Chapter 4 #2
Lunch happened on the swim platform with the engine cover for a table.
Turkey, wheat, mustard, lettuce, a slice of tomato sliced thin enough to suggest the person slicing it cared about something the rest of the operation didn’t yet pay them for.
He let himself be like the tomato. There were going to be many small things over the next eight weeks he’d need to register and not allow himself to like, and a tomato in a Florida sandwich shop he could allow.
He ate slowly. He watched Pier Two without looking at Pier Two, which was something he’d been doing for nineteen years and which any working captain who happened to glance across the channel would see only as a man eating a sandwich on his swim platform.
Doyle Pruitt’s slip nine sat empty. The Bertram was on her cleats. Nobody had come down Pier Two yet today.
He finished the sandwich and put the wrapper in the bag and the bag in the trash and washed his hands at the slip hose and dried them on the rag he’d hung off the cleat.
Then he picked the sander up off the cushion and got back to work on the starboard rail, because the rail was the cover and the cover was the work and the work was what kept him on this dock for as many hours as he needed to be on it.
The houseboat lady came down Pier Three at eleven fifty.
She walked the way an older woman walked a dock she’d walked for many years, which was unhurried and sure-footed and with the cup of coffee still in her hand.
The paperback was folded under her arm now, spine out.
The blue caftan moved around her ankles.
She had small gold studs in her ears that caught the noon sun.
Ethan saw her coming. He had the sander down before she’d reached slip nineteen, and he’d picked up the rag and wiped his hands and stepped off the boat onto the dock by the time she reached the pylon at the head of his slip.
“I’m Catherine Pell.”
“Ethan Vale. Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”
“Catherine, please. I’ve been ma’amed past my limit this decade.”
“Catherine.”
She had a face that had been a beautiful face for a long time and was now the face of a woman who’d stopped being interested in being beautiful and was something better than that, which was at ease.
Her eyes were a pale, clear blue. She looked at the boat the way George had looked at the boat, which was to say with the precise unromantic affection of a person who’d known the boat as somebody else’s thing and was now meeting her as something new.
“I am so glad somebody finally took her.”
“George said about the same.”
“George Halsey is right about more things than he gets credit for.” Catherine took a sip of coffee.
“I watched Don sit on this deck on Sunday afternoons for nine years; I've been here eleven. He used to drink an Old Fashioned at four o’clock and tell Edna she was the most beautiful woman in three counties, and Edna would tell him she could only count two counties and he was already drunk in both of them, and it was the prettiest love story on the dock. After Don went, it broke my heart to watch this boat sit.”
“She’s going to get fixed up.”
“I can see that. The canvas is already off.”
“The canvas was the easy part.”
“It usually is.” She smiled. The smile reached her eyes. “What are you finding under it?”
Ethan gave her the abbreviated tour from the dock, which was the right thing to give a marina neighbor who was being friendly and not the wrong thing to give a marina neighbor who might one day be useful.
He pointed out the salt damage along the toe rail and the soft place in the sole he’d need to lift this fall and the manifold leak Sloane had flagged.
Catherine listened the way a woman who’d lived on a boat for eleven years listened, which was with informed nodding at the right places.
Halfway through his pointing-out, his eyes went past Catherine for a half-second without his face going past her. Doyle Pruitt had come down the gravel from the parking lot and onto the boardwalk. Doyle had a black tool bag in his right hand.
Ethan kept his eyes on Catherine.
The watch on his wrist said twelve oh-three.
“What are you reading?” he said.
She lifted the paperback. The cover was navy blue with a lighthouse on it and a woman in a long coat walking toward it, and the title was in white script across the top.
“Romantic suspense.” She gave him a small confiding smile.
“I read four a week. I’m sixty-eight years old, and my husband has been dead for nine years, and I have not yet been able to convince myself that I shouldn’t spend my afternoons reading about handsome dangerous men, and frankly I’ve stopped trying. ”
“That sounds reasonable.”
“It is reasonable. It’s the most reasonable thing I do.”
“Anything good lately?”
“This one.” She tapped the cover. “A federal agent moves to a small fishing village and falls in love with the woman who runs the lighthouse. It’s ridiculous. I’m enjoying it enormously.”
Ethan let the smile come up because the smile was the right answer, and because the smile was also the answer of a man who hadn’t been told the joke he was inside of. He didn’t let his face do anything else.
“Sounds like a tough commute for the federal agent.”
“He manages.”
Behind her, in the corner of his eye, Doyle Pruitt walked past the kiosk and turned left onto Pier Two. The tool bag went with him.
Ethan kept his eyes on Catherine.
“Can I ask you a thing?” Catherine looked at him over the rim of the mug, and the looking had a different quality now than it had had a minute ago, less performance and more attention. “How long are you here for?”
“As long as the boat takes.”
“That could be a long time.”
“It could.”
“All right.” Catherine took another sip.
The coffee mug came down. She wasn’t looking at the boat anymore.
She was looking at him. “Sloane Mercer is a friend of mine. I’ve known her since she was twenty-one years old.
Her father was a friend of mine before her, and her brother was, too, and the brother is the part of that sentence we don’t have the answer about. ”
She let that sit a beat. Ethan didn’t fill it. He let her work.
“His name was Noah. He was funny and decent, and he took his sister to the diner on her birthday every year and ordered the same thing she ordered because he liked making her laugh when he didn’t finish his plate.
He went out one night four Aprils ago and didn’t come back.
The marina has never been the same since, and Sloane has carried it alone, and I have watched her carry it from my houseboat for four years. ”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Thank you.” Catherine’s eyes stayed on him. “I wasn’t going to say his name to you on Day One. I changed my mind walking over.”
“Why?”
“Because you bought a boat sight-unseen from a widow who needed out of slip fees and you took it over without trying to talk her down on the price, and George Halsey came back from the bait shop telling everyone on Pier One that you’re polite and you laugh at the right places and you don’t ask questions you haven’t earned, and I have decided I would rather know early than late what kind of man my friend has rented her slip to. ”
The water around the dock did what water did. A halyard tapped a slow tap on a mast at the head of Pier One. Catherine waited.
“Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry for hers. I’m not a man who came here to cause her any trouble, and I will try to be a tenant she’s glad she rented to.”
Catherine looked at him for a beat that was longer than the answer required.
Whatever she’d been looking for in his face, she’d either found it or decided to wait for the rest of it.
The pale, blue eyes moved away from him and onto the toe rail, and the tension that had been in her shoulders went out of them in the small, unannounced way of a woman accepting a thing on provisional terms.
“All right.”
“Great.”
“I’ll bring you a casserole this week. Tuna noodle. I make it the way my mother made it, which is to say with too much cheese, and I'll not apologize for the cheese.”
“I accept.”
“Good.”
She turned to go. Then she paused, the way a woman in a blue caftan paused, with her weight already on the back foot.
“Ethan.”
“Catherine.”
“If you ever want to know a thing about this dock, you can ask me.
I read romantic suspense, and I drink coffee on my deck, and I miss my husband, but I also pay attention, and I've been paying attention from that houseboat for eleven years, and there is very little that happens on these piers that I don't see.”
“Noted.”
“I thought it might be.”
She walked back up the dock. Ethan stood at the pylon at the head of his slip and watched her go, and Doyle Pruitt was not yet back up the dock from Pier Two.
The watch said twelve oh-eight.
Doyle had been below for five minutes so far.
Ethan picked the sander up off the cushion and went back to the rail. He worked it. Six more minutes. He didn’t look at Pier Two. The sander made the sound the sander made.
At twelve fourteen Doyle Pruitt walked back up Pier Two with the tool bag in his right hand. He went up the gravel to the lot. The screen door of the office didn’t clap. He went straight to the truck.
Eleven minutes.
Ethan finished the section he was working on, set the sander down, and drank half a bottle of warm water from the cushion. He waited the count of breaths it took for a man on a swim platform to look like a man taking a break, and then he went below and wrote it in the back of the notebook.
Slip nine. Bertram. Eleven minutes below. Twelve oh-three to twelve fourteen. No conversation with the office on either end. Tool bag in. Tool bag out.
He closed the notebook. He sat at the dinette with his hands flat on the table for a long count of breaths.
The sander ran for an hour and twenty minutes after lunch.