Chapter 14 #2
“She had this thing where if she decided you were wrong, she’d just look at you. Wouldn’t argue. Wouldn’t yell. She’d just stand there with this expression that made you feel like you’d disappointed the entire concept of decency. Dawson does the same thing. Learned it from her.”
“That sounds effective.”
“It was devastating. I once left my boots on the kitchen floor and she gave me that look and I didn’t leave my boots anywhere but the closet for the rest of our marriage.
” The almost-smile happens before I can stop it.
“She was a first-grade teacher. Twenty-two six-year-olds every year. She ran that classroom like a gentle dictatorship. The kids worshipped her. Parents would request her specifically.”
I’m talking about Holly. In another woman’s kitchen.
And Emma isn’t flinching. She’s leaning against the counter with her coffee and she’s just listening.
Holly was structured and sure. Emma is chaos and warmth.
Holly organized everything. Emma can’t find a spatula in her own drawer. They would have been best friends.
“She sounds wonderful,” Emma says.
“She was.” I look out the galley window.
The marina. The dock. The water. “She was the person who made everything make sense. When she was alive, I knew who I was. And then she was gone and I was still Dawson’s dad and Harold’s son and the guy who ran the marina, but the part that held everything together was missing. ”
“I don’t talk about her enough,” I say. “Dad tells me that. Justin tells me that. Dawson never says it but I can see it—he wants to hear about his mom and I can’t —” I uncross my arms. Cross them again.
“I kept everything. Her books are still in a box on my boat. There’s a note she left in the marina logbook—just a sticky note.
Gone to get Dawson, back by four, don’t forget to eat lunch. Her handwriting. I can’t pull it out.”
“Don’t pull it out.”
“It’s old.”
“Don’t pull it out.”
She says it simply. Not sentimental. Just certain. And something in my chest loosens. Half a turn. Like a bolt that’s been rusted in place finally giving way.
“Loving something new doesn’t mean the old thing stops mattering,” she says. “You know that, right? Harold added new slips to this dock. He didn’t tear down the originals to do it. He just built alongside them.”
“You’re comparing my dead wife to dock infrastructure.”
“I’m comparing grief to a marina, which honestly tracks for this family.”
I laugh. An actual laugh. Not the almost-laugh. A real one. Small, but real. Emma’s face lights up and I realize she’s been waiting for that—not the almost version, the real one.
“She would have liked you,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“She would have loved you. You would have been best friends and ganged up on me and I would have lost every argument.” I pause. “She liked people who showed up loud. She said quiet people already had enough friends.”
Emma laughs. It comes out wet, and she swipes at her eyes, and I don’t flinch because I understand what it means to stand in a kitchen with someone who sees you and not know whether to run or stay.
“I haven’t done this in a long time,” I say. “Any of it. Breakfast. Talking. Being in someone’s kitchen because an eight-year-old yelled at me from a dock.” I pause. “I’m going to be bad at it.”
“You just made perfect pancakes.”
“Pancakes have a recipe. There’s no recipe for —” I gesture between us. Vague. Encompassing everything. “This.”
“There’s kind of a recipe. Show up. Be honest. Don’t disappear into a garage.”
“I don’t have a garage.”
“Then we’re already ahead.”
My hand stops next to hers on the counter. An inch between my fingers and hers. Neither of us closes it.
I should leave. I should go back to my boat and my office and the life I know how to operate.
Things with rules and routines. Things I know how to fix.
This—standing in a kitchen with a woman who just compared my grief to a marina and somehow made it make sense—this I don’t know how to fix. Because it’s not broken. It’s just new.
“I should probably —”
“Yeah.”
“The charter bookings are still —”
“Yeah.”
Aidan yells from his room that Steve has escaped his enclosure and is making a run for the bathroom and would someone please bring a cup and also Steve might be in the toilet but everyone should stay calm.
I close my eyes. “The crab is in the toilet.”
“Possibly.”
I open my eyes, look at Emma, then look down the hall.
“I’ll get the crab,” I say, because evidently this is who I am now. A man who rescues hermit crabs from toilets. Spencer men. Truly a gift to romance.
Aidan is standing outside the bathroom door with the enclosure in his hands.
“He went under the door,” Aidan says. “He’s fast when he’s motivated.”
“Crabs don’t belong in bathrooms.”
“You don’t know Steve. Steve is exceptional.”
I get on my knees. Steve is on the rim of the toilet, one claw gripping the porcelain, his shell tilted at an angle that suggests he regrets his choices. I cup my hands around him and lift.
“Got him.”
“Steve, you’re grounded!” Aidan takes him back. “No more unsupervised bathroom privileges!”
I stand up. My knees pop. I’m forty-two years old and I just kneeled on a houseboat bathroom floor to rescue a hermit crab, and somehow this is the most honest thing I’ve done all morning.
Not the confession. Not the dishes. This.
Getting on the floor for a kid’s pet because it mattered to him, and because I was here.
I come back to the kitchen.
“Steve is fine. Made it to the rim but not past it.”
“Thank you for rescuing my son’s crab from the toilet.”
“This is not how I expected this morning to go.”
“How did you expect it to go?”
I don’t answer that.
“I should go,” I say. I set down the dish towel—her dish towel, the one with the faded lobsters—and walk toward the door.
I’ve got one foot on the dock and one foot still on her boat when Dad’s golf cart hums down the dock.
Of course. Of course it’s now. The man has a radar.
He pulls up. Takes in the scene—me, half on Emma's houseboat, dish towel still over my shoulder, two coffee mugs visible through the galley door. His face does the thing. The slow smile.
"Morning," Dad says.
"Morning."
"Emma." He waves at her like they're old friends, because in his mind they already are.
"Hi, Harold." She waves back, easy and warm, and I watch my father light up the way he does around people who aren't me.
He looks at the coffee mug. The dish towel. My ears, which I'm certain are red.
Dad says nothing. He says nothing so loudly it fills the entire marina.
"Don't," I say.
"I didn't say anything."
"You're thinking it."
“I’m an old man sitting in a golf cart. I’m not thinking anything.” He adjusts his cap. “I’m just here to remind you the Langley charter is at two and the bilge pump on C-7 needs looking at. But you’d know that if you were in your office instead of —” He gestures at everything. “— elsewhere.”
“I had breakfast.”
“I can see that.” His mustache is trying to escape his face. “Pancakes?”
“How do you know it was pancakes?”
He nods toward the dock, where Aidan is now giving Steve a marina tour with narration that can be heard on the mainland.
“Your son told me when he walked past my cart. He said, and I’m quoting, ‘Mr. Harold, Mr. Paul made the best pancakes in the world and he’s a regular now, which means he has to come to every breakfast forever. It’s a rule I just made.’”
I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“I like that rule,” Dad says. “I might adopt it myself.”
“Dad.”
“Langley charter. Two o’clock. C-7.” He puts the cart in reverse. “And Paul?”
“What.”
“Your mother made me wait three arguments before I got breakfast privileges. You did it in one.”
He drives away.
I watch him go. Pinch the bridge of my nose again.
“He’s going to tell everyone,” I say.
“Probably.”
“By tonight the book club will have a group text about it.”
“They probably already do.”
I step onto the dock. Both feet off her boat. Hands in my pockets. Looking at her on her deck. Wanting to say the thing I rehearsed at dawn on my own deck—the thing that got obliterated by pancakes and hermit crabs and model trains.
“Thanks for breakfast,” I say. Which is not what I want to say.
"Thanks for breakfast," I say. Which is not what I want to say.
"Thanks for the pancakes."
"And the crab rescue."
"And the crab rescue."
We're repeating each other like two people who forgot how conversations work. I should leave. I should have left thirty seconds ago.
"I'll see you," I say.
"You live ten feet away. You'll see me whether you want to or not."
“Yeah.”
I walk away. Down the dock, past Millie reading in her shade, past Aidan narrating the bait shop to a crustacean, toward the office and the life I know how to operate.
I don’t turn around. I want to. But turning around means going back, and going back means staying, and I’m not sure I deserve that yet.
I slow down at the corner. Just slightly. Then I go to work.
In the dock office, the marina logbook is on the shelf behind my desk. I pull it down. Open it to the page I always open it to. Holly’s sticky note, her handwriting, slightly faded but still there. Gone to get Dawson, back by four, don’t forget to eat lunch.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I put the logbook back. And I pick up the phone and call the Langleys about their deposit. And I don’t pull out the sticky note. And I don’t think about the fact that for the first time in a very long time, the list of things I care about has gotten longer.
Except I do think about it.
All day.