Chapter 7
Confronted by the prospect of losing her job, Cece deploys a three-pronged strategy (bribery, reciprocity, and flattery) to keep her summer gig at Rayburn.
She isn’t about to get fired from two jobs in a month.
Last week’s conversation with Richie still fresh, she arrives at the docks in Noank just after sunrise, determined to win Santiago and Davi over.
What better way to show her commitment than doing their jobs for them?
She runs the risk of breaking another piece of equipment or forgetting a step in the process to get the boat ready, but she’s got nothing to lose.
The sun is only a suggestion along the horizon when Cece tops off the gas tank with diesel, checks the fuel lines, and hoses down the deck just for good measure.
Where there is grime or scum, Cece lets the hose run and scrubs at the areas with a brush.
It won’t be anywhere near spotless, but she wants it to look cleaned up by the time Santiago and Davi arrive.
The morning’s busywork serves another purpose, too—it keeps Cece’s mind off Morgan and the contents under his bathroom sink.
The tampons, the toothbrush—incontrovertible evidence of another woman, and not just any woman, but a woman who’d spent the night and didn’t care if keeping her toiletries at his house made her look clingy.
Cece has no right to be disappointed, and yet she is, which only irritates her more.
She’s the one who was worried about Morgan thinking this was more than a fling. She should be elated!
Cece doesn’t know whether they’re dropping racks today, but she’s gotta keep moving and heads back to the warehouse and starts stacking them, one after another, ten high.
Afterward, she heads inside the workshop to organize the tools, a task Santiago had asked her to do already but that she’d half-assed.
This time around, she takes her time and works meticulously.
She even organizes all the loose screws and nails that are scattered across the plywood worktable.
Nothing is left unaccounted for. And by the time she hears Santiago’s truck pull in, she steps back to admire her work on the pegboard.
It’s a wonder of efficiency and organization: zip ties, hot glue guns, measuring tapes, and spatulas for spreading fiberglass filler on the left side, and on the right, in descending order of size, hammers, wrenches, plyers, grippers, and socket wrenches.
The door cracks open and Santiago pushes his head inside.
Lips pursed, he gives Cece’s efforts a once-over and nods before closing the door.
Cece follows him, eager to deploy her other strategies of persuasion.
She hurries to her car while Santiago heads to the boat.
Davi is already on board and pacing the deck.
When she opens her car door, Cece’s greeted with an aroma of dough and custardy goodness.
She hopes the pastries are still fresh. That morning, she’d dragged herself out of bed at four a.m. and driven to Hartford.
She used to work with someone who was from there who’d raved about a Portuguese bakery just off Park Street.
The place didn’t open until six, but Cece had taken a chance.
She’d expected them to treat her like a crazy woman, knocking on the finger-smudged door at five in the morning, offering cash for their freshest batches of pastel de nata and bola de Berlim, but they couldn’t have been more pleased.
They’d even given her extra when she mentioned they were for some Portuguese oystermen she worked with.
This, too, was a risk, but a calculated one.
Santiago and Davi might not be Portuguese at all, in which case, Cece would be accused of all sorts of awfulness, but she’d heard them speaking to one another in a foreign tongue and was fairly certain she’d identified the language correctly; either that, or they were the tannest Russians she’d ever seen.
Paper bag in hand, Cece approaches the boat where Davi is talking to his father and pointing at the deck of the boat, mystified by its cleanliness. Something like pride swells in her chest. The two regard her with skeptical indifference.
“I brought you something.”
The gesture flummoxes Santiago, who stands with his hands on his hips. Davi eyes the bag like he has X-ray vision.
“Breakfast,” Cece says. “Pastries.”
Foot on the gunwale, Santiago leans over and retrieves her bribe. If the immaculate boat, tuned-up equipment, and organized tool wall don’t convince him to keep her around, maybe these will. He hands the bag to Davi, who eagerly opens it.
“Pastel de nata!” he shouts, holding up the golden custard in the morning light. “Your favorite.”
“We already ate breakfast.”
Davi stalks to the back of the boat.
“Where did you get those? There isn’t a Portuguese bakery for miles.”
“Hartford.”
“I guess you think because you brought me some baked goods from the motherland, tidied up, and cleaned the boat I’ll let you stick around.”
Fury builds in Cece’s chest, but she pushes it down, drowns it. “I don’t really care what you decide, but I’m here, so you might as well put me to work. And those pastries weren’t for you. They were for your son.”
They aren’t on speaking terms for the rest of the day.
Cece stays on land, carrying out the same menial tasks she’s done for weeks while Santiago and Davi head out on the boat.
When they return with a few racks and set to cleaning oysters in the tumbler, Cece keeps her distance, wary of pushing too hard.
Every few hours, Davi looks over in her direction, as if to apologize.
Cece wonders if Santiago let him eat the pastries, or if he tossed them overboard out of spite.
They cut out early at four o’clock, stripping their rubber waders off and carrying them to their truck.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Cece says to Santiago as he walks by.
“Suit yourself.”
The day had been an utter failure. Despite her best efforts, Cece’s made little headway.
If anything, she’s in a deeper hole. She hadn’t even been able to deploy her last stratagem: flattery.
It wasn’t really her fault. Altogether unappealing, rude, and pompous, Santiago was impossible to shower in adulation, real or imagined.
That night, long after Cece’s collapsed into bed and fallen into a fitful sleep, she’s jolted awake, heart pounding, sweat-soaked sheets clinging to her chest. For one brief terrifying moment, the bedroom is nothing but patchy darkness, and Cece doesn’t know where, or who, she is.
The unfamiliar confines—the claustrophobic low ceiling, the steady drip of a showerhead, a tinkling wind chime—bring a swift sense of dread, and Cece lies still, straining to identify whatever’s shaken her from sleep.
At Bucknell, wake-ups for swim practice were between 4 and 5 a.m. Cece used to revel in the predawn silence of campus while she made the long walk to the athletic center in her sweats and hoodie, drawstring bag hugging her armpits.
Back then, her first year on campus, before the shoulder surgeries, before she told her dad, tears in her eyes, enough was enough, she thrived on routine and structure.
Even without her father’s dogged encouragement, Cece likes to think she would have pursued swimming.
Within those lanes, goggles pressed against her eye sockets, hair pulled in a tight bun under her swim cap, the world nothing but a murmur beneath the water, Cece excelled.
Swimming suited her—a sport where all the variables are controlled, where the only competition is yourself.
It wasn’t so much the winning that drove Cece, although she did do a lot of that, too; it was the idea of improving against a fixed unit, of honing her craft to be faster than the time before.
While some of Cece’s teammates got nervous or fidgety before a big meet, these were the rare moments when Cece experienced a profound sense of calm.
She’d already done everything to be prepared; the pool was the same length, the lanes the same width, even the water was the same pH and alkaline levels as it always was.
There was nothing to fear—no unknown. Was there anything more beautiful than things going to plan? Back then, Cece didn’t think so.
It was after Cece’s third torn labrum, when she was still mulling surgery and the prospects of another lengthy rehab isolated from her teammates, that she began to imagine life outside swimming.
Even with a practical degree in statistics, the world beyond the college’s idyllic campus seemed erratic and arbitrary.
There were no guarantors of success, no rules to play by, only the promise of hustle and free-market systems. Cece’s lack of social capital and familial relations had only become more glaring during her time at Bucknell.
Unlike many of her classmates, there was no friend of a friend at Goldman Sachs, no VP at J.P.
Morgan in the form of an uncle, which was fine by Cece.
It just meant she had to work harder, prepare.
Like many anxious soon-to-be college graduates before her, Cece sought the help of the college career office.
The staff were a genial bunch, middle-aged women armed with turtlenecks tucked into corduroy pants and endless patience for helping squirrelly undergraduates.
After countless meetings, in which she grew increasingly anxious over the uncertainty of her future, one of the career officers, in a last-ditch effort, put Cece in touch with her brother who worked as an actuary.
Donald was a life actuary, he explained, dragging out his vowels like a true Wisconsinite over the phone. He worked for Nationwide developing life insurance and annuity policies for people based on risk factor data.