Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
By my fourth day on the island, I had, without entirely deciding to, annexed the supply closet, the spice situation, and a low-grade ongoing war with the parlor’s accounting that I was winning. I had also drafted an itinerary.
The girls’ week was still ten days out — Cam was finishing something in Lisbon, or starting something, the distinction never quite holds with Cam — but a week that good does not organize itself.
I had learned long ago that the people who claim to love spontaneity are, without exception, relying on somebody like me to arrange it behind a curtain.
So I built the week. Color-coded. And the centerpiece, slotted into Day Three at the hour my weather app and I had agreed gave the best odds, was a sunset charter.
Greer watched me lay it out on the parlor counter at closing — the laminated card, the contingency for weather, the note about the good rosé.
“You’re scheduling magic hour,” she said.
“Someone has to.”
“Brooke. The whole point of magic hour is that it just?—”
“The whole point of magic hour,” I said, “is that somebody books the boat.”
Dani, sanding a drawer front at the far end of the counter, did not look up. “Who’d you book?” she asked, in the careful neutral voice of a person who already knows the answer and intends to enjoy it.
“There’s one operator who runs a sunset charter. A Captain Hollis. I’ve left three messages.”
Dani set down her sandpaper. Greer’s mouth did a thing. The two of them exchanged a look I did not care for — the look of people watching a woman stride cheerfully toward a glass door she is confident is open.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Greer said, in the tone that means everything. “Hollis is just — Hollis.”
“He runs a charter business. I am chartering. This is the most natural transaction on earth.”
Dani and Greer looked at each other again.
Then Dani, who has never wasted a word in her life, gave me the only briefing I was going to get.
“He doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t have a card reader.
He turned down the cruise company that wanted to buy him out, then turned down the next one.
And Tansy says he once took a man’s deposit back out of the register and walked it to his car, because the fellow tried to tip him to guarantee dolphins.
” She picked the sandpaper back up. “You’re going to want to dolphin-guarantee him, Brooke. I can feel it from here.”
I informed them both that I had managed harder men than a fisherman. That I had, in point of fact, once gotten an entire zoning board to reverse itself with a binder and a plate of lemon bars. That one barefoot boat captain did not constitute a meaningful obstacle to a confirmed reservation.
They let me have that. They are good friends. Good friends know when to let you walk into the glass.
The marina was not what I would call a going concern.
It was a dock, a bait cooler, a hand-lettered board of prices that had not been touched since the prices were lower, and four boats in various states of philosophical decline.
The one I wanted belonged to a charter operation that consisted, as far as I could establish, of one boat and one man, neither of them in a hurry.
The boat was the Margaret Ann, after a woman nobody had troubled to explain to me.
It was old. It was also, I noticed, against my will, immaculate in the places that count — the brightwork oiled, the lines coiled like they mattered, every cleat, rod, and rail kept with the quiet ferocity of a man who has decided that this, and possibly only this, will be done right.
The man was at the stern with his back to me, doing something to a reel with the unhurried competence I would come to consider the single most maddening quality in the state of Georgia.
I had left three messages. He had returned none.
I had driven to the marina to resolve the matter the way I resolve matters, which is in person, with a calendar.
“Captain Hollis,” I said, to his back. “I’m Brooke. I’ve left you a few messages.”
“I know,” he said. He did not turn around. “Machine told me.”
I waited for the rest of it — the apology, the explanation, the small social repayment a person tenders for three unreturned calls. None arrived. He went on with the reel. A pelican judged me from a piling.
“I’d like to charter the boat,” I said. “A sunset cruise. Eight days out, Thursday. Two hours, seven fifteen to nine fifteen, departing promptly, party of four. I can leave a deposit now to hold the date.”
He turned around at that. He was older than the voice — fifties, sun-cured to roughly the color and texture of a saddle, with pale eyes that had spent a lifetime reading water and now spent about four seconds reading me, which proved to be plenty.
He looked at the watch. He looked at the card I’d already produced.
He looked, with what I can only call mild anthropological interest, at me.
“You can’t hold a sunset,” he said.
“I’m not holding the sunset. I’m holding the date.”
“Same thing, from where I stand.” He set the reel down. “I don’t take deposits. I don’t book to the minute. And I don’t promise sky. You want a thing that happens at seven fifteen sharp, ma’am, you want a planetarium.”
I am not accustomed to being handled, and I registered, with real indignation, that I was being handled — by a man in a hat.
So I tried again, reasonably, because I am always reasonable, which is one of the most aggravating things about me.
I explained that I run on certainty. That I had four people counting on a specific evening.
That surely a business wishing to remain a business could accommodate a paying customer who only wanted to know what she was getting.
He let me finish all of it. Then he said, “You always this hard at relaxing?”
It was not a clever line, and he did not deliver it like one.
He said it the way you’d mention a low tire — not unkind, just a fact about the vehicle the owner might want to see to.
And it went in under the blazer, under the itinerary, under the three unreturned messages, and landed somewhere I had spent a great deal of effort keeping locked.
I had driven four hundred miles, reorganized a stranger’s accounting, and laminated an entire vacation to avoid precisely the thing this man had just named, for free, from beneath a hat, in six words.
So I did the only thing available to a woman whose armor has just been read by a fisherman. I rebooked the conversation.
“I’ll take Thursday,” I said. “Seven fifteen. No deposit, since you won’t take one. And if the sky declines to perform, Captain, I’ll consider that your problem, not mine.”
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth that on a less weathered face might have been the start of a smile, and on his was more like a tide deciding whether to come in.
“It’s always my problem,” he said. “That’s the job.” He picked the reel back up. “Be here at seven. Boat leaves when it leaves.”
And that, I thought, walking back up the dock with my unused credit card and my thoroughly used composure, was that. One charter, booked. One captain, managed. I had, after all, gotten my Thursday.
“Well?” Greer said, when I came back into the parlor. “Did you book it?”
“I booked it.”
“You booked Hollis.” She said it like I’d wrestled the alligator. “No deposit?”
“He doesn’t take them. The boat ‘leaves when it leaves.’” I put the air quotes around it with more violence than the phrase strictly required. “The man runs a business the way other people run a hammock.”
Dani, who had drifted to the dip station and was eating the evening’s mistakes, weighed in. “He runs it exactly the way he wants to,” she said. “You hate that.”
“I don’t hate it. I find it operationally indefensible.”
“You hate it,” Dani said comfortably, and ate a malformed cone.
She was wrong, and she was right, in the order she always is.
I did find it indefensible — a man with one asset and no system, leaving money on the dock out of what looked from any reasonable distance like sheer contrariness.
But underneath the part of me that wanted to fix his booking, his signage, and his entire attitude was a smaller, quieter, freshly unhoused part that had stood on a dock and watched a man do one thing well, slowly, unhurried, on nobody’s schedule but his own — and felt the one thing I had no category for, the thing I’d spent a whole managed life outrunning, which was envy.
I did not say that either. I found my legal pad.
I entered Captain Hollis — charter, Thurs, 7:15 into the itinerary in its proper block, in my own steady hand.
And I underlined 7:15 twice — because some of us hold the line even when the line has told us, to our face, from under a hat, that it leaves when it leaves.