23. Jake
JAKE
The Green is quiet now.
The screen, what’s left of it, is gone. Concession tables are stacked. Someone swept up the popcorn, though a few kernels remain near the oak roots. Chip will handle those by morning.
The string lights are still on. They usually are at this hour. No one’s ever in a hurry to turn them off. Blue Crab Bay likes an excuse to linger.
Hank and I are doing the same.
He found Willard’s bench ten minutes ago and planted himself at the old man’s feet like he’d been formally invited. Which, knowing Willard, he probably was. Hank has never had to earn his welcome here.
“Quite a night,” Willard says.
I lower myself onto the bench beside him. The wood dips in the familiar way it always has. “French Fry planned that,” I say.
“Probably.”
“He’s been waiting for this moment.”
Willard tosses a peanut into the grass. Nothing moves to collect it. Chip has called it a night.
“The mayor’s going to have a rough week,” I add.
“Mayor’s been having a rough year,” Willard replies. “Tonight just made it public.”
I huff a quiet laugh. Hank exhales a full-body sigh and settles heavier against Willard’s shoes.
We sit for a while without saying anything. Willard doesn’t come here for conversation. He comes for the bench. For the way it holds memory.
I’ve been coming to this bench since I was nine. Back then it was peanuts and no agenda that drew me here.
He was the only adult in Blue Crab Bay who didn’t ask anything from you.
My dad used to wave to him from the dock every morning. My mom brought him sweet tea on hot afternoons and stayed exactly as long as she wanted. Never more. Never less. She said Willard had the gift of not needing. She was right.
“She looked happy tonight,” he says.
He doesn’t say her name.
He never has to.
“Yeah,” I answer. “She did.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees, studying the crushed shell path in front of me. It’s worn smooth down the middle from decades of footsteps. Mine among them. My dad’s. My granddad’s.
“Different than you expected?” Willard asks.
I think about the night Maddy fell. How the news traveled through town before the ambulance finished turning the corner. I knew what it meant.
I told myself I was ready.
I wasn’t.
“She’s braver than she thinks,” I say.
Willard makes a low sound. Agreement. Or just acknowledgment. “She always was,” he says. “She just never had to be before.”
That’s true. Blue Crab Bay summers didn’t require bravery when we were kids. They required sunscreen, a working bike, and the ability to stay out past dark. Everything else was easy. Everything else was us.
I don’t know when easy became complicated.
“She hooked her pinky with mine tonight,” I say. “During the movie.”
Willard doesn’t look at me.
“I don’t know if she realized she did it.”
“She realized.”
I glance at him. He’s watching the channel marker blink out in the dark.
One.
Pause.
One.
I look back at the water.
Willard doesn’t hand out answers. He gives you space to find them yourself and the occasional nudge when you’re looking in the wrong direction.
His wife Ida was mayor for twelve years. You don’t stand beside a woman like that without learning when to speak and when to keep your mouth shut.
He talks about her sometimes. Not often. But when he does, he talks about her like she’s still in the room. Like time didn’t take her so much as relocate her somewhere slightly out of reach.
I used to think this bench with her name on it was grief.
I understand now it’s just love that outlasted the person.
“Your dad used to do that,” Willard says.
“Do what?”
“Sit here after something good happened. Like he didn’t trust himself to just let it be good.
He’d come by after a strong day on the water,” Willard continues.
“After you made a big play he’d listened to on the radio or watched on television because he couldn’t get to the game.
” He pauses. “He’d sit right where you’re sitting and stare at the water like he was waiting for it to tell him how long it would last.”
I don’t answer. Because I do the same thing. I always have.
“He was proud of you,” Willard says. “I know you know that. But he was scared for you too.” He looks out toward the ocean.
“The way you love, Jake. It’s not small.”
“I don’t know how to love halfway.”
The channel marker blinks again.
One.
Pause.
One.
Hank shifts and rests his chin on Willard’s shoe. Willard scratches behind his ear without looking down.
“She left sophomore year,” I say quietly. No context needed. Willard knows. Willard has always known. “I was twenty-one. Thought that was the worst thing that would ever happen to me.” I buy myself a second before I say it. “Took about seven years to learn I was wrong.”
The accident.
A preseason game. I was still in the locker room when my phone started vibrating across the bench. It was Charlie. He never called during a game. He called five times in a row.
I knew before I picked up.
Willard was one of the first people I saw when I walked into The Knuckle at two in the morning because I didn’t know where else to go.
He didn’t ask questions. He just sat with me until the sun came up and the town woke around us and life kept moving the way it always does even when you’re certain it shouldn’t.
“The shoulder,” I say after a while.
Willard waits.
“I could’ve rehabbed it. People come back from worse. My surgeon gave me a whole plan. He had charts. Timelines. Projections.” I lean back and look up through the oak branches.
“I stood in his office and listened to every word he said and pictured putting that jersey back on and walking into a stadium and I couldn’t—“
I stop. Scrub a hand down my face and start again. “And I couldn’t keep walking out there without looking for them in the stands.”
It wasn’t the pain. It wasn’t fear.
It was the empty space where they would’ve been.
“I just couldn’t find the reason anymore,” I finish.
“You came home,” Willard says.
“I came home.”
The dock lights along The Knuckle reflect in the water, long gold streaks that ripple and reform. My granddad built that dock. My dad extended it. I’ve repaired it three times since I came back. There’s something in that continuity that steadies me on the days when nothing else does.
“She doesn’t know,” I say. “About any of it.”
“No,” Willard agrees. “She doesn’t.”
“You think I should tell her.”
“I think,” he says slowly, “the people worth keeping are the ones who don’t flinch when you hand them the hard parts.”
I think about Mo’s face in the kitchen when we almost kissed. On the boat when I told her I was barely holding it together. Under the meteor shower with her fingers laced through mine.
She didn’t flinch.
“She stayed,” I say.
Willard nods. He tosses another peanut. Still no Chip. The peanut disappears into the grass. “My wife used to say love isn’t the feeling,” he says. “It’s the decision you keep making when the feeling gets complicated.”
I turn my head toward him then.
“She made it sound simple,” he adds. “It isn’t simple. But she wasn’t wrong.”
I rub the back of my neck. “I told her I don’t want this to be another summer.”
“How’d she respond?”
“She squeezed my hand.”
He nods like that’s sufficient. Maybe it is.
Hank stands and shakes, ears flapping, then sits directly on my foot. He looks up at me, bottom teeth showing, one eye slightly more open than the other.
He’s ready for bed.
I stand slowly, and Hank rises with me. I clip his leash and hold it loose. He leans against my leg. “Willard,” I say.
He looks up.
“Thank you. For…” I gesture vaguely. At the bench. At the years. At all of it.
He waves it off. “Your mother used to bring me sweet tea.”
“I know.”
“Best sweet tea in Blue Crab Bay. Don’t tell Vera Duncan I said that.”
I huff a laugh. “I won’t.”
He tips his hat and settles back, tilts his face toward the sky like a man with nowhere he needs to be.
I take the long way back. Past the lighthouse. The fountain that will probably now forever be known as Fornication Fountain. Past Hart’s Landing. The curve in the shell loop where Mo and I have walked three times this week, each time less careful than the last.
The light above Holey Moley is on. Her room. I picture her up there with her water bottle. Overthinking and a smile she’s not letting anyone see yet. Wearing my hoodie or my old jersey she thinks I don’t know she kept.
She’s been keeping me close in the only way she knew how.
Hank makes a low grumble and bumps his head against my leg. “I know,” I tell him. “I know.”
I turn toward the boathouse. The water is calm. The channel marker is blinking.
One.
Pause.
One.
The mermaid’s heartbeat.
I think about telling Mo everything. The accident. The guilt that still lives quietly in the background. The shoulder that became a door I chose to walk through. The way coming home felt like relief and loss at the same time.
Hank trots ahead of me up the dock, bandana slightly crooked from the night’s chaos. He stops at the door and looks back.
Tomorrow, the tide will be right.
And maybe it’s time to tell her.