Chapter 4 #3
He worked along the starboard rail toward the stern.
Sweat ran along the inside of his arms. The pale blue T-shirt was on the cushion beside the engine cover, where he’d folded it when the sun got ahead of him at two o’clock.
His back caught the late-afternoon light through the canvas, and the white tank under the T-shirt had gone damp through, and his hands moved over the rail in a steady, unhurried draw, twenty years of practice carrying the work while his head went somewhere else.
Noah arrived at three forty.
Not Noah. Noah’s name in Catherine’s mouth at twelve oh-six this afternoon. The thought arrived without his permission, the way it had arrived this morning when he’d been watching Sloane’s hands brace on the toe rail.
He stopped the sander.
He stood at the windshield with his hand on the rail he had just sanded, and the dust on his forearms, and the sun coming down across the channel onto the deck, and he let the thought arrive.
Eight months he’d been letting Noah arrive.
Eight months he’d been letting Noah pass through.
Today the thought had a face on it — the face Noah had worn the one night they’d talked, in front of slip eight.
He’d brushed Noah off. Three weeks later, Noah had gone out of slip eight and hadn’t come back, and Ethan had spent eight months not being able to decide whether the question Noah had asked him had been the one Noah needed answered.
Catherine had said his name out loud. The first person on this dock to say it to him in eight months had been a sixty-eight-year-old woman in a blue caftan with a romantic suspense paperback under her arm, and she’d said it because she’d decided he was the kind of man she could trust with the name, and she’d been wrong about that without knowing she was wrong.
He took his hand off the rail.
The bottle of water at his feet was warm from the deck. Half of it went down in one pull. He sat on the engine cover with the bottle in his hand and let himself sit for a moment with what was in his chest.
The watch wasn’t in the duffel below. It was on a desk in a town he wasn’t going to drive back to, and it was going to stay there until he asked for it, and he was going to ask for it when the time was right, and the time wasn’t Day One.
Two engraved words on the back of it, in a hand that had been Frank Mercer’s hand.
A father giving a son the watch his own father had worn.
The engraving because the father had been proud to hand the watch over, and had wanted to commemorate it. Noah had worn it every day.
Ethan was going to be the man who put the news in Sloane Mercer’s hand when the time was right, and the time was going to be the time it took for Sloane to be ready to hear it, and Ethan was going to know the time when he saw it, because he’d been reading rooms for nineteen years and hadn’t lost the habit.
Eight months he’d been carrying this. Forty-eight hours he’d been carrying it confirmed. Day One on her dock, and the weight was the same weight that had been in the chair across from David yesterday morning, and the chair had at least had David in it.
He picked the sander back up and worked the rail to the stern in a steady draw.
What he was doing while he worked was the thing he’d been doing for eight months when Noah arrived in his head, which was nothing.
Nothing was the discipline. Nothing was the wait.
Nothing was the price of being able to stand on this dock at all.
At four ten, the sander quit running. He’d finished the starboard rail. The port rail would be tomorrow. He set the sander on the cushion and the canvas back over the windshield and put the bottle of mineral spirits and the drop cloth in the cabin.
Below, the cabin had warmed through the afternoon and gone close.
He opened both ports and the forward hatch.
The grease along the side of his right thumb came off in two passes at the head sink.
His forearms came clean. He put a clean shirt on — a gray one this time, soft from a hundred washes — and ran his hand through his hair the way a man ran his hand through his hair when he wasn’t admitting to himself why he was bothering.
The six-page list was on the dinette. He tore the top sheet free along the perforation, folded it twice, and put it in his back pocket.
Up the cabin steps. Off the boat. Up the dock.
The office light was on. The OPEN sign in the front window still read OPEN, though the marina had thinned in the way a working marina thinned at five-thirty, with the day-trippers off the water and the live-aboards going down for the evening.
He went in through the side door.
The bell didn’t ding from the side door. Sloane was at the counter with the till open and a stack of singles in her left hand and a roll of quarters in her right, and she’d set them down again before she’d turned to see who’d come in. She’d known the step on the boardwalk.
“You’re still open.”
“I’m closing.”
“I can come back.”
“You’re here.” She finished the roll of quarters one-handed; she likely had done it for years. “What do you need?”
He took the folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket.
He’d known what he was going to ask before he’d walked off the boat, and he’d told himself the question was the holding tank because the holding tank was the smallest of the three, and a man on his first afternoon asking the smallest question was a man who wasn’t pushing.
“Holding tank.”
“What about it.”
“Last service. Pump-out path. Whether the previous owner kept records on her.”
Sloane closed the till. The drawer made the soft chunk of a marina till closing at the end of a day, and she didn’t key the lock yet, which meant she wasn’t in a hurry to put him out.
“Don kept records on everything.” She crossed to the standing file. “His widow gave me the binder when she signed the boat over. It’s yours now.”
She pulled a thick green binder out of the second drawer and set it on the counter between them.
“Thank you, Sloane.”
“You’re welcome, Ethan.”
That was twice now, his name in her mouth. The first time had been at six thirty-two with two of them shaking hands across the counter, and the second time was now at five thirty-six with a green binder between them and her hand pulling back along the wood.
“Anything else on the list?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” The almost-smile he’d seen at six thirty-two came back, smaller, more careful. “I’ll be here.”
“Good.”
“Lock the side door behind you. The front’s locked.”
“Will do.”
He picked up the binder. The weight caught him, and he felt the surprise show on his face before he could keep it off, and he watched Sloane see that he had seen, and neither of them named it.
He went out through the side door and locked it behind him.
The walk to Pier Three took the same hundred and twenty feet it had taken at six thirty-two.
He carried the binder in his left hand and the folded list in his back pocket and the quiet awareness, which he wasn’t going to dignify by examining yet, that he’d walked to the office for a holding-tank question, and what he was walking back from the office with wasn’t a holding-tank question.
Day One. Twice across her counter. Once on her dock at noon. Once in her office at five thirty-six. A cinnamon roll. A handshake. The half-second she’d held his hand. A grease streak along the inside of her left forearm. The way she’d said his name.
None of those were operational.
All of them were operating on him anyway.
He came down the dock to slip seventeen and stepped onto the swim platform. The Sundancer rocked once under his weight and steadied. Below, he set the green binder on the dinette and sat on the cushion across from it and looked at it for a long count of breaths.
Then he opened it.
Don Bickford’s careful, slow handwriting filled the first dozen pages.
Plumbing schematics. Holding-tank service entries going back to two thousand four.
The kind of records a man kept when he loved a boat and wanted the man who came after him to know what he’d done to her.
Ethan read through enough of it to answer the question he’d gone to the office to ask, and then he closed the binder.
He sat at the dinette with his hands flat on the table for a long count of breaths, just like he’d sat at this same table at six fifty-five in the morning with the office phone call to David still ten minutes ahead of him.
Day One.
George at nine fifteen. Catherine at eleven fifty.
Doyle for eleven minutes between twelve oh-three and twelve fourteen.
Sloane at six thirty-two, at twelve twenty-three, and at five thirty-six.
Roy at the bait shop counter for forty seconds.
Two waves across the channel before any of it started.
A tuna noodle casserole promised by a woman who had decided to take a chance on him.
He stood. The cinnamon roll bag from the bakery was still folded in the trash where he’d put it at seven.
He ate the apple he’d been carrying since Jacksonville, and he drank a full bottle of water, and he sat on the gunwale in the cooling light off the channel and watched a heron lift off a piling at the head of Pier One and beat slow and low across the water toward the inlet.
He watched until the heron was gone.
Across the channel, Catherine’s deck light came on. Her paperback was on the small folding table beside her chair. She lifted her hand. He lifted his back.
Then he went below to start the work of being Ethan Vale on a forty-two-foot Sea Ray for the night.