Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Sloane unwrapped the salad at the office desk and found a second fork in the bag, which meant Margo had packed it, which meant Margo knew.
She set the fork down and looked at it for a while.
He'd walked into the Sandbar at lunch and ordered a salad and asked Margo to wrap it for her, and Margo had put two forks in the bag like a woman leaving a note she didn't have to sign.
There was no version of this town where a man bought a marina owner her lunch and the marina owner's best friend didn't have the whole thing arranged into a story by the time the bag hit the counter.
She ate it anyway. It was a good salad. He'd remembered she liked the vinaigrette on the side, which she'd mentioned exactly once, eight days ago, in the middle of a sentence about something else.
That was the thing about him she kept circling back to.
He listened the way most people pretended to.
He took the small true things she let slip and put them somewhere and gave them back to her later, and every time he did it, she felt the floor of her chest drop an inch, and she was running out of inches.
She'd spent years being careful. She knew the shape of careful the way she knew the marina at low tide, every soft spot, every place the bottom came up to meet you.
Careful had kept her alive through the worst of it.
Careful had also, somewhere in there, stopped being a thing she did and started being a thing she was, and she hadn't noticed the changeover until a man in slip seventeen made her a sandwich and she'd laughed out loud at her own dock and frightened herself with the sound.
The salad was gone. She tossed the container and missed the trash can and got up to retrieve it, and through the office window she could see the Sundancer at the head of Pier Three, and the cockpit was empty, and she stood there with the crumpled plastic in her hand longer than the moment called for.
He'd told her what he was. A man with a mission and a job that used her dock.
He'd stood right there by the standing file and handed it to her and watched her face, and she'd waited for the knowing to make her sensible, and the knowing had done nothing of the kind.
If anything, it had made it worse, because now she understood that whatever this was, it had a clock on it, and a clock made a person count, and counting made a person honest about what she'd regret.
She threw the container away. She made it that time.
Catherine was on her foredeck at slip six with a paperback and a glass of iced tea when Sloane came down Pier Two on the afternoon walk, and she lowered the book and watched Sloane come like she watched weather move in off the Gulf, with patience and no particular hurry to comment on it.
“You walked past slip eight without stopping,” Catherine said.
Sloane stopped. She looked back. She had, in fact, walked the length of Pier Two and gone past the empty berth at slip eight without the pause she'd built into every afternoon for four years, the half-beat where she stood at the head of it and looked at the water and let herself feel what she felt and then kept moving.
“I didn't notice,” she said.
“I know. That's what I'm telling you.” Catherine turned a page she wasn't reading. “Four years you've stopped at that slip like it was a chapel. Today you walked by it thinking about something else. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm saying I saw it.”
Sloane came down the dock and stood at the rail of Catherine's houseboat, and the two of them looked at the slip basin between Pier Two and Pier Three, the open stretch of green water with the Sundancer riding quietly on the far side of it.
“It scares me,” Sloane said. She hadn't planned to say it.
Catherine had a way of leaving a silence open at exactly the width of the thing a person was carrying, and Sloane had walked right into it.
“Not him. The other part. That I'd let myself want something this much and then have it turn out that I can't keep it.”
“That's not a reason not to want it.”
“Margo said almost the same thing.”
“Margo's smarter than she lets on.” Catherine set the book down spine-up on the deck. “Can I tell you something an old woman has earned the right to say?”
“You're going to anyway.”
“I am.” Catherine's pale eyes came up and held her.
“I buried a husband I loved for thirty-one years, and I will tell you the part nobody warns you about.
It isn't the wanting that breaks you. The wanting was the best of it.
It's the years afterward when you decide the safe thing is to never want like that again, and you're so good at it, and so reasonable, and one morning you wake up, and realize you've kept yourself alive and missed your whole life doing it.”
The water moved against the pilings. Somewhere up the dock George Halsey's diesel coughed and caught.
“I'm not telling you he's the one,” Catherine said. “I don't know that. Neither do you. I'm telling you that being careful isn't the same as being safe, and you've been confusing the two for a long time, and it's been costing you more than you let yourself add up.”
Sloane looked at the Sundancer across the green water.
“He's got a piece he hasn't given me yet,” she said. “Something he's holding. He told me he'd give it to me, and he told me when, and I can see it on him sometimes, the weight of whatever it is. I keep thinking I should wait for that before I—” She stopped.
“Before you what.”
“Before I let myself.”
Catherine picked her book back up. “That's the most careful thing you've said yet.
Waiting for the whole truth before you'll feel the thing you already feel.” She found her page.
“Nobody gets the whole truth first, sweetheart.
You jump, and you find out on the way down whether he jumps with you. That's the only version there is.”
She went back to her paperback, which was Catherine's way of saying she was done, and Sloane stood at the rail another moment and then walked back up Pier Two, and this time when she passed slip eight she stopped.
She made herself stop, and stood at the head of the empty berth and looked at the water and felt all of it, the old grief that never finished and never would, the four years of holding a place open for a man who went out and didn't come back.
Then she let herself do what she'd never let herself do.
She set the new wanting down right next to the old grief, and the fear that came with the wanting, and she waited for the grief to shrink under it, and the grief didn't shrink.
It made room. A house with one lit window wasn't any darker for the lighting of a second, and the second window didn't pretend the first had gone out.
They burned together. She'd thought she had to choose.
She walked back to the office. The afternoon went on around her the way it did.
The weather came up on the marine forecast that evening while she was closing out the register.
She had the little radio going on the shelf at close, half-listening, and the automated voice ran through the coastal waters and got to the part that made her stop counting twenties.
A system building off the Gulf, moving in slowly, expected to settle over the coast by the following night and sit.
Small craft advisory upgrading. Winds backing around to the southwest and freshening.
The kind of front that didn't come ashore so much as lean on you for a day and a half and leave everything dripping.
She knew this water. A blow like that meant a long evening of lines and fenders and double-checking the boats whose owners weren't around to do it themselves, and it meant nobody on the docks who didn't have a reason to be there, and it meant the marina would empty out to the handful of people who actually lived on it.
Catherine on her houseboat. The man in slip nine, who hadn't left his boat in days. The man in slip seventeen.
She wrote the forecast on the whiteboard by the door so the weekend boaters would see it and make their own decisions, and she stood with the marker in her hand and looked at her own handwriting and felt the day's whole conversation settle into one clear shape.
Tomorrow night, the marina would be hers and his and a storm.
She capped the marker. She was aware of having had a thought she hadn't quite let herself finish, and she let herself finish it now, standing alone in the lit office with the dark coming down on the water outside, and what she finished was simple and frightening and the truest thing she'd let herself think in four years.
She wasn't going to be careful about this one.
Her phone buzzed on the counter at nine-forty, when she was home with the lights off and the windows open to the warm dark, sitting at the kitchen table she'd eaten alone at for longer than she wanted to count.
Saw the forecast go up on your board. Get your fendering done early tomorrow. I'll take the outboard half of Pier Two, so you're not doing it alone in the wind.
She read it twice, which she'd promised herself she'd stop doing and hadn't.
He'd offered the boats, not the company.
He'd found a way to say he'd be there that a marina owner couldn't refuse without it being strange, and he'd left her every inch of room to keep it about the docks if that was what she wanted.
She thought about Catherine at the rail. You jump and you find out on the way down whether he jumps with you.
She typed, then stopped, then deleted it. A smaller version came next, and that one went too, because the small thing was the careful thing, and she'd just told an empty office she was done being careful, and a person who meant it didn't get to take it back the first time her thumbs got nervous.
She set the phone down. She got up and stood at the window and looked at the dark line of the inlet and let her heart do the foolish thing it wanted to do without arguing it down.
Then she picked the phone back up and wrote the true thing, the one with no exit built into it, and she read it once and sent it before she could reconsider.
Come for dinner after. My place. I'll cook. You've fed me twice, and I owe you, and that's not the only reason.
The three dots came up and went away and came up again, and she stood in her dark kitchen with her pulse going and thought that she would remember this, the standing here, however it landed, because it was the first thing she'd reached for with both hands in years and the reaching itself felt like coming up from underwater.
Yes. Tell me what to bring.
She let out a breath she'd been holding since she hit send.
Just you. We'll figure out the rest when the wind dies down.
She put the phone face-down on the table.
She didn't smile this time. The night of the board she had, alone in this same dark kitchen, a small private thing she'd let herself have.
This was bigger than a smile and quieter.
She sat back down at the table where she'd eaten years of solitary dinners and she let herself imagine, for the first time without flinching, a second chair pulled out and a man in it who listened, and she found she wasn't afraid of the picture.
She was afraid of how much she wanted it. That was different. She was beginning to understand it was the better fear.
Outside, the first edge of the system was still a day off the coast, and the night was warm and still and gave no sign of what was coming.
She sat in it a while longer, in the good quiet of a decision made, and then she went to bed, and for once she didn't lie awake listening for a boat that wasn't going to come in. She slept.