Chapter 16
SIXTEEN
PAUL
The yacht arrives on a Tuesday.
I know it’s coming. I’ve been preparing for weeks—reinforced the pilings, rebuilt the fender system, upgraded the electrical hookup to handle a vessel that probably uses more power than the rest of the marina combined. I’ve run the numbers. I’ve done the measurements. I’ve made the slip ready.
Nothing prepares me for the actual size of it.
It comes around the point just after sunrise, white and gleaming, catching the early light like it was designed to make everything around it look shabby.
Which it was. The thing is a hundred and twenty feet of Italian engineering and obscene wealth, gliding into my working marina the way a limousine pulls into a gravel driveway.
Justin is standing on the dock next to me. His shrimp boat—immaculate, practical, the pride of his life—is docked in the next slip over. We both watch the yacht approach in silence.
“Huh,” Justin says.
“Yeah.”
“That’s...a lot of boat.”
We stand there for a minute, not saying anything else, because there’s nothing to say. His shrimp boat is forty-two feet. My fishing vessel is thirty-six. Emma’s houseboat is maybe fifty. This yacht has a sun deck bigger than my father’s house.
The captain—because of course it has a captain, a hired professional who navigates yachts for a living, which is apparently a career that exists—eases the vessel into the reinforced slip with the kind of precision that makes me grudgingly respect him.
The dock creaks. The pilings hold. The fender system I spent three weeks building absorbs the impact exactly the way it should.
I don’t say anything about the fender system. But I’m satisfied.
Emma is on her deck. Of course she is—you can’t miss a hundred and twenty feet of white fiberglass pulling into the slip next door.
She’s standing at the railing with her camera already up, shooting the yacht as it docks, because Emma photographs everything, including things that are disrupting my entire operation.
“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” she says.
“It’s a vessel I need to secure properly, so if you could stop photographing it and let me work—”
“Look at the lines on the bow. Look at the way the light is hitting the hull right now. Paul, that’s—”
“Emma.”
She ignores me completely and keeps shooting. The shutter clicks mix with the sound of dock lines being tossed and the low rumble of the yacht’s engines powering down.
Aidan bursts out of the houseboat in his pajamas. “Is that a spaceship?”
“Does it have a pool?” he asks, not waiting for an answer to the first question.
“It has a hot tub.”
“That’s basically a pool for fancy people.” He turns to Emma. “Mom. Mom! Can I go on it?”
“Not right now, buddy.”
“But it’s right there.”
“A lot of things are right there. The ocean is right there. You don’t jump into that either.”
“I jump into the ocean all the time.”
“That’s—we’ll discuss that later.”
Millie appears on the deck with a book and her reading glasses and the composure of someone who has seen everything and is impressed by nothing. She looks at the yacht, looks at her book, and goes back inside.
Aidan is now attempting to count the portholes. He’s gotten to fourteen and is standing on a dock piling to see the other side, which means I’m going to have a heart attack before breakfast.
“Aidan. Get down.”
“I’m counting.”
“Count from the ground.”
“The ground doesn’t have the right angle.”
“The ground has the right amount of not-falling-into-the-water.”
He gets down. Immediately starts walking the length of the yacht with his arms spread, pacing it off in eight-year-old steps. “One, two, three, four—Mom, it’s a hundred steps long.”
“It is not a hundred steps long.”
“Ninety-seven. I might have doubled some.”
Steve the hermit crab chooses this moment to make a break for it. Aidan’s pocket—because of course he brought Steve on deck in his pajama pocket—produces a small brown crab that drops onto the dock and scuttles directly toward the yacht’s mooring line.
“Steve. Steve, no. That’s not our boat.”
I watch an eight-year-old in pajamas chase a hermit crab down my dock at six-forty-five in the morning while a four-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht idles in the slip behind him. This is my life. This is what I’ve built.
Emma catches Steve at the base of the mooring cleat. Hands him back to Aidan. “Pocket. Now.”
“He wanted to explore.”
“Steve can explore the houseboat. The houseboat is his jurisdiction.”
“Steve doesn’t recognize jurisdictions. He’s a free spirit.”
I turn to Justin. Justin is watching all of this like he just realized that the marina has become a sitcom and he’s a recurring character.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say something about how this dock used to be quiet.”
“It used to be quiet.” He takes a sip of coffee. “I kind of like it better this way.”
I don’t respond to that. I respond by checking the mooring lines on the yacht, which need checking, and not thinking about how I might agree with him.
Dawson appears on the dock, barefoot, hair still wet from the shower. He stares at the yacht the way most teenagers stare at sports cars.
“Dad.”
“I see it.”
“That’s the biggest boat I’ve ever seen.”
“Yacht.”
“What’s the difference?”
“About four million dollars.”
He grins. I don’t grin back, but my mouth does something involuntary that I cover by checking a dock cleat that doesn’t need checking.
Finch materializes next to Dawson because Finch has a sixth sense for anything interesting happening on the water. “Is that the wedding yacht?”
“No,” I say. “A different mega yacht just happened to park here. Coincidence.”
“Can we go on it?”
“No.”
“Can we go near it?”
“You’re near it right now. This is as near as you get.”
“Mr. Spencer.” Finch puts his hands together like he’s praying. “Please.”
“When the owners get here, you can ask them.”
“But you’re the dock master.”
“I’m the dock master of the dock. Once you step on that yacht, you’re in international luxury and I can’t help you.”
Finch and Dawson immediately start googling the yacht on Dawson’s phone.
Within three minutes, they’ve found the manufacturer’s website, the interior layout, the price—which makes Dawson whistle low—and a celebrity gossip article that says the yacht was previously owned by a tech billionaire who used it to host parties in the Mediterranean.
“Dad. A tech billionaire owned this yacht.”
“Fascinating.”
“It has four staterooms.”
“Still fascinating.”
“There’s a website that says the galley has a wine fridge and a separate champagne cooler. What’s the difference between a wine fridge and a champagne cooler?”
“About the same as the difference between a boat and a yacht. Money.”
Jenna drifts out of the houseboat in the deliberate, unhurried way of a teenager who refuses to be impressed by anything. She glances at the yacht. Her eyebrows go up one millimeter. She takes a photo for her Instagram story, types something, and goes back inside.
The whole interaction takes eight seconds. It’s the most efficient review of a multi-million-dollar vessel I’ve ever witnessed.
Dad’s golf cart hums down the dock ten minutes later. He pulls up next to the yacht, kills the engine, and sits there staring at it with the expression of a man seeing his marina at full potential for the first time.
“Well,” he says.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say ‘I told you so’ or ‘your mother would have loved this’ or both.”
“I was going to say she looks good in that slip.” He climbs out of the cart and walks the length of the yacht, one hand brushing the dock railing, nodding to himself. “New cleats?”
“Replaced them last week.”
“Good boy.” He pats my shoulder the way he’s been patting my shoulder since I was twelve, and I let him because some things aren’t worth fighting. “Your mother would have loved this.”
“There it is.”
“She would have been up at four in the morning to watch it dock. Would have made coffee for the whole crew.” He looks at the yacht, but he’s seeing something else.
“She liked big occasions. I liked small ones. That’s why we worked—she made me show up for things and I made her slow down enough to enjoy them. ”
He says it easily. The way he talks about Mom now—like she’s a memory he can carry without bleeding. I’m not there yet. With Holly, I’m not there yet.
“The wedding’s going to be something,” Dad says.
“It’s going to be chaos.”
“Same thing.” He winks at me and gets back in his golf cart. “I’m going to tell Vivian. She’ll want to see it.”
He means Grandma Hensley. He drives away humming something I don’t recognize, and I stand there on my dock between a mega yacht and a houseboat and wonder when my life became this.
Levi and Delilah arrive an hour later.
Delilah steps out of the SUV already talking—on her phone, gesturing with one hand, holding a binder in the other, wearing a sundress covered in flowers that might be an actual fabric pattern or might be her own handiwork. With Delilah, you never know.
Levi follows at his usual pace. The man never rushes.
Rock stars apparently don’t experience urgency the way the rest of us do.
He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt and sunglasses pushed up on his head, and he looks like a guy on vacation, which I suppose he is, except his vacation involves a yacht and a wedding and my marina.
“Paul!” Delilah waves from the parking lot. “She’s here! Isn’t she incredible?”
I look at the yacht. The yacht looks back at me with the quiet confidence of a vessel that costs more than my entire life.
“Arrived this morning,” I say, which is the most enthusiasm I can manage.
“Levi, tell him about the deck.”
“You tell him. You’re better at it.”
“The sun deck has a retractable awning and a sound system and there’s a hot tub—a hot tub, Paul—and the ceremony space at the bow can seat a hundred and fifty people and the salon has a full bar and —”