He was on a salvage job outside Baia de Todos os Santos harbor in Salvador, Brazil, working on a faltering BP oil tanker that had run aground after a monstrous storm. A big job, three weeks, but the tanker was wedged fast into the mud and the work was not nearly as dangerous or technical as most of his gigs. The money on the big corporate salvage jobs was fantastic, even for a welder, and he had flown Sienna and Mason down as soon as his son’s preschool graduation was over. Brian had missed the graduation, but he wouldn’t miss his son’s first days of summer vacation. He could still remember his old man picking him up after he’d finished kindergarten, down at the end of that long gravel road on a warm late spring day. No kindergarten graduation back in those days, but his father had let him know he’d done well, shaking his hand and then offering him a bottle of Coca-Cola, dripping ice water from the old green Igloo cooler in the box of the GMC farm truck. Mason slept soundly the first night in the apartment the company had rented for him, a nice place on the western edge of Salvador’s Barra neighborhood, Mason’s room adjoining theirs so they had a bit of privacy.
