Chapter 5 #2
“I'm not telling you what to do about him.
I'm not telling you what to feel about him.
I'm telling you, because I've known you since you were twenty-one and I do not want you to find out from somebody else, that I have looked at him and I have decided he is the kind of man your father would not have thrown off the dock.”
Sloane put both hands flat on the counter.
Catherine waited.
The kettle on the back counter wasn’t on.
The bell over the front door wasn’t doing the sound.
Outside, the marina kept being a marina around them in the small ways marinas kept being marinas — a halyard, a charter engine warming up two slips down on Pier One, the soft small whirr of the cooler compressor cycling on — and Sloane Mercer stood at her own counter at ten twenty-seven on a Wednesday in May and let the words your father would not have thrown off the dock sit on her chest the way her father’s old jacket had sat on her chest the spring after he died, which was heavily, and without apology, and with a familiarity she hadn’t felt in six years.
“Catherine.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Thank you for the casserole.”
“You are welcome for the casserole.” Catherine picked up the cup. “I'm going home to read my book. The federal agent and the lighthouse woman are about to make a series of unwise decisions. I would like to be on the deck for it.”
“Catherine.”
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything about Noah?”
Catherine paused with the cup half to her mouth. She put it back down, looked at Sloane the way an older woman looked at a younger woman when she was choosing whether to give the younger woman the thing or the gentler version of the thing, and she chose the thing.
“He said he was sorry for my loss; he was sorry for yours; he wasn't the kind of man who would cause you any trouble. And he meant the third sentence the most.”
“All right.”
“All right.”
Catherine went out. The bell did the sound. The Pyrex sat on the counter with the tea towel over it, and Sloane stood with her hands flat on the wood and watched the door for a count of about ten breaths after Catherine was gone.
Then she lifted the tea towel and looked at the casserole.
It was beautiful. It was unreasonable. Catherine had made it with too much cheese, and the cheese had browned in the places it was supposed to brown, and she had put little paprika dots across the top in a pattern that suggested an old woman with time on her hands had decorated dinner.
Sloane was going to eat it tonight; she would think about the man on her dock while she ate it. The two were no longer separable.
She put the tea towel back, put the Pyrex in the office fridge, between the half-gallon of milk and the jar of olives she’d been meaning to throw out for two months.
She closed the fridge, stood in front of it for a count of about three breaths with her hand on the door.
Then she went back to the daybook.
She walked Pier Three at twelve sixteen.
She had told herself, on the way out of the side door of the office, that she was walking Pier Three to check the cleat on slip nineteen, which was a cleat she’d been meaning to check for three weeks and which she would in fact check on the way past. The cleat on slip nineteen was the cover.
The cover was the work she was making her feet do.
The cleat on slip nineteen was, in fact, fine.
She came up to the head of slip seventeen at twelve eighteen and stopped at the pylon.
Ethan was on the swim platform with the holding-tank binder open on the engine cover.
He had a pencil behind his ear, the same pencil he’d had behind his ear yesterday at noon, and his head was down over a page in Don’s handwriting that had a plumbing schematic on it, and the morning sun had moved to the early afternoon angle that put the side of his face in the kind of light a woman noticed if she was paying attention to that kind of light.
She was paying attention.
She noted the paying-attention without letting it show. The shelf behind the insurance certificates would accept the new item without comment.
He looked up.
Whatever was on her face in the half-second before she’d had a chance to put a face on it, he saw, and he didn’t do anything with what he saw, and the not-doing-anything was a small precise kindness she registered on a different shelf entirely.
“Sloane.”
“Holding tank.”
“Yes.” The small, careful smile she’d seen yesterday at six thirty-two came up at the corner of his mouth. “I've been reading about it for an hour. Don wrote two paragraphs on the plumbing path that would shame an actual engineer.”
“Don was the actual engineer.”
“I’m getting that impression.”
She didn’t step onto the boat. She hadn’t stepped onto the boat yesterday and she wasn’t going to step onto the boat today, because the difference between checking on a tenant from the dock and checking on a tenant from his swim platform was the difference between two kinds of woman, and the woman on the dock was the woman she was going to remain in front of him as long as she could manage it.
“Pump-out path?”
“Forward to aft. Y-valve at the head of the salon. The diversion to the macerator runs along the port side under the sole. There’s an inspection plate Don added that isn’t on the original schematic. He drew it in.”
“Show me.”
She’d said it before she’d decided to. The two words came out as her feet were already on a boat she wasn't stepping onto, and Ethan looked up from the binder, and he did nothing with the two words she hadn't meant to say.
He turned the binder around on the engine cover, pointed at the page, and waited.
She stepped onto the swim platform.
The Sundancer rocked once under her weight and steadied. He held the binder steady and waited.
She stood beside him at the engine cover, and she looked down at the page, and her shoulder didn’t quite touch his shoulder, and his shoulder didn’t quite touch hers, and the gap between the two was a small specific distance she was aware of with the precision a woman realized the distance between her shoulder and a man’s shoulder when the distance was the only honest thing on the boat.
She looked at the page.
Don’s handwriting. The hand-drawn inspection plate in the margin, in a slightly cramped pencil that suggested Don had added it at his dinette by lamplight at some point in the second half of his life. The schematic ran along the port side under the sole exactly the way Ethan had described it.
“You’ve been reading this for an hour.”
“An hour and ten.”
“It usually takes a man a day.”
“I’m motivated.”
She looked at him.
He was looking at her. His eyes were brown, with a small fleck of green at the right one she hadn’t had room to register yesterday because yesterday his eyes had been new, and today his eyes were the eyes of a man she had been thinking about for nineteen hours, and the green fleck was a thing that had been there yesterday too and would be there tomorrow and was, in this small careful moment at twelve twenty-one on a Wednesday, the only thing in the world.
She forgot what she’d walked over to say.
She'd walked over to ask him about the inspection plate, with the part of her that was still standing on her own dock at her own marina at her own work, that she had walked over to ask him about the inspection plate.
The walking-over and the asking-about-the-inspection-plate were separate motions that her body had been planning to execute in sequence, and the second motion had gone out of her head.
She closed the binder.
“All right. I’ll let you get back to it. I have to check the cleat at nineteen.”
“Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“The cleat on slip nineteen is fine.”
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
The small, careful smile at the corner of his mouth had not gotten bigger.
The eyes had not done anything they hadn’t already been doing.
He was a man on a swim platform with a binder on his engine cover and a pencil behind his ear, and he had told her, with one sentence, that he had been paying enough attention to her marina yesterday afternoon to know which cleat she’d been meaning to check for three weeks, and that he was not going to make her account for either of those things.
“Is it?”
“I tightened it yesterday afternoon. I was going to tell you. I forgot.”
“All right.”
She stepped back off the boat. The Sundancer rocked once. He didn’t watch her go. She knew he didn’t watch her go because she didn’t look back to find out, and a woman who didn’t look back was a woman who already knew.