled from my truck underwater by some— thing. Whatever it was, it saved me. And it was fast. It towed me away from my sinking truck and brought me to the surface to breathe when I needed to and it—it had a tail.”
    “None of this makes you a mermaid, Ish.” He glared at her. “How’d you get back here?”
    “Well, I didn’t have any clothes on and I was in this boat. I woke up, and there were all these stars. This drunk dude showed up and he took me to some other dude’s hut and that guy—”
    “I’m not sure I’m following. Some drunk dude found you? Naked? In a boat?”
    “Yeah, but I got away. And I ran for the ocean and dove in and then my legs became this tail—I’m not kidding—and it was so powerful and I felt so strong and I knew I could swim back to the States—”
    “A tail, huh?”
    Okay, now he was looking at her like she was crazy.
    “So you’re saying a mermaid rescued you after your truck went off a cliff. But then the mermaid left you in some drunk guy’s boat and so you grew your own mermaid tail and swam back here from Baja?”
    She didn’t move. She didn’t know what to say. The story did sound ridiculous.
    “You’ve been gone half a month. You couldn’t have been in the bottom of the boat for two weeks. You look fed. How’d you eat? What’d you eat?”
    “Fish wrapped in—I guess it was like kelp or something. It was tough.”
    “The kelp or the fish?”
    “Both.”
    “Was it cooked?”
    “Nope.”
    “So, sushi. You just ate it with your fingers?”
    “Kinda. Not really. I mean, yes, with the fingers. But no soy sauce. No ginger or wasabi or anything. Definitely no sake.”
    “There’s more to sushi than the accoutrements.”
    “I’m not joking, Allen.”
    “Neither am I.”
    She’d hoped the truth would set her free. Now, she just felt like a fool.
    Allen grew quiet, staring at her. He moved back into the kitchen and started scrambling the eggs in the frying pan.
    “I know this all sounds insane,” she said. “And impossible. I don’t know how it happened.” She glanced over toward the landing; the door was barely cracked, and she could hear Diane still gabbing away on the phone. She leaned in closer and lowered her voice. “I had a tail.