Chapter 6 #2
The houseboat door opens and Emma steps out onto the deck.
She's changed out of the pajamas—shorts and a tank top now, hair pulled back, camera bag over one shoulder.
She pauses at the railing and watches Harold with the boys.
I can't see her expression from here, but I can read her posture—the slight tip of her head, the way her weight shifts to one hip. Stillness.
Then she looks toward the office.
I step back from the window. Which is absurd. I'm a forty-two-year-old man in my own office. I am allowed to look out my own window. I am not hiding.
I am also not going back to the window until she's walked past.
The phone rings. Mrs. Kimball, wanting to know if her husband left his reading glasses on the rental boat again. (He did. They're in the cup holder.) Two college kids wanting to book a kayak. A vendor confirming the fuel delivery for Thursday.
Normal. Routine.
The door opens.
“Knock knock.” Lottie is standing in the doorway holding two cups of coffee. Her red hair is in a ponytail today, and she's wearing what appears to be one of Emma's sweatshirts—too big through the shoulders, sleeves rolled at the wrists. “I brought a peace offering.”
“For what?”
“For the breaker trip this morning. And for what's about to happen.”
She sets one of the cups on my desk.
“What's about to happen?”
“Mitch just asked your father if they can practice knots on the boats. The actual boats. With actual ropes that are attached to actual things.”
I'm on my feet before she finishes the sentence.
“Relax.” She holds up a hand. “Harold said no. He redirected them to the practice cleats. I just wanted to see your face.”
She smiles. It's a smile that says I understand more about this situation than you'd like, and I don't know how to respond to that, so I sit back down and pick up the coffee.
It's good. Better than the gas station coffee I've been drinking for the past decade, which means Emma made it, which means it came from the possessed coffee maker on the twenty-amp circuit.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Emma made it. She said to tell you she used the staggered appliance system and the breaker held.”
“It's been three hours. That's not a trend.”
“She also said to tell you she's color-coded the schedule.”
“Is she serious?”
“She laminated it.” Lottie leans against the doorframe. “She's like that. Commits to the bit. When her ex told her the houseboat was a terrible idea, she made a PowerPoint with charts about waterfront property values and the psychological benefits of coastal living.”
“Did it convince him?”
“No. She did it anyway.” Lottie takes a sip of her own coffee. “Emma doesn't wait for permission. She just figures out the best way forward and goes.”
I don't know why she's telling me this. I don't know why she's standing in my office drinking coffee like we're friends. We met yesterday. She watched me grunt my way through a dolphin tour while my father narrated my emotional development to three eight-year-olds.
“Lottie.”
“Yes?”
“Did Emma send you in here?”
“No. She'd be mortified if she knew I was here. She thinks I'm getting sunscreen from the car.” Lottie straightens up. “I wanted to say thanks. For yesterday. The boat trip. It was the first time my kids have been happy—actually happy, not performing-happy-for-mom—since the divorce.”
Her voice catches. Just for a second. Then she smooths it over with a practiced smile.
“That was Dad,” I say. “Not me.”
“Your dad drove the boat. You caught Mitch before he went overboard. That was you.”
I remember. Mitch had been reaching for a line and his center of gravity shifted and I'd moved without thinking—grabbed his life jacket strap and hauled him back before his sneakers hit the water.
It wasn't heroic. It was reflex—a lifetime around boats and kids, and you develop an instinct for which direction a body is about to fall.
“He was fine,” I say.
“He was absolutely going overboard. You just didn't let him.” She taps the doorframe twice. “Enjoy the coffee, Paul.”
She leaves. The office is quiet again. Just the hum of the computer, the distant sound of Harold with the boys, and water doing what it always does.
I pick up the coffee. Take a sip.
It's really good.
I lean toward the window—nobody's watching—and Emma is down at the far end of the dock, crouched at the waterline with her camera.
She's photographing the shallows—a heron, maybe, or the way light hits the oyster shells.
Her whole body is still the way photographers get when they're locked on a shot, every ounce of attention focused through the lens.
In nine months, she's tripped the breaker fourteen times, hosted a book club meeting on the aft deck that kept me awake until ten thirty, let her eight-year-old name a crab that now lives under my dock, and smiled at me in a way that makes me feel like I'm standing in direct sunlight.
I don't want to feel this. I'm not built for it anymore. The part of me that knew how to open up—how to let a person in and trust that they'd stay—that part went quiet a long time ago, and I've made my peace with the silence.
But she keeps smiling. And my father keeps scheming.
And her kid named the crab Steve, and that's the part that gets me.
Not the smile, not the warmth, not the way she looks in the morning holding an empty mug.
The crab. Named Steve. Living under my dock like he belongs there, like everything Emma touches eventually decides to stay.
My throat tightens. I swallow against it and turn back to the logbook.
The afternoon passes the way marina afternoons do—a series of small problems that add up to a full day. A loose cleat on B dock. A bilge pump that needs replacing on the charter boat. A tourist who wants to know if he can fish from the fuel dock. (He cannot.)
At four o'clock, I'm on my knees at the junction box behind the boathouse, replacing a corroded wire terminal, when Jenna's voice comes from above me.
“You're doing that wrong.”
I look up. Emma's sixteen-year-old is standing on the dock, arms crossed, phone in her back pocket for once. She's wearing a Twin Waves Marina cap that I'm fairly certain belongs to Dawson, though I'm not going to ask how she got it.
“Excuse me?”
“The terminal. You're using a butt connector. You should use a heat-shrink connector. Better waterproofing.”
I stare at her. “How do you know that?”
“YouTube.” She says it like it's obvious. “Also, my mom's houseboat has the same junction box and I've watched four videos on why it keeps tripping.”
I look at the butt connector in my hand. Then at the heat-shrink connectors in my tool bag, which I was going to use but hadn't gotten to yet.
“I was getting to that,” I say.
“Sure.” She sits down on the dock, legs dangling over the edge. She doesn't say anything else. Just watches me work the way Dawson used to when he was younger—quiet, studying, filing things away.
I switch to the heat-shrink connector. She nods once, barely perceptible, like I've passed a test I didn't know I was taking.
“Your son said you built most of this dock yourself,” she says after a while.
“Rebuilt. The original was here. I replaced the boards, reframed the posts, added the finger piers.”
“That's cool.”
It's the most Jenna has said to me since Emma moved in. She's been treating me like a piece of marina furniture—an obstacle she walks around without acknowledging. This is different.
“Your mom know you're down here?” I ask.
“She's editing photos. Lottie's watching the little kids.” She picks at a splinter on the dock board. “It's loud on the houseboat right now. Six people. You know.”
I do. I know what it's like to need quiet and not know how to ask for it. I know what it's like to be sixteen and feel like every room you walk into is already full.
“You can sit here anytime,” I say. “It's usually quiet.”
She doesn't thank me. Doesn't gush. Just nods and pulls out her phone, and we exist in the same space without talking for the next twenty minutes while I finish the terminal and she scrolls through whatever sixteen-year-olds scroll through.
When she gets up to leave, she pauses.
“The cap is Dawson's,” she says. “He lent it to me because the sun was in my eyes. Before you make a thing of it.”
“I wasn't going to make a thing of it.”
“Your face already did.”
She walks back toward the houseboat, and two things hit me at once.
Jenna watches YouTube videos about marine electrical, which means she's been thinking about the houseboat's problems and trying to solve them on her own.
And she chose to sit here, with me, in the quiet, when she could have gone anywhere.
My chest does the tightening thing again. The same one from yesterday, watching Dad light up with the kids. The same one from this morning, watching Emma hold an empty mug like a security blanket.
I pack up my tools and go back to the office.
The coffee is cold now. I finish it anyway and open the logbook.
Slip 12—breaker trip, 6:47 a.m. Load management discussed with tenant. Resolved.
I stare at what I've written. Then, before I can think about it too hard, I add:
Shore power upgrade—slip 12. Get estimate.
It's practical. The circuit needs upgrading if she's going to keep living there with six people on board. It has nothing to do with the coffee. Nothing to do with the empty mug or the laminated schedule or the way she said thanks for checking on it like I'd done her a favor instead of my job.
I close the logbook. Pick up the cold coffee. Drain it.
Outside, my father is teaching three eight-year-olds to tie a cleat hitch. The woman in slip twelve is photographing herons in the shallows. My son is putting an outboard back together with hands that look like his mother's.
And I'm sitting here getting an estimate for a shore power upgrade I swore I'd never do.
Holly would be laughing at me right now.