Chapter 8 #2
Roy was an older man, lean, Vietnam Veteran cap pushed up on his forehead, the eyes of a man who had not been saying anything at the counter of a bait shop for twenty years and had decided, on a Thursday morning in May, to start saying something.
“I’ve known him five years. He’s never tied that boat up anywhere but Sloane’s. He doesn’t know anybody on this part of the coast who’d let him on their dock for the night. If he told you he stayed at a friend’s slip, he’s lying.”
“Roy.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve been on this counter a long time. I see what I see.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Don’t come back in for a couple of days. He saw you in here this morning, and he’ll come back to ask me about you. If you’re not in, I’ve got less to tell him.”
“Understood.”
He spent the late morning on the boat.
The starboard rail still needed primer in the spot where the salt had eaten through, and a man who had told a marina owner he was on his boat all afternoon needed to be on his boat all afternoon, and so he primed the rail and let it set and primed it again and let that set, and the work was slow and steady and didn’t require his head, and he let his head do the work it needed to do.
Which was the question Sloane was going to ask.
He had until this afternoon to find the middle Caleb had told him to find.
The middle was the sentence that gave her enough to keep her on the dock and not enough to break the op, and the middle had to land in her hearing so that it let her trust the next sentence after it, because there was going to be a next sentence after it, and there was going to be a next sentence after that, and there were going to be a couple of weeks of next sentences before he could give her the whole of what he was carrying.
He didn’t have the middle yet.
He worked the rail, drank water, and ate a granola bar at eleven.
At eleven-thirty, Catherine waved at him from her deck, and he waved back, and Catherine pointed at her coffee pot and raised her eyebrows, and he shook his head and tapped his wristwatch, and Catherine nodded and went back to her paperback, and that was the whole exchange.
At twelve-ten, Sloane walked out of the office to the fuel dock.
She had a clipboard, checking the fuel pump that had taken the storm at the head of Pier One.
He didn’t come up off the swim platform, didn’t wave, let her work.
She finished at twelve twenty-two and went back into the office, and the kiosk light came on at twelve twenty-four, which meant she was reading something at her counter, which meant she was probably eating lunch.
He primed the second coat at twelve thirty-five.
At one o’clock Greg Bonner came over from Reel Therapy with a bilge pump in his hand.
“Vale.”
“Greg.”
“Don’s pump.”
“Don’s pump?”
“I told Don in 2018 he needed to replace it. He didn’t. He told me he’d get to it. He didn’t. Now he’s dead and the pump is your problem and you’re the new owner, so.”
“So.”
“Take the spare. I’ve had it on my shelf for six years. I’m not going to live long enough to need a spare bilge pump. You will.”
“Greg.”
“Take it.”
Ethan took it. Greg sat on the gunwale and ran him through the install for twenty minutes, with the kind of patience an older man had for a younger man who was being given an heirloom, and Ethan asked the questions of a man who knew what he was being given and was paying attention to the gift.
At one twenty-eight, Greg tipped two fingers and went back to Reel Therapy.
Ethan put the pump on the dinette and washed his hands and stood at the cabin port and looked across at the office.
The kiosk light was still on.
At two-forty he made two cups of coffee.
He didn’t make them in the office pot. He made them on the small two-burner stove in the cabin, which produced better coffee than the office machine, and he poured both cups into the travel mugs he’d bought in Jacksonville two weeks ago, and he didn’t ask himself why he’d bought two travel mugs for a man who lived alone on a boat.
He carried them up the cabin steps and across the boardwalk and onto Pier Two.
Sloane was at the head of Pier Two on her hands and knees with the loose cleat from slip ten beside her and a fresh bag of marine sealant in her left hand and a cordless drill on the planking next to her right knee, and she was setting a new cleat into the planking by herself at two forty-one on a Thursday afternoon, and the left knee she’d gone down on at four-something this morning was the knee she had on the planking now.
She heard him coming. She didn’t look up.
“I’m working.”
“I brought coffee.”
She set the drill down and looked up.
She had a smudge of marine sealant on the side of her jaw where she’d brushed her face with her wrist, and her hair was tied back the way she’d tied it back in the rain at five this morning, and her eyes had the kind of tiredness a woman had at two forty-one in the afternoon after she’d been up since four-oh-six and had worked the storm and had been holding a question in her chest since six twenty-eight, and the eyes didn’t move off his face.
He held out a mug.
She took it.
She didn’t say thank you. The not-saying-thank-you was an honesty between them, because they had already done the thank-you at six twenty-eight at the head of slip nine, and they had already done the you-didn’t-ask-me-to and the I-didn’t-have-to, and what was between them now was a different thing.
She drank.
He drank.
They stood at the head of Pier Two with the afternoon sun warming the planking and the marina dry now around them and the cleat from slip ten on the planking beside her knee, and Ethan watched her drink her coffee, and he didn’t pretend not to.
“Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“When do you want the question?”
She held the mug in both hands, looked at the cleat, then looked at the cordless drill. She looked at the bag of marine sealant in her lap, then looked at him.