Chapter 5 #3
“Me neither is the short answer,” Cece says after taking pity on him.
“How’d you end up working for that Richie Rayburn? Doesn’t seem like your usual line of work.”
“What gave it away?”
“Now you’re just searching for compliments…Your hands mostly.”
Two weeks of oyster work and her hands are still in good shape, except for a few new callouses and chipped nails. Cece does her best not to weigh the cost-benefit analysis of being truthful in this moment. Be honest, she thinks. What do you have to lose that you haven’t already lost?
“I saw an ad online and was desperate to try something new and get out of Stamford. My fiancé and I broke up a month ago. We…he lives there.”
Morgan looks out at the water contemplatively. Cece can’t tell how this news has landed, his beard making his face inscrutable.
“I also lost my job. He didn’t react well,” she says before he can respond.
“Sorry to hear,” Morgan says. “Getting fired’s no fun.”
“You’ve had experience?”
Morgan grins. Those perfectly skewed teeth again. “God…more than I can count. Waitering gig at this real hoity-toity spot in Provincetown. A roofing job up in Portsmouth for a total crook. Then there was a welding apprenticeship…So yeah…I’ve been fired a few times in my day.”
Cece waits for him to say something or ask her questions about the implosion of her engagement, but he doesn’t.
His seeming disinterest is so palpable, it makes Cece wonder whether she said it aloud at all.
Waves slap against the boat’s prow, a hypnotizing rhythm.
“It was my decision to call it off,” she says, unable to resist to urge to clarify her situation.
“It’s still hard to end things, even when it’s the right thing to do.”
That’s the problem! Cece thinks. She doesn’t know whether it was the right choice.
“But whatever reasons you had,” Morgan continues. “I’m sure they were the right ones.”
Cece wonders if he’s just saying all this to make her feel better but decides not to question him. It is making her feel better. Isn’t that what matters? “Thanks.”
“So what was the gig you got fired from?”
It takes Cece a moment to understand Morgan’s moved on to the next subject, no longer interested in the juicy details of her failed relationship. Surprised, but mostly relieved, she tells him about her career in what feels like another life.
“An actuary…Aren’t those the people who help insurance companies predict when you’re gonna die?”
“There are different types,” Cece says, sounding more defensive than she wants to. “You’re talking about a life actuary. They make sure the insurance company models are sustainable. But we do all kinds of work: pensions, property insurance, risk management. It’s just the science of risk.”
“Science of risk.”
“Using statistical tools to determine the probability of something happening.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Not really,” Cece says. “I mean, you don’t even need an advanced degree for it.”
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“What?”
“Make yourself small. Belittle your accomplishments, at least on my account.”
“Force of habit,” Cece says. “I guess I’m still figuring things out.”
“You ever wonder if that’s just life? Figuring things out? Like maybe there’s no moment where you eventually wake up and everything makes sense.”
The idea terrifies Cece, but she cracks a smile anyway.
With Morgan here, now, such things seem possible.
He’s different; he listens, not just to what she says, but how she says it.
Cece gets the sense that Morgan would treat her the same whether she’d attended Harvard or the community college up in Norwich.
And if she’s being honest with herself, which isn’t always the case, she doesn’t understand how someone can be so unpretentious and secure.
On their way back, Morgan wants to know why Lorraine hates him so much.
Cece says that hate’s a strong word but that the ongoing house renovation isn’t earning him any allies in the neighborhood.
There’s more to it, Morgan says, that she’d begrudge him even if he had the nicest house on the block.
“All those professors act like the college is doing the town a favor,” he shouts over the chop of waves and whistling wind, “like the townies should be grateful for the part-time jobs in their dining hall.” There is a hard bitterness to his words, and for a moment, Cece wonders if this is the real Morgan, underneath the kind and mellow demeanor.
She thinks about what Lorraine told her about the police showing up outside his house.
As quickly as it appears, Morgan’s hostility melts away, and he shrugs his shoulders, defeated, as if to say, This is just the way of the world.
Heading up the river, Morgan lets Cece take the wheel and shows her how to read the water.
He runs through the terminology: starboard, port, stern, and bow.
Approaching the shipyard, he teaches her how to throttle down and reminds her to throw the rubber fenders over the side before bringing them up against the mussel-covered pilings.
They walk the length of the boat, and Morgan instructs Cece on how to tie a bowline knot and then a cleat hitch, the rope heavy in her hands.
He stands behind her, beard tickling her neck, and recites a trick to help her remember, his voice thrumming against her back: “Up through the rabbit hole, round the big tree; down through the rabbit hole, and off goes he.”
“Or she,” Cece says.
Morgan chuckles. “Or she.”
Cece leans back into him then, his chest sturdy and wide, and for the briefest of moments, she allows herself to imagine what this kind of life might be like—risk be damned.