Night draws weary souls to sea. Jude has caught onto the pattern over the years: the aimless pacing from room to room. The slamming of doors. The stench of brine and liquor permeating through their living room. Even when morning reels in these despondent loved ones, bitter remnants of their departure linger in the household—a heavy humid thing.

Jude chokes on it tonight, the intensity of it all. Dad’s missing again. Sneaking off, as her mother puts it. Cowering away at any unfavorable emotion. This has been the case since Jude relied on pacifiers. The stubborn arguments. The ruthless crescendo. The sobering guilt. The convenient escape. Now grown enough to defend the rest of the household, Jude urges Mom to go back to bed this time, promising that she’ll track him down before sunrise.

Yearning to be swaddled within a dream, Jude ventures into the night thick with salt and fatigue. Weathered wooden planks groan under her stride. Folds of ink churn beneath the pier. Surrounded by a scatter of crushed aluminum cans, a familiar figure dangles his legs and fishing line over the edge. With his back to her, he listens to the lull of waves lapping against distant anchored boats. Likewise, the lull of alcohol roiling inside his gut.

For once, Jude stands taller than the man that raised her. This is the same looming presence that counted backwards from three until she cowered away to her bedroom. The one that skipped dinner afterwards and slept on the futon to avoid accountability. Now that Jude confronts him in the act, his slouch over the fishing pole barely resembles the burly presence she once feared.

“Thought I’d find you here,” she says to the back of his head.

Dad swivels toward her. Sweaty eyes. Fishing hook posture. He’s trashed, Jude realizes with disgust, just as her mother prophesied. A greeting oozes past his lips, some infantilizing nickname of hers that Dad uses against her wishes.

“Here Judy.” Dad thrusts a full can of beer in her hands. “Give the fishies a drink. Loosen ‘em up so that they’ll leap into our laps.”

Jude’s lip curls. “I think you’ve had enough to drink for one night.”

Her father deflates, resting the can at her feet.

“Glad to know my daughter thinks so highly of her old man.”

Jude recognizes that tone. To spare an unnecessary skirmish, she pops the tab and guzzles it herself. Mouthful after mouthful of toxic coping. She despises the taste of Dad’s jigsaw-vague expression more than she does the hops.

“Time to pack it up,” Jude orders.

With a sigh, Dad reels in his line and is met with resistance. A gelatinous lump breaks the surface. Moon jelly? Shortfin squid? No, neither of these. Just a sopping plastic grocery bag snagged on his line. To Jude’s horror, Dad plucks the sack free and tosses it back into the ocean. Wrestling the empty can from her slackened grip, he jiggles the tab free and feeds his hook through the hole.

Jude peels back his fingers. “That’s not—Dad, you can’t use beer tabs as bait.”

The strain in her tone mirroring her own mother’s exasperation, ignites a spark behind Dad’s pupils.

“Why the hell not? The ocean’s full of garbage,” he barks, sweeping a wide arm across the velvet stretch of sea. “Those scaly bastards don’t know the difference between nutrients and aluminum. They might even prefer the crunch.”

Tapping the lid of his cooler, he offers to slice open the bellies of tonight’s catches. Says more plastic than guts will belch out of the slits. Jude shakes her head, swiping the tabs from his hook and cramming them in her pockets.

“Maybe you should focus this energy on saving the planet instead of killing it.”

“Can’t save what’s already dead,” Dad sighs. “Wildlife, relationships, it’s all the same. We’re expected to feed them, even if all that we have left to give is junk.”

His explanation is sea fog to Jude’s ears once he rifles through his tackle box. In place of where the worms and lures should be are pieces of his so-called junk. Love letters addressed to her mother. Wrinkled roses. Birthday cards. Cassette tapes with corny titles scrawled in permanent marker.

Dense words lodge in Jude’s throat: this isn’t trash. Trash to the ocean, maybe, but priceless fortune to her mother. The hot contempt that has distorted her view toward her father now shrivels into bewilderment.

“Dad, I—” Jude’s breath hitches at a familiar glinting object her father secures to his hook, roughly the same size as the beer tab but a thousand times more important.

Her father casts his wedding ring into the abyss.

“No!”

Shoving him aside, Jude leaps off the pier. The cold plunge stuns her. Eyelids squeezed shut against irritants, she searches the empty murk but only grasps fish-disguised bottles. Tangles of mesh. Plastic six-pack manacles.

Dad’s ring is gone, lost among ambiguity. Does that make it junk now? Suspended among the deep, the pressure is too much to bear. She’d rather sink to the ocean floor to be picked clean than face the impending backlash to come. Witnessing Mom’s distress would only make Jude feel like trash.

Realization seizes her in a cough of bubbles. This is why he runs off.

A splash disturbs Jude’s panicked submersion. The newfound presence scoops her beneath the armpits and lifts her to the surface. This is her father’s grip, the same hands that cradled her as an infant.

“The ring,” Jude gasps. “I couldn’t find—”

Dad shushes her. “Never mind that, are you alright?”

An expendable figure wouldn’t fathom a response this sincere. Despite the contradictory whirlpool within her, Jude throws her arms around him. You’re not trash, she repeats into his chest, in hopes that her mother will sense it when she greets them dripping saltwater on the front porch. In hopes that her father will believe it for himself, too.