Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
Greer told me on a Thursday that I did not know how to walk up a set of steps with empty hands. On the Friday, I went down to the marina to prove her wrong, and I brought a proposal.
I did not see the contradiction. That is the most honest sentence I can give you about who I was that week.
I had heard Greer say empty hands, I had agreed with her, I had felt the truth of it in my actual body — and then I had gone home and lain awake wanting Hollis so badly and so far outside my own control that the wanting felt like a structural failure, a load the building was not rated for, and I had done the only thing I have ever known how to do with a load like that.
I had engineered a way to carry it. I had turned the most uncontrollable thing in my life into a thing with terms.
I had, and I am not exaggerating for effect, made notes.
At my own kitchen table, the night before, I had sat down with the legal pad — the legal pad, the same instrument I’d used to dismantle a marriage and rebuild a parlor — and I had worked out what I wanted to propose to a man I had kissed exactly once, on this same boat, before fleeing him at a dead run.
I had given it a shape. Boundaries, a timeline, an exit.
I had drafted the terms of a romance the way I’d draft the terms of a wholesale account, and I had done it because a thing with terms is a thing you can read off a page and be afraid of in an orderly fashion, and what I could not survive was the other kind, the kind with no page, the kind that just wants you and waits.
A man who waits is a far more terrifying proposition than a man who leaves.
A man who leaves, at least, you can manage.
I drove to the marina with my notes in my head and my heart going like a thing that wants out of a building, and I called it being mature.
He was on the Margaret Ann, of course, in the long gold of the evening, not waiting for me because Hollis does not wait for anyone, simply being where he was when I arrived, which on Hollis reads almost the same and is the entire difference.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, and I heard my own boardroom voice come out, the one I use to make men who hate me sign things, and I could not stop it.
“About — this. Us. Whatever this is. And I think the reason it scares me is that it’s undefined, and I do better with definition, I always have, so I thought we could just — talk about what it is.
Set some expectations. I’m here through the season, you’ve got your charters, neither of us is looking to upend a life, so maybe we just agree it’s a summer thing, a good one, low-stakes, no projections past Labor Day, and that way nobody?—”
“Brooke.”
“—nobody gets hurt, and we both know where we stand, and?—”
“Brooke.” He didn’t raise his voice. Hollis has never once raised his voice in my hearing; it’s part of what’s so unbearable about him.
He set down the line he was coiling. “You came down here to break up with me before anything started, so you’d be the one holding the scissors.
” He looked at me, and for the first time all summer, there was something in his face that wasn’t patience.
“You’ve negotiated a contract for a thing nobody offered you a contract on.
I never asked you for past Labor Day. I never asked you for anything.
I told you that on this exact boat. And you’ve gone and built a fence around a field I never tried to fence, so you’d have something to stand behind. ”
“I’m being realistic?—”
“You’re being scared. They’re not the same, but you’ve spent so long calling one the other you can’t hear the difference anymore.
” He stepped up onto the dock, slow, like he does everything, so that we were standing on the same boards for once instead of him below me on the water.
“I’ve watched you all summer, Brooke. I watched you take the kindest counter boy on this coast and teach him to fail at a number.
I watched you price an eighty-one-year-old woman out of the only chair she ever felt at home in.
I watched you straighten a cone that fifty years of storms couldn’t, and build a cart fifty feet from my slip so you’d never have to admit you wanted to be near me.
And now you’re standing on my dock at sunset trying to schedule the one thing in your life that finally came without a schedule.
” He shook his head, and the worst part, the part I deserved, was that it wasn’t anger.
It was disappointment, which is so much heavier.
“I’m not going to sign your contract. Not because I don’t want the summer.
Because I won’t help you do to this what you’ve done to that parlor — take a living thing and manage it until it’s efficient and dead. ”
I should have heard him. Some part of me did hear him, the part that fell asleep in a chair at a lake twenty years ago, the part Sophie swore she didn’t make up.
That part heard every word, knew it was true, and wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything I could put on a page, to set the proposal down on the dock and walk up to him with nothing in my hands at all.
I did not do that. I did the other thing. I did the thing I have done my whole life when a person gets close enough to see the actual size of the fear, which is to get cold, get correct, and get gone.
“Well,” I said, and I heard the boardroom close over my voice like water over a stone.
“I’m sorry you see it that way. I thought I was being honest about my capacity.
I have a business to run — two, actually — and I don’t have room right now for something that needs this much...
interpretation.” I was already turning. I was already three steps up the dock, already reaching for the clipboard that wasn’t there, already converting the truest offer anyone had made me all summer into a problem of capacity and interpretation.
“I should get back. The evening rush at the cart starts at seven.”
“Brooke.” Quiet. Not chasing — Hollis told me once he doesn’t chase, and Hollis does not say things he doesn’t mean.
I stopped, but I didn’t turn around, because if I turned around, he’d see my face, and my face was not under management.
“The rush isn’t the thing you’re running to,” he said. “It’s just the thing that’s open.”
I walked back to the cart. The evening rush started at seven, exactly as scheduled, two hundred strangers stepping off boats with money and nowhere to put their hands, and I served every one of them with a smile I had taught myself the way I’d taught Tuck his scripts, and not one of them could have told you that the woman handing them the most photographed cone on the Georgia coast had just, on a dock behind them, in the gold of a perfect evening, optimized the last good thing she had left clean out of her own life.