Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Sloane poured coffee into the green thermos at five forty-one and walked out the back door of the office at five forty-three.
She’d walked out the back door of the office at five forty-three for four years, and the marina did the things the marina did at this hour, and she did the things she did inside of them.
She set the thermos on the piling, unscrewed the lid half a thread past finger-tight, and poured.
Slip eight was empty as it had been for four years.
She drank her coffee.
The thing about the morning was that it was the same morning.
Day after day after day. Water held what the sky was giving it.
The pelican folded its wings in the same stages.
A halyard tapped. She drank her coffee. The fact that yesterday a man in a pale blue T-shirt had walked into her office at six thirty-two and shaken her hand half a second too long was not something the dock had any opinion about.
The dock was the dock. Slip eight was slip eight. Her brother was still gone.
She finished the cup, poured another, and drank the second one slower.
At five fifty-six, she screwed the lid back to half a thread past finger-tight and walked back up the long dock the way she’d walked back up it for four years, and she didn’t, on the way past, look at slip seventeen.
Not looking at slip seventeen took a small amount of work that hadn’t been required of her yesterday. She did the work without comment.
By six-thirty she had the kettle on and the slip seventeen folder back in the drawer where it belonged.
She’d pulled it on her way past the standing file because her hand had pulled it, not because she’d told her hand to.
She held it for the count of three breaths.
The folder went back in between sixteen and eighteen.
Her father had said once, with his hand on the same standing file in 1998, that a hand that pulled a folder without asking was a hand telling you something the rest of you was being polite about.
She’d been twelve. The line had landed then and was landing now.
She made the coffee. Three minutes. She poured a cup and drank half of it standing at the counter.
Tarpon Lady ran out at seven for the morning charter — a half-day trip, three out-of-state customers George had taken in the night before.
The Bayliner in slip four was off the dock by seven-fifteen.
The houseboat in slip six on Pier Two had its deck light off, which was Catherine going below for her second sleep, which was something Catherine had done in the morning for as long as Sloane had known her.
She did the daybook. The deposit slip from Tuesday got finished. Then she rang up a quart of two-stroke and a Snickers bar for a man she’d been ringing up Snickers bars for since the year her father died.
At eight forty, Doyle Pruitt walked into the office with a hundred-dollar bill in his hand.
“Diesel.”
“How much?”
“Top her off.” Doyle put the hundred on the counter. “Probably eighty, the way she runs.”
Sloane keyed the pump from the office. She watched the gauge climb on the small panel by the register. Eighty-three forty-two. She handed Doyle his change without counting it, because she’d counted it without looking at it; she’d been counting change without looking at it since she was ten.
Doyle didn’t leave.
He put his hands flat on the counter, per his usual, broad in the shoulders for a man in his sixties, the watch on his wrist catching the morning light through the front window. His thumbnail was clean, which was something she’d been noticing about Doyle Pruitt for five years.
“New tenant settling in?”
“Mm.”
“Saw him sanding the rail yesterday afternoon. Looked like he knew what he was doing.”
“He does.”
“What’d you say he did before?”
“Logistics.”
“Logistics is a hell of a word.”
“It is.”
She didn’t look up from the daybook. The daybook had a column for the Doyle diesel she was filling in with her right hand, and she’d been filling in columns in this daybook since 2014, and she could fill in the column with her right hand and watch Doyle Pruitt with the side of her face.
Doyle was looking out the back window.
Not at her. Not at the daybook. At the back window, which faced the piers, which faced the kiosk, which faced Pier Three, at the angle the side of the kiosk made it face Pier Three.
From where Doyle was standing at her counter, the only thing he could see out the front window that he hadn’t already seen this morning was the top eighteen inches of slip seventeen’s windshield over the line of the kiosk roof.
He was looking at the top eighteen inches of slip seventeen’s windshield. He had been looking at them for the count of about ten seconds.
Sloane finished the column.
“Anything else, Doyle?”
He turned back. The eyes that came back to her were the eyes of a man who’d been somewhere else for a count of ten seconds and was now choosing to be back at her counter, and he did the small smile that didn’t reach his eyes, the way he’d been doing it for five years.
“Nope.” He tapped the counter twice with his thumbnail. “You have a good day, Sloane.”
“You too, Doyle.”
He went out. The bell sounded. She watched his back through the back window all the way across until he turned down Pier Two, and she watched the spot he’d been standing in for another count of about four breaths after he was gone.
She’d been telling herself for five years that Doyle Pruitt watching her marina from her counter was Doyle Pruitt being a marina tenant who didn’t have anything better to do with his morning.
This morning, with the angle of his head and the ten-second count and the cleanliness of his thumbnail, she was no longer telling herself that.
She didn’t have what was on the other side of that sentence yet.
She filed it. The shelf behind the insurance certificates was getting busy.
Catherine Pell came in at ten-fifteen with a Pyrex dish in her arms, a tea towel folded over the top, and the smell of cheese that had been melted on top of more cheese.
The bell dinged. Catherine paused in the doorway, which was for the half-second it took an older woman with a covered Pyrex to find a place to set it down without committing.
Her eyes went to the back counter, where Sloane’s rags lived.
She decided against the back counter. Her eyes went to the front counter.
She set the Pyrex down on the front counter beside the daybook and let the tea towel fall back to the half-inch it had been holding up off the top.
“Tuna noodle.”
“Catherine.”
“I told the new tenant I was bringing him one. I have brought him one. He was busy. He is busy at all the hours I have come over there in the last twenty-four. So I have brought the other one to you.”
“The other one.”
“I made two. I always make two. I've made tuna noodle in pairs since 1974, when my mother made me promise I would never let a friend who needed a casserole sit waiting on it.”
“Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“Did I need a casserole?”
“You don’t need a casserole. You need a Pyrex dish on your counter on a Wednesday morning so that when you go home tonight, you don’t cook. That is a separate condition. The casserole is the vehicle.”
Sloane laughed before she meant to.
Catherine smiled. The smile was the small, careful smile of an older woman who’d been making the people on her dock laugh since 2014, and she put the tea towel back over the Pyrex with the unhurried care of a woman who’d been making the same small kindnesses look like nothing for the entire eleven years Sloane had known her.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
Sloane poured her one. Catherine took it. Catherine did what she always did when she got a fresh cup, which was to hold it for a count of three breaths under her chin and not yet drink. Then she drank. Then she set the cup down on the counter and put her elbow next to it.
“Sloane.”
“Catherine.”
“I like your new tenant.”
Sloane took the line in without letting it show on her face.
She had been taking things in without letting them show on her face since she was a girl, and Catherine Pell knew that she could, and Catherine was watching her do it, anyway.
There was a kind of compliment in being watched that way by Catherine, which was that Catherine was choosing to acknowledge Sloane was doing it.
“Do you?”
“I do. He's a polite man who knows how to look at a Sundancer and who tells a woman the truth when she gives him an opportunity, and those two things in one man at his age are not as common as you would like to believe.”
“Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“What did you ask him?”
Catherine looked at her over the rim of the coffee. The eyes were pale blue and not a bit apologetic about being pale blue, and they held Sloane’s for the small count of breaths Catherine took to decide whether to answer in full or in part.
“I told him I had known your father, and I had known your brother, and I had been watching you carry it from my houseboat for four years, and I wanted to know early instead of late what kind of man my friend had rented her slip to.”
Sloane didn’t move.
She had her right hand on the daybook, and her left hand on the counter, and a half-cup of coffee that had been cooling for ten minutes, and she didn’t move because she didn’t know which way she would move if she moved.
Catherine had walked across the piers yesterday morning, and had walked over to Sloane’s new tenant on Day One, before Sloane had figured out what she thought about him, and Catherine had said her brother’s name to him on Sloane’s behalf and on her own.
“And.”
“And I came home, and I made tuna noodle casserole, and I told myself I was going to wait twenty-four hours before I came to tell you about it, because at our age twenty-four hours is the difference between a thing you tell a friend and a thing you tell a friend too soon, and I have decided twenty-four hours is enough.”
“Catherine.”