3. Chapter 3 Liam
Monday morning I was back in coveralls by seven, and I'd be lying if I said a part of me hadn't missed them.
Brackett Lake Marina in December was a graveyard with a coffeemaker.
The fuel pumps wore garbage bags. The snack shack had been boarded up since Labor Day.
A hundred-odd boats sat up on stands in the back lot in long white rows, shrink-wrapped for winter, and when the wind moved through them they creaked all together.
Dead quiet, Jerry called it. Best season we've got.
He was in the office when I came up the lot, which is to say he was in the shed with a desk in it, radio going, and coffee maker brewing. The entire room smelled like diesel and old wood and always had. There was a chart of the lake on the wall older than my mother.
"Look what the bus dragged in," Jerry said, not looking up from the paperwork. "College boy."
"Jerry."
"Wind got into the back lot Thursday night." He tipped his head at the window over the docks. "Tore the wrap open on the Hendersons' Sea Ray and that big pontoon at the end of row C. Been flapping for four days. Sounds like applause out there. Go make it stop."
He slid a heat gun across the desk. That's the thing about Jerry. I'd been gone four months, come home bisexual, punched a Kingswell kid, made captain, and Jerry didn't care to ask about any of it. He told me what to do. I did it. Got paid.
I took the heat gun and the coffee he didn't offer and went.
I found the tear on the Sea Ray's starboard side, a three-foot gash where the wind had peeled the plastic back like a lid.
I pulled my box cutter and trimmed the ragged edge back to clean wrap, ran a strip of tape along the margin, and cut a patch from the roll on the cart.
Lined it up. Smoothed it flat with my palm.
Then, the heat gun.
I pulled the trigger and worked the seam low and slow, one pass, watching the plastic go cloudy and then draw down, tightening against itself, pulling smooth over the hull.
You can't rush it. I'd melted a hole in it during my first time, and Jerry had stood over me going slower, slower, you're not drying your hair, son.
So I held the gun at the distance my hands remembered, one speed, steady, and the seam hazed and sealed and went drum-tight under my glove.
I like this work.
That's the part I never say out loud to anyone at school. I liked the cold and the gun in my hand and the lot to myself and the lake stretched out flat and white past the last row of boats, not a soul on it, ours again for one season.
The rich take the summer. December belongs to us.
Saturday night was still with me while I worked.
We'd left things weird. Not bad, just off. I'd gone quiet on him, and he'd gone short with me, and Sunday had been a whole day of neither of us texting first.
I didn't know when I was going to see him.
He was twenty minutes away, and I had no idea when we'd actually be in the same room.
Could be tomorrow. Could be a week. And the not knowing made everything else worse.
The fear about him seeing my house, finding out that I worked all winter at the marina, or worse yet, that we wouldn't see each other at all.
Jerry came out mid-morning to inspect the Sea Ray, which meant he stood there with his coffee and looked at my seam for five seconds.
"Hm," he said. High praise.
Then, walking the row toward the pontoon, casual as a forecast: "They opened the big place out on the Point. You hear that?"
My hands kept working. I made sure of it.
"Which place?"
"Which place, he says." Jerry snorted. "The place.
Harrington's. Lit up like an airport out there since the weekend.
Denny plowed their drive, says they got it staffed and everything.
Christmas at the lake." He shook his head at the wonder of rich people.
"Thirty years they've closed that house every fall. Never once seen it lit in December."
"Huh," I said.
"Huh," Jerry agreed.
I ran the heat gun over a seam that was already sealed and listened to my heart going.
He doesn't know. Of course he doesn't know.
On this lake I'm still just Linda Moore's kid who's good with a heat gun.
The fact that I could see Alex's house from where I was standing, that his father had lit up thirty years of dark windows specifically to deal with me, that the boy inside had gone to sleep in my hoodie last night. No one knew that, not here.
I had lunch in the shop — space heater, sandwich from home, hands thawing enough to hold a phone.
I looked at it. No new texts. Just Saturday night's conversation sitting there on the screen, the last message still mine: I'm good… really. Night, Alex.
Good really. Who says that? I sounded like a robot trying to pass a feelings test.
I typed: Hey.
Deleted it.
Typed: Hope today's going okay over there.
Looked at it. Sent it.
Alex
It is. Thanks. Lunch was consommé.
Liam
What the hell is consommé?
Alex
It's like fancy soup.
Alex
What are you doing today?
I looked at the phone.
Steam was coming off my gloves where I'd hung them over the heater. There was shrink-wrap tape stuck to my sleeve, and soon there would be grease under my nails from afternoon engine work, and out the shop window the lot stood in its white rows with my morning's work holding tight against the wind.
Helping Jerry at the marina.
I looked at that for a while.
It's five words. It's where I was. And the guy whose texts I fell asleep reading could have had those five words without the sky falling. He worked here himself.
But Alex worked here like a tourist. I work here like my mother's son.
Now that he was mine, now that this was real, the marina isn't a cute story about the summer we met.
It's the answer to a question he hasn't asked yet: what does Liam Moore actually amount to?
Scholarship kid, captain, sure. But under that, down at the studs, a boy in coveralls with grease under his nails who counts twenties through denim and calls it a good week.
He'd say it didn't matter. He'd say it warmly, and mean it. But I'd rather he never thought of me in this place than watch him be generous about it.
I deleted it one word at a time.
Liam
Errands. Around.
Alex
Are you getting me a gift?
Liam
You'll see.
I put the phone face-down on the workbench and ate the rest of my sandwich.
A gift.
My mom had said meaningful. I'd been turning that word over since Friday night and I still didn't know what it meant.
Meaningful how? Meaningful like expensive?
I couldn't do expensive. Meaningful like sentimental?
I didn't have anything sentimental that wasn't embarrassing.
Meaningful like I made this for you? What was I going to make him — a macaroni necklace?
The whole thing made me feel stupid. Like there was a language for this that other people knew and I'd skipped that class. Some guys just knew what to get their person. I was just trying to figure out what meaningful meant.
I let it go.
The afternoon was engine work. A lower unit that needed draining, batteries to pull and shelve, the last winterizing on a straggler whose owner had called in November.
Jerry worked the bench across from me, and Jerry-quiet is a good quiet, radio between us, tools going back where they live. And then, without looking up from the carburetor in his hands, he lobbed it over.
"Say. That summer kid, few years back. Came in hot on his old man's boat. He turned a screw half a thread. "Harrington's boy. He was about your year, wasn't he? He's not up at that house, is he? Whatever came of him?"
And there it was.
What was I going to say? He's my boyfriend. He's in that lit-up house right now going to war for me, and we like to fuck, naked.
"We row against each other."
Jerry grunted. True things get grunts. "Small world," he said, and went back into the carburetor, and I stood there with the lie still warm in my mouth.
At school, I was out. Done. The photo went around, I walked into the boathouse with Alex, Hale shook my hand.
But standing in that shop five feet from Jerry, I understood: I would have to come out to him too.
And to Denny. And to every person on this lake, one at a time, from scratch. Jerry would probably be fine.
I didn't say it. Not today.
By four the light was going, that early December drop where the sky just gives up, and I finished the wrap in the blue dusk with the work lamp on.
Last seam. One pass, slow. The plastic hazed and drew down tight, and I killed the gun and pulled a glove and ran my bare palm over it — smooth, hard, drum-tight, not going anywhere till April.
Good seam. Nobody would ever see it but me, Jerry, and the wind. I stood there in the cold, being proud of it anyway.
In the office, Jerry counted twenties out of the cash drawer, licking his thumb, and folded them into my palm.
"Whole week's work if you want it. Storage checks and that Grady-White's impeller."
"I want it all."
"Course you do." He looked at me over the top of the glasses he pretends he doesn't need. "You're the only one of these kids worth a damn, you know that? Don't tell nobody. Ruins my leverage."
"Secret's safe, Jerry."
That one sat in my mouth wrong on the way out the door.
Walking through the lot, I counted the fold through my pocket and put it against the gift problem. Meaningful. I still didn't have it.
And then, passing the back row on my way to the road, I stopped.
The Hendersons' Sea Ray. The one I'd spent the morning patching. Thirty-two feet, deep-V hull, a cabin you could stand up in. Teak trim. Helm console that cost more than my mom's car. In the summer, somebody's lake-weekend trophy. In December, wrapped and forgotten.
I looked at it.
I looked at the extension cord coiled by the shop wall. The space heater inside. The camp lantern on the shelf next to the batteries.
Giant space. Fancy. Private. Nobody would come near it until April.
Alex would love it.
The entire plan landed at once.
I got out my phone.
Liam
Wednesday night. Dress warm. I found us somewhere.
Alex
Found us somewhere. Where?
Liam
You'll see.
Alex
What do I bring? What's the dress code?
Liam
You'll see.
Alex
You're enjoying this.
Liam
So much. Wednesday. 8 PM. I'll send a pin. Don't be late.
Alex
I'm never late. That's your thing.
Liam
8 PM. Golden boy.
I pocketed the phone and walked the rest of the road grinning into my collar. Wednesday night I'd plan down to the minute. A thermos, a blankets, the heater, the lantern. I'd hand him a whole night wrapped and sealed, every seam tight.
Where I'd spent my Monday, though. He didn't need to see that.