Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
The morning after the rebrand died on the boardwalk, I could not sleep past four, and a woman who cannot sleep past four on this island has exactly two options: she can lie in the dark over Earl’s and conduct a full forensic review of her own character, or she can go down to the water.
I had done the forensic review the previous three nights. I went down to the water.
The marina at that hour is a held breath.
The boats sit in the flat dark and tick against their lines, and the only light is the one over the bait cooler and whatever the sky is offering, and Hollis was on the Margaret Ann with a thermos, doing the thing he does, which is being exactly where he is with no apparent wish to be anywhere else.
He had a stack of crab pots on the dock and a look that said he was about to go put them somewhere.
“You’re up,” he said to the pots.
“I don’t sleep anymore. It’s a whole feature of my new life. I have a lot of new features.”
“Mm.” He hefted a pot into the boat. “Heard about the sign.”
“Everyone heard about the sign. The sign is the most successful thing I’ve made all summer, in terms of reach.
” I sat down on the edge of the dock, uninvited, which on Hollis is the only way anything happens.
“Boone gave me a speech about a storm in 1979. Earl bought a vanilla cone at me as a form of pardon. Tansy made a noise I’m still recovering from.
” I watched him work. “Where are you taking the cages?”
“Out.” He looked at me for a second, that pale four-second read. Then, because the man is not actually cruel, only economical: “You can come if you’re quiet. I’ve got two hours of work and no use for opinions on it.”
I should not have gone. I had a parlor to open in three hours and a four-page plan with two surviving pages and a standing policy against unscheduled water. I got in the boat.
He did not perform the trip for me, which is the whole of why I remember it.
We went out into the marsh in the gray, the engine low, the water going from black to pewter to the particular pink that this coast does and no postcard has ever caught, and he ran his pots one at a time — hauling, checking, rebaiting, dropping, the same unhurried liturgy I’d watched him give a reel on our first morning — and he did not narrate a single thing.
He did not point out the sunrise. He did not tell me the names of the birds, though he knew them; I could see that he knew them — his eyes would track a thing and dismiss it.
He just did his work in front of me and let me be in the weather, and I understood, somewhere around the fourth pot, that this was the most respect a man had paid me in years.
He was not trying to give me an experience. He was letting me have a morning.
I tried, twice, to be useful, because two hours of not being useful is a near-lethal dose for me.
The first time I reached for a line and he said “don’t” without heat, and I didn’t.
The second time I started, helplessly, to suggest a system — a logbook for the pots, a numbered buoy scheme, a way to track yield per location that would, I was fairly sure, improve his catch by a measurable margin — and he let me get all the way to the end of it, the way the whole maddening island lets a person finish their worst sentence, and then he said, “I know which ones are good. I’ve known for thirty years.
It’s in my hands, not a book.” He dropped the pot.
“If I wrote it down, I’d stop knowing it. Some things you keep by carrying them.”
It was the second time that summer a person had said that exact shape of thing to me — some things you keep by carrying them — and the first time, from Dani, I’d filed it as a charming limitation.
Out on the water at sunrise with a man who could read a marsh like a ledger he’d never once had to open, I heard it as the thing it was, which was the entire argument against everything I had come to this island to do.
I did not have a column for it. I was beginning to keep a private, growing list of things I did not have a column for, and every single one of them was out here, on the water, in this man’s hands.
And then I told him a true thing, which I had not planned to do and had told no one, not Greer, not Cam, not the lawyer, not myself in any sentence I let finish.
“My husband left me in May,” I said, to the water, not to him, which is the only way I can say the true ones.
“For a woman I recommended to him. And the thing nobody knows, the thing I can’t say out loud at home because it makes me a monster, is that I wasn’t sad.
I felt — relieved. Eighteen years, and the main thing I felt was that I’d gotten my Tuesday back.
” I watched a heron stand in the shallows, being patient about a fish.
“And I keep thinking a normal person would’ve fought for it, or at least cried, and I just — packed his bag, because I couldn’t stand to watch him fold it wrong.
That’s who I am. That’s the whole report. ”
Hollis did not fix it. That was the thing I will carry by carrying it the rest of my life.
He did not tell me I wasn’t a monster, did not reassure me, did not offer a single one of the eighty things a person reaches for to make a confession smaller and themselves more comfortable.
He let it sit on the water between us the way he’d let the word wife sit on the charter.
Then he checked a pot, dropped it, and said, “Relief’s just grief that finished early.
You did your crying years ago, in installments, where nobody could see it.
That’s not a monster. That’s just a long way of being lonely.
” He looked at the heron. “Folding the bag was kind, by the way. You don’t have to be a monster about everything.
Some of it you were just being decent.” And he went back to his pots, and left me sitting in the stern with the most accurate thing anyone had ever said about my marriage, delivered by a fisherman who had known me eleven days, and not one idea what to do with a man who could see me that clearly and seemed to find the view perfectly all right.
We came back in with the sun fully up and a bushel of crabs that would, I noticed and hated myself for noticing, retail for considerably more than he’d charge for them. He cut the engine at the slip and let the quiet come back, and for a minute neither of us moved to end it.
“You’re easier out here,” he said. Not a question. “Whole different face on you. You ought to know that. Somebody ought to tell you what you look like when you’re not running the place.”
“And what’s that?”
He considered it with the gravity he brings to weather.
“Like the woman the rest of it’s keeping in a drawer,” he said.
“She’s all right. I’d let her steer sometime.
She wouldn’t even have to be good at it.
” And then he climbed out and started handing crabs to Tansy’s nephew, who’d appeared on the dock for them, and the moment closed over the way the water closes over a dropped line, no mark left, and I sat in the boat for one second longer than I should have, with a feeling in my chest the size and temperature of the risen sun, and absolutely no idea what to do with a man who’d just offered to let me be bad at something.
So I did the thing I do. I climbed out, and I thanked him with a briskness that took the temperature right back down, and I walked up the dock toward a parlor that needed opening, already reaching for the day’s list, already converting two of the best hours of my summer into a thing I had done and could now stop feeling.
By the time I had the lights on I had nearly persuaded myself it had been research — a competitive scan of the local charter operation, a little due diligence on a vendor.
I am very good at telling myself things.
But my hands smelled like salt and bait all morning, and every time I caught it I was back out on the pewter water being told I’d be allowed to steer, and I served cones with a face that Mari, watching me, finally identified out loud at noon.
“You went out on the boat,” she said, not a question, the whole island already knowing.
She studied me with the clinical interest of a seventeen-year-old cataloguing an adult’s weakness.
“Huh. You like him.” And she went back to the machine, having diagnosed in four words a condition I would spend another two weeks and one disastrous kiss refusing to admit I had.