Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
PAUL
The morning starts with a pelican stealing my breakfast.
I’m on the deck of my boat eating a blueberry muffin—the last one from the bag I bought at the marina store—when a brown pelican the size of a Labrador lands on the railing, looks me dead in the eye, and takes it out of my hand.
Not a piece of it. The whole thing. One fluid motion, like a pickpocket who studied at an elite academy.
“Hey —”
The pelican swallows it in two bites and stares at me with no remorse or gratitude. Just the dead-eyed superiority of an animal that has decided I exist solely as a food delivery service.
“That was my breakfast.”
The pelican ruffles its feathers.
“I hope you choke on the wrapper.”
It doesn’t choke. It launches off the railing, clips my coffee mug with its wing on the way out, and sends lukewarm coffee cascading down the front of my white T-shirt.
I stand on my deck, soaked, muffin-less, watching a pelican fly away with my dignity. It’s seven a.m. This is going to be a great day. I can feel it.
I’m changing my shirt in the cabin when I hear Matt’s voice on the dock.
He’s early. That’s new. The Matt I’ve been observing for the past two days operates on a schedule that revolves entirely around himself—arrives when it suits him, leaves when he’s bored, checks his phone in the gaps between performing fatherhood.
But today he’s here before the kids are awake, carrying two coffees and walking toward Emma’s houseboat with purpose.
I pull on a clean shirt and don’t go outside.
Through the porthole, I watch him knock on Emma’s hull. The screen door opens. Emma appears in pajama pants and an oversized sweatshirt, her hair doing approximately nineteen things at once. She takes one of the coffees. They sit on the houseboat deck.
I can’t hear the conversation. I can see their faces—his animated, leaning forward, hands moving when he talks. Hers quieter. Listening. The way she holds the coffee cup with both hands, close to her chest, like a shield.
I should stop watching. This isn’t my conversation. This isn’t my business. Emma is a grown woman having coffee with the father of her children on her own deck, and I’m a forty-five-year-old man spying through a porthole like a character in a movie I’d be embarrassed to watch.
I step away from the porthole.
Step back.
Step away again.
Holly would be laughing at me right now. Full-body, head-thrown-back laughing. “Paul Spencer, you are a mess,” she’d say. And she’d be right.
I go to the dock office. Close the door. Open the logbook. Stare at it without reading a single entry. Holly’s sticky note is still tucked inside the front cover. Don’t forget to eat lunch.
A pelican stole my breakfast and I’m spying on the woman I love through a window the size of a dinner plate. Lunch feels optimistic.
Harold shows up at nine.
He’s wearing his fishing vest—the one with forty-seven pockets that each contain something inexplicable—and carrying a Tupperware container of tomatoes from his garden.
“These are for Emma,” he says, setting them on my desk. “Let her know the Cherokee Purples are ready and she should grab them before the squirrels do.”
“You could deliver them yourself. She’s on her houseboat.”
“She’s got company.”
“You noticed.”
“Son, I’ve been running this marina since before you could tie a bowline. I notice everything.” He settles into the chair across from my desk. “The ex-husband.”
“Matt.”
Harold frowns. "Did you see him shake her hand? Like she's a client he's closing. Smile that doesn't reach his eyes. That's not a man who came to see his kids. That's a man making a presentation."
“Dad.”
“I’m observing. Observation is free.”
“Your observations always come with opinions.”
“Opinions are free too. That’s the beauty of being seventy-two. Nothing I say costs a dime, and nobody can send me a bill.”
I don’t respond. Harold takes this as an invitation to continue, because silence has never once stopped a Spencer from talking when they’ve decided a point needs making.
“Your mother wore perfume to our third date,” he says.
“Nice stuff. Expensive. She never wore perfume—said it gave her headaches. But she wanted me to notice her, so she suffered through it. I noticed. I also noticed the headache she got an hour later and the way she powered through dinner pretending her skull wasn’t splitting open. ”
“Is this going somewhere?”
“People perform when they want something. The question is whether the performance has anything real behind it.”
He picks up a tomato from the Tupperware. Examines it. Sets it back down.
“Holly never performed,” he says. “Not once. She showed up exactly as she was every single day. That’s why you fell for her. And that photographer on the houseboat—she’s the same kind. No performance. Just real.”
“Dad.”
“I’m leaving. I’m leaving.” He stands up. Doesn’t leave. “One more thing.”
“Of course.”
“The man in the pressed khakis brought her coffee. You bring her solutions. There’s a difference between caffeine and commitment, son. Make sure she knows which one you’re offering.”
He takes a tomato from the Tupperware—one of Emma’s tomatoes—pops it in his mouth, and walks out whistling.
I love my father. I also want to launch him into the harbor on a regular basis.
The morning goes sideways at ten.
I’m replacing a section of railing near slip two—actual work, useful work, the kind of work that keeps my hands busy and my brain from spiraling—when Aidan appears.
“Mr. Paul!”
“Hey, bud.”
“Dad’s here. He showed up before we woke up. He brought Mom coffee and they’ve been talking on the deck for like an hour and Mom’s doing the thing where she holds her mug really tight, which Millie says means she’s thinking hard.”
I set down my drill. “That’s nice.”
“He said he wants to talk about being around more. Like, visiting more. Maybe even moving closer.”
The drill slips off the dock and falls into the water.
We both watch it sink. It’s a good drill. Cordless. Milwaukee. Two hundred and forty dollars.
“Was that important?” Aidan asks.
“Nope.”
“It looked important.”
“I have another one.”
I don’t have another one. That was my only drill. It’s currently settling into the mud at the bottom of the marina, and I’m standing here with my hands empty, watching my tools and my composure disappear into the same murky water.
“Anyway,” Aidan says, because eight-year-olds have the emotional triage skills of a golden retriever, “Dad wants to take us to the aquarium. Can you come?”
“That’s a dad-and-kids day, bud. You should enjoy it with him.”
“But you’re one of us too.”
I look at this kid. Sandy hair standing up in three directions. Shark tooth necklace. Stomper tucked under one arm even though he’s heading to an aquarium and not to bed. He said it like it was simple. Like it was obvious. Like family is something you just are when you show up enough times.
“Go have fun,” I say. “Tell me about it when you get back.”
“Will you be here?”
“I’m always here.”
He grins. Punches my arm—still too hard, still slightly off-target—and sprints back to the houseboat. I watch him go.
Then I sit on the edge of the dock and stare at the spot where my drill sank.
Moving closer. Matt wants to move closer. Matt, who couldn’t show up for a school play, who checked his phone eleven times at lunch, who has a climate-controlled garage full of miniature trains—that Matt wants to move closer.
And Emma held her coffee cup tight and listened.
They leave for the aquarium at eleven. All four of them in the silver SUV. Aidan waving out the back window. Millie with her book. Jenna with her earbuds. Matt behind the wheel, looking like a man who’s already rehearsing the next act.
I wave back at Aidan. Keep the smile on until the car turns the corner.
Then I go to the marina store, buy a replacement drill—a cheaper one, because I just threw two hundred and forty dollars into the ocean—and work on the railing until my arms burn.
Justin finds me at noon. He takes one look at my face and sits down on the dock without a word.
“Don’t pull the quiet trick on me,” I say.
“What quiet trick?”
“The Holly thing. Where you sit there and wait for me to crack.”
“I wasn’t pulling anything. I was resting.”
“You were resting with intent.”
He picks up a piece of sandpaper and starts working the rough edge of a dock board. We sand in silence for five minutes.
“He wants to move closer,” I say.
Justin keeps sanding. “Heard.”
“From who?”
“Harold. Who heard it from Grandma Hensley. Who heard it from Lottie. Who heard it from Emma.”
“So everybody knows.”
“Everybody knew before you did. That’s how Twin Waves works. Information moves faster than the tide.”
I sand a board so aggressively that I take off more wood than I intend to.
“Easy,” Justin says. “That board didn’t do anything to you.”
“I dropped my drill in the water.”
“The Milwaukee?”
“Yep.”
“That was a two-hundred-dollar drill.”
"Two-forty."
It slipped. That's what I told Aidan, who was watching from Emma's deck with wide eyes.
My hand slipped because I was distracted by a pelican landing.
Very plausible. Not at all related to Matt's rental car pulling into the lot, or the way Emma smiled when she saw him, or the fact that my grip went weak at the exact moment he stepped onto my dock like he belonged there.
Aidan said, "That looked expensive."
I said, "It's fine."
It was not fine. I watched two hundred and forty dollars sink to the bottom of the marina and I smiled at that kid like nothing was wrong, because his mother was twenty feet away hugging her ex-husband and I was not going to be the man who made a scene.
Justin winces.
“She hasn’t said anything to me,” I say. “Emma. She hasn’t come to the office. Hasn’t knocked. She sat on her deck with him drinking coffee and talking, and then they all left for the aquarium, and I’m here sanding boards with a forty-dollar replacement drill and no idea what’s happening.”
“What do you want to happen?”