Ten
I SPENT THE next week trying to make the “Day in the Life” happen.
Hutch had said no way in hell ? We’d just have to see about that.
I decided that if I couldn’t get him to say yes, I would come clean and tell him that my job was on the line.
But I didn’t want to have to do that. I didn’t want to abuse his sense of pity.
I wanted to talk him into it, fair and square.
I cornered him with lists of reasons why telling his story would inspire the world—but none of them worked. I tried arguing that Rue would be proud of him—but he said she was proud enough already. I made an impassioned argument that the world was on a slippery slope of self-centered thoughtlessness that we all needed to push back against.
But his no held firm.
I tried catching him at different times of the day, too: while swimming laps, or running sprints, or doing pull-ups. I tried asking as we carpooled to and from the air station. I practiced arguments in the mirror to myself—from detailing how stepping outside our comfort zones could help us grow emotionally to explaining patriotism to a person in the military .
But, yeah: nothing.
The only argument that had any promise was also the one that seemed morally wrong: to tell him that I needed to be rescued.
I drew the line at that—at first. But as time wore on and his rejections piled up, I started to wonder.
I did need to be rescued, after all.
I wasn’t going to blackmail him. Or force him. I would just give him the full picture. He was free to make whatever choice he wanted. You could even argue, I decided, that the true morally suspect behavior was withholding information from him that he might have been interested in.
The truth is, it’s hard to make yourself ask for something that you know the person you’re asking doesn’t want to give.
Toughen up! I pep-talked myself. This is your career.
But what was I going to do, interrupt him in a preflight meeting? Demand his help over the sound of the sewing machine while he was mending his gear? Stop a safety training as he walked the crews through the items stashed in the pockets of their flight vests? Was saving my job really more important than Hutch teaching these folks about the knives, rations, oxygen tanks, signal mirrors, and life rafts that might one day save their lives?
This was the kind of thing Hutch did all day.
Can you even imagine?
Picture it: Hutch describing, say, the technique for placing a tourniquet on a victim, including serious details like “If you can’t get the bleeding to stop, add a second tourniquet,” and adding, half joking: “Just twist it until they scream and then give it one more twist.” And then me, on the heels of that, jumping in to say, “I’m so sorry to interrupt. Quick question: I’m in danger of getting fired. Can I sleep over at your house and film you jumping rope shirtless?”
No. Just no.
My problems, my worries, my whole life seemed positively silly in comparison.
For example—safety tip from Hutch in that same meeting that I sat in on: “If you’re ever in a boating accident, and you smell fuel in the water, do not launch your flares.”
I mean, the man was on another level.
He didn’t need some person he barely knew putting more demands on him.
I might have dropped the subject entirely—if not for the drumbeat of Cole’s texts.
Did you ask again?
Better hurry up.
That dude from California just got the axe.
Plus, I was busy. This job was a steep learning curve for a person who knew nothing about the military. Coast Guard terms I learned in the first week alone included: rollers for waves; sortie for a trip out in the helicopter; ensembles for the different swim gear ASTs wore for different weather conditions; night sun for the external spotlight over the waves in the dark. Plus, SAR for “search and rescue,” PIW for “person in the water,” and NVGs for “night-vision goggles.”
Oh, and this one seemed important: bingo . As in, “to hit bingo .” In the helicopter. Which meant to reach the point where, if you didn’t turn around and RTB (“return to base”) immediately , you would not have enough fuel to make it back to shore.
A lot of new terminology. None of it trivial.
I kept a notebook and wrote it down, went back and highlighted, and had to ask Hutch endless questions like, “I’m sorry: What’s a VFR chart?”
Plus, can I just add? Even when I wasn’t hauling ass to get up to speed on military terms, talking to Hutch was also just… fun. He was an interesting guy. Watching him go through his day at the air station prompted endless questions in my head.
And don’t forget: I was making a video about him.
All day, I followed him around with a camera, and then, after I got back to the Starlite, I went through the footage. Hutch basically took up 90 percent of my waking hours. When I wasn’t talking to him, I was filming him, and when I wasn’t filming him, I was combing through the footage, looking for the best moments.
And do you want to know what I saw?
Hutch holding the door for people. Hutch sweeping the air station hangar while humming “Heart and Soul.” Hutch stopping to gather up litter in the parking lot. Hutch genuinely laughing at other people’s jokes. Hutch picking up breakfast tacos for the crew. Hutch offering other people his umbrella in the rain and insisting that he didn’t mind getting wet. And one I saw over and over on the footage that I didn’t quite understand: Hutch picking up pennies whenever he saw them on the ground, checking them out, and then tossing them back down so someone else could have the good luck.
“What’s the deal with the pennies?” I asked one time, on our commute home.
“The pennies?”
“You always look at pennies.”
“Do I?”
“You check them when you get change. And you go through the coin jar in the lounge. And you always pick them up if you see them on the ground.”
“Everybody does that. It’s good luck.”
“Only if you keep them. But you don’t.”
“I have enough luck as it is.”
“It’s like you’re looking for something,” I said then. “What are you looking for?”
Hutch looked over. Then he said, “After my mom died, when I was a kid, I got this idea that if I could find a penny from the year she was born, I would know she was okay. So I started looking. And now I collect them.”
“You collect coins?”
“No. I collect pennies from 1965. Only pennies. Only 1965. The year my mom was born.”
“Are they valuable?”
“They are to me.”
“How many do you have?”
Hutch shrugged. “A jarful or so. I haven’t counted in a while. I just like finding them, you know? It’s like my mom’s saying hi.”
“Huh,” I said. “I thought you just really loved pennies.”
“Naw,” Hutch said. “I just really loved my mom.”
ONE THING WAS for sure: Cole Hutcheson could not have been more wrong about his older brother. He wasn’t a love hater. Or an empty machine. Or a strong silent type. He wasn’t empty of thoughts, or devoid of feelings.
And he wasn’t hard to talk to at all.
He was almost too easy.
He was so easy that I had to make a rule for myself never to ask him about rescue-swimmer things in the off-hours, or military things, or job things—lest I waste material that should go in the video.
So we talked on our commutes about favorite music, and favorite movies, and favorite foods. We talked about old friends and places we’d lived. We talked about bucket lists, and mistakes we’d made, and things we still hoped to get right.
It turned out, Hutch was a mad fan of nature shows—though he called them wildlife podcasts to make them sound more exciting. He was a fountain of trivia about the natural world, happily explaining how most insects taste with their feet, and how dogs have two compartments in their noses—one for breathing and one for holding smells—and how ducks have wraparound vision and can see the entirety of the sky without having to turn their heads.
If we ever had a quiet moment on our commute, I could just say, “Tell me about bats,” and off he’d go.
But it wasn’t just Hutch talking on those drives.
Good listeners make it easy to overshare, and Hutch was a shockingly good listener. Before I knew it, I was saying all kinds of things that mattered. Sentence after sentence would just burble up and happen . I told him about my mom leaving us when I was a kid and running off with her dentist. “Her dentist ,” I said. I told him about Beanie’s self-help obsession. I told him about Lucas getting famous, and how things fell apart. I even told him about the way I’d proposed to Lucas—almost a month before he had proposed to me.
“You proposed to him first? And then he proposed to you again later?”
I nodded. “We had these four bridges that went over this stretch of freeway near our house, and they had cyclone fences on them. You know those ones with the twisted wires?”
“Yeah.”
“People used to stick Styrofoam cups in the holes between the wires to spell out team names and stuff. Or like, ‘Go to the prom with me, Stella!’”
“Got it.”
“And one day I started thinking I might do a Burma-Shave proposal on those bridges.”
“What’s Burma-Shave?”
“It’s an old-timey shaving cream. And back when highways were first becoming a thing, they used to put rhyming signs by the side of the road to advertise. So, have you ever heard the rhyme, ‘Don’t stick your arm out too far. It might go home in another car’?”
“Yeah. We said that as kids.”
“That’s Burma-Shave! Each phrase was on a different sign, so you’d pass them in real time as you drove.”
“Huh.”
“There were tons of them—brilliant ones. Like: ‘Special seats—reserved in Hades—for whiskered guys—who scratch their ladies.’ Or ‘If your peach—keeps out of reach—you better practice—what we preach.’ Or—this is my favorite: ‘Soap may do—for lads with fuzz—but sir, you ain’t—the kid you wuz.’”
“These are brilliant.”
“I was freelancing for a documentary about the company, so I had those rhymes in my head all the time. And then one day I just heard one in my head, proposing to him, and I decided to write it in cups on those four bridges—and then drive underneath them with Lucas.”
“What was the rhyme?”
“‘Make you happy?—Yes I can!—Lucas won’t you—be my man?’”
Hutch nodded, impressed. “Genius.”
“Right? But it didn’t work.”
Hutch frowned and glanced over.
“I had to drive him under the bridges three times before he noticed. And then, when he finally saw it, he refused to give me an answer.”
“He—what?”
“He said that guys should propose to girls, and not the other way around.”
A new type of frown from Hutch. A That’s crazy frown.
“So he never answered. But then he took me to a fancy restaurant a month later and did it ‘right.’ Like with flowers and candles.”
“Your way was better.”
“Right?! Thank you.”
“If somebody proposed to me that way, I’d have said yes before the last bridge.”
“Exactly! That makes me feel better.”
“Were you feeling bad?”
“No. It’s just… He’s a singer, and he just released a new song, and it’s about me. So that’s been a little weird.”
“Wait,” Hutch said. “Your ex-fiancé Lucas isn’t—?”
“Lucas Banks. Yeah.”
“And so his new song ‘Katie’ is—?”
“About me. Yes.”
Hutch kept driving, trying to take it in. “Are you messing with me?”
“Nope.”
“You used to be engaged to Lucas Banks?”
“He wasn’t famous when we met. He was just a dude playing guitar in coffee shops—for free.”
After a moment, Hutch said, “But are you sure that song is really about you?”
“Yes?” I said. “The name kinda gives it away.”
“Yes, but it’s about a girl with hazel eyes.”
“So?”
“Your eyes aren’t hazel.”
“They aren’t?”
Hutch shook his head. “Hazel’s like a brownish green, and yours are a bluish gray.”
I pulled down the visor mirror to check. “Are they?”
“You don’t know what color your own eyes are?”
“I always just called them hazel.”
“Maybe the pie piece was throwing you off.”
“Maybe.”
“And you’d think he’d mention the pie piece, too, by the way.”
“He never noticed it, though. So he couldn’t have put it in the song.”
“How could he not have noticed it? I saw it the first day.”
“The first day?” I asked. “When you were”—I hesitated—“doing splinter removal?”
But Hutch shook his head. “The first day in Rue’s shop. When you had that hibiscus in your hair.”
I nodded and took that in.
“I looked it up, by the way—your pie piece. It’s called sectoral heterochromia .”
I looked over. “Well, that’s a mouthful.”
“Heterochromia is having different colors in your eyes—like, some people have one blue eye and one brown eye. But sectoral heterochromia is just a section of the eye that’s different.”
I nodded like I was fascinated by the scientific terminology. But I was really more fascinated by how Lucas, a man I’d dated so long, could have noticed so little about me. And, for that matter, how I could’ve noticed so little about myself.
After a while, Hutch said, “Well, it’s a great song.”
I sighed. “I guess it is.”
“He must have loved you, to write a song like that.”
“Yeah, probably,” I said, looking out the window. “He just didn’t love me… good enough .”
ALL TO SAY, Hutch and I wound up spending a lot of time together. I followed him around all day at work. We shared a commute to and fro. We had an urgent swim-lesson regimen to stick to.
My self-imposed deadline for getting that “yes” for a “Day in the Life” before SWET training day had seemed so reasonable at first—but then the training got postponed a few times. Which allowed me to put off asking, and gave us time to pack in extra swim lessons.
Add in the fact that Rue and The Gals grilled dinner out by the pool almost every night, drinking sangria in fluttery caftans and watching the sunset—and that Hutch dropped me off, went home to pick up George Bailey, and came back to swim and stay for dinner almost every night, too.
With someone else, it could easily have been too much .
But somehow, with Hutch, it just wasn’t. The more we spent time together, the easier it was to spend time together. It was like there was this extra layer of energy whenever we were around each other that just kind of amplified whatever was happening. Something that would be serious with somebody else felt earthshaking with him. And anything mildly funny became hilarious. He laughed a shocking amount for someone whose main hobby was frowning .
We just got along.
Even swimming was fun, as impossible as that sounds.
I guess exposure therapy really works. The more you do a thing, the less weird it starts to feel. Plus, Hutch was so comfortable in the water. He made a good lead. Add to that, this wasn’t some spring break situation—all about preening and looking good. This was work.
Work that involved blowing a lot of bubbles and doing cannonballs.
You know how going on vacation can sometimes make you into a different person? This was kind of like that. Nothing around me was the same, and so I didn’t have to be the same, either.
This wasn’t the usual, ordinary old me. This was me in Key West .
I’d splash around with Hutch in the pool and then slip that fluttery cover-up back on and spend the rest of the evening noshing on dinner at the patio tables with him and The Gals, George Bailey lying in the grass nearby.
Maybe it was the island breezes. Or the sangria. Or the warmth of the sun. Or the lovely feeling of being surrounded by the easy chatter of friends. But there was something special going on that I couldn’t ignore. It felt like a different way of living that had something good—and something long overdue—to teach me.