Chapter 7 #2
Which she didn't have anything to say to, and I felt her not have anything to say to it, all down the length of her, and that was the moment. If somebody asks me for the moment, that's it. Not the wheelhouse. That.
Later she pulled the sheet up over both of us and put her head on my chest and said, into it, "Say that again but with a subject and a verb."
"I'm staying in Florida."
The rain did its thing on the deck about four inches above our heads.
"Okay," she said. "For how long?"
"That's the wrong question."
"It's the only question I'm insured for."
I put my hand in her hair.
"I'm staying," I said. "The club's got a maritime file open now and somebody's got to run it and that somebody's got to be in the water.
Cade knows. Cade's known since he put me on a plane.
He's just too much of a coward to say the thing out loud so he sends a man four thousand miles and lets the weather do it. "
"That's not cowardice."
"It's exactly cowardice."
"It's management," she said. "It's the same skill set. He just doesn't have to be nice about it."
I laughed, which shook her head on my chest, and she said "hey" and put a hand flat to stop me.
Then she said, "I already did it, by the way."
"Did what."
"Put you on the crew roster."
I stopped.
"When."
"Thursday," she said. "The Thursday you got here. About four hours after you fixed my o-rings, which, by the way, you did without asking, on a boat you'd been standing on for a hundred and twenty minutes."
"That's — "
"Insurance," she said, to my sternum. "It's an insurance document. Crew roster's an insurance document, Torren, you have to declare everybody on the vessel, it's not — it's not a romantic gesture, it's a form, and I'd like that clearly understood."
"Uh huh."
"It's a form."
"Uh huh."
"There's a fee."
"How much was the fee."
"Ninety dollars."
I lay there in a boat in a mangrove cut and thought about a woman with forty-one thousand dollars of debt spending ninety dollars on a form on a Thursday afternoon for a man she'd known for four hours and had already decided about.
"Nerissa."
"Don't."
"Look at me."
"No, because your face is doing a paragraph," she said, "and I have a policy."
I made her look at me anyway, which took a while and involved some negotiation, and when she did her eyes were wet and absolutely furious about it.
"Ninety dollars," I said.
"It's a form."
"It's the best thing anybody's ever said to me."
"That's a very sad life you've had," she said, and kissed me, and that was the end of the talking for a while, and the bilge pump ran twice and neither of us thought it was the engine.
Wednesday, late, the rain went soft and we cooked the eleven eggs badly on a two-burner and ate them out of the pan on the deck with the mangroves dripping and the whole world smelling like green and diesel.
"Okay," she said. "Boat names."
"No."
"Second boat. The little one. When we get the award we're refitting her and she needs a name and it's your job."
"It's not my job."
"You're on the roster."
"I regret the roster."
"Too late. Ninety dollars." She pointed her fork at me. "Go."
"Perpetua."
"That's the wreck. That's morbid. Next."
"Margarita."
"That's a drink, and there are eleven of them in this county, and one of them is a church boat."
"Compressor."
"That's not a name, that's a part."
"Second Boat."
"Torren."
"The Ledger."
"Absolutely not, that's a threat, that's a boat that's going to come to your house."
"Injector."
"You're doing this on purpose."
"I'm doing all of it on purpose," I said. "There hasn't been an accident yet."
"Okay. Okay." She wiped her hands on her — my — shirt. "Serious one. Go."
"Silas."
She put the fork down.
"That's not a joke name," she said carefully.
"No."
"Torren."
"It's a good name for a boat," I said. "He'd have hated it. He'd have said covers are advertising."
She was quiet.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. That one's — that one's on the list. That one's on the list at the top." She picked the fork back up. "But you still have to name the first one, and the first one is currently called the Halcyon, which was my dad's, which stays."
"So there's nothing to name."
"There's the skiff."
"It's a skiff."
"It's a vessel, Torren, it has a hull identification number, it is a person in the eyes of the law — "
"Skiff," I said.
"You are not naming the skiff Skiff."
"It's accurate."
"I'm going to throw you off this boat."
"You'd have to file an amendment," I said. "There's a fee."
And she laughed so hard she dropped the pan, and eleven dollars of eggs went into four feet of tea-colored water, and somewhere down there a crab had the best week of his life.
We sat out there a long time after that with our backs against the wheelhouse and our feet on the rail, not saying much.
The rain came back around midnight, softer, and the mangroves did the thing they do, a hundred thousand leaves all reporting the same weather at slightly different times.
"Two more days of this," she said.
"Then the hearing."
"Then the hearing."
"You scared?"
"Of the hearing? No. Of the ruling." She pulled her knees up. "Because there's a version where we win and it's still not enough money and I still lose a boat, and there's a version where we lose and I have to tell an old man that he sold his best friend's daughter out for nothing."
"There's a version where you win."
"There's a version where I win," she agreed. "I don't rehearse that one. It's bad luck and it's also very boring to rehearse."
I put my arm along the back of her.
"Ninety dollars," I said.
"Oh, we're never going to be done with that, are we."
"No," I said. "That's the thing about a form. It's permanent."