10. Four Months Late #2
Every pass rubbed the handle over the same places on my palms. I changed my grip, switched angles, crouched lower, then stood to work the sections I could reach from beside the boat. None of it made the job easier. It only moved the pain somewhere else.
Skipper wandered past once and nodded toward the stern.
“You missed a strip near the bottom.”
“I see it.”
“Then finish it before you call the job done.”
“I’m finishing it.”
He kept walking.
I crouched again and shoved the scraper beneath the strip he had marked. The coating resisted before peeling away in a ragged curl. By then, sweat had dried and returned enough times that my shirt clung to me, and blue residue had worked its way across my trousers.
The handle slipped.
Pain burned through my palm.
I pulled my hand back and found a split in the skin near the base of my fingers. A thin smear of blood marked the tool where I had been gripping it.
There was still hull left.
I shifted my grip to avoid the cut and went back to work.
Piper had done this kind of labor pregnant.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about it through every pass since Skipper told me.
It haunted me right alongside the memory of the ring on our kitchen island and the Amex alert heading south while I packed for Seattle.
She had been carrying our child through all of it, and I had let my father convince me that chasing her would reward bad behavior.
The next patch came free.
I adjusted my stance and kept going.
By the time Skipper returned, the worst of the afternoon heat had eased. A breeze came off the water and swept beneath the hull, cooling the sweat on my neck. My lower back tightened when I stood, but I bent again and scraped the final patch near the stern.
Skipper stopped beside me.
“That the last of it?”
“Almost.”
He pointed with two fingers. “There’s your edge.”
I followed the line until I found a narrow band I had missed.
The scraper caught once, then peeled the buildup away.
I stepped back and looked over the section Skipper had assigned. My hands were filthy, the torn places stung, and my shoes looked like they belonged in a trash can, but the old buildup was gone.
Skipper nodded toward the workbench.
“Leave the scraper there.”
I carried it over and set it down.
“Anything else on this one?”
“Not tonight.”
The word *tonight* meant there was a tomorrow.
The shack stood across the yard, close enough to see the doorway Piper had ordered me away from earlier this afternoon. I hadn’t dared to approach it again. Maybe she had watched me finish working from a window. Maybe she hadn’t cared at all.
Neither possibility gave me the right to knock again.
Still, I needed to know.
“Then I need to ask you something.”
Skipper looked at my hands. “You should clean those before you smear blood over my property.”
“I will.”
“What do you want?”
I let my eyes linger on the shack, then faced him.
“The hull is scraped and prepped for paint. Could I please just go knock on the shack door to tell Piper goodnight?”
Skipper gave a short laugh with no humor in it.
“You already tried talking to her today, and she nearly took your head off. Scraping barnacles for one afternoon doesn’t erase four months of you abandoning her. Get off my docks and walk down the highway to the motel.”
The answer hurt more than the scraper had.
I looked at my palms instead of arguing. The cuts were proof that I had worked. They were not proof that I deserved Piper’s time.
I wouldn’t have understood that four months ago.
Maybe not even yesterday.
“I wasn’t asking her to forgive me.”
“No. You were asking me to give you access to her because you finished a chore.”
I let the silence admit he was right.
Skipper pointed toward the road. “Piper decides when she wants to speak to you. Not me. Not you. And certainly not because you ruined a shirt under one of my boats.”
“You’re right.”
He raised his eyebrows as if he had expected a fight.
I walked back to the piling and took my jacket down. Dried residue dusted one sleeve, and I didn’t bother brushing it off. The thing had looked important this morning.
Now it was just something I had to carry.
“I understand, and I’ll leave for tonight,” I said. “But I am coming back tomorrow morning, and you can assign me whatever chores you need done.”
Skipper studied me for a moment.
“Sun comes up early.”
“I’ll be here.”
“Then go clean those hands before they get infected.”
I nodded and turned toward the road.
The shack stayed behind me. No door opened. Piper didn’t call my name or give me some small reward for staying in the dirt all afternoon.
For once, I accepted that without trying to change it.
I was coming back in the morning.
By the time the Driftwood Motel sign came into view, every step down the highway had turned into work.
The neon buzzed above a long row of rooms set back from the road, one letter blinking on and off as if the place couldn’t decide whether it wanted customers.
My lower back ached from hours spent crouched beneath the hull, and the cuts across my palms burned whenever my fingers brushed the jacket hanging over my arm.
Forty-eight hours ago, I stood in a Manhattan penthouse with a private jet waiting on my call.
Now I was walking into a roadside motel with boat paint on my trousers.
The glass door stuck before giving way under my shoulder. Stale cigarette smoke clung to the lobby despite the faded NO SMOKING sign taped beside the counter. A man sat behind the desk with a paperback open in one hand and a plastic cup beside his elbow.
He lowered the book.
“You checking in?”
“If you’ve got a room.”
“Got rooms.” He looked down at the paint residue smeared across my leg. “Depends how long you’re staying.”
“At least a few nights.”
I lifted the jacket onto the counter so it wasn’t dragging against the floor. The man’s name tag read WAYNE in block letters.
Wayne leaned back in his chair. “You been working down at the marina?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re tracking half the yard into my lobby.”
Dried mud had broken loose around the soles of my shoes and scattered across the tile behind me.
“Sorry. It’s been a long day.”
“Looks like it.”
He showed no sign of recognizing me. No second look. No question about whether I was the quarterback plastered across sports networks every Sunday.
That should have been strange.
Instead, it was a relief.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the black Amex. The card landed on the laminate counter between us.
“I need a room for the rest of the week, preferably something quiet in the back. You can keep that card on file for any incidentals.”
Wayne stared at the card.
Then he pushed it straight back.
“We don’t take fancy credit cards here, mister. It’s cash only, forty dollars a night, paid upfront.”
For a moment, I thought he was joking.
The card sat against my fingertips.
That piece of plastic had paid for charter flights, presidential suites, security teams, dinners where nobody bothered printing prices on the menu. Reid had once used the same account to secure an entire hotel floor because a sponsor didn’t want strangers staying on the same level as me.
Wayne couldn’t have cared less.
“Cash only?” I asked.
“That’s what I said.”
“You don’t run cards at all?”
“No machine.”
I looked around the lobby as if one might appear out of pity.
Wayne picked up his book again. “There’s an ATM at the gas station about a mile north if you don’t have enough.”
Walking another mile sounded worse than any fourth-quarter drive I had played that season.
“I’ve got some cash.”
“Then we’re making progress.”
I slid the card back into my pocket and started checking the others. My fingers caught against the fabric; I couldn’t close my hands without pulling at the torn skin. Receipts came out first. A folded parking stub. Two twenties.
Wayne watched me sort through the mess.
“You want one night or more than one?”
“Three to start.”
“That’s a hundred and twenty.”
“I can do math.”
“Good. Saves us both time.”
I pulled a fifty and a worn ten from another pocket. I laid the bills on the counter, then checked the inside of my jacket for the rest.
I stared at the wrinkled cash on the counter.
I had flown into Florida assuming money could solve anything that survived an apology. Now I was counting wrinkled bills under a broken motel sign because a man named Wayne didn’t care how much credit I had.
And for once, I didn’t want him to.
“I understand,” I said, checking the last pocket. “Let me just find enough cash to cover the first three nights.”
I found the last twenty tucked behind an old receipt and laid it beside the other bills.
Wayne counted the hundred and twenty without comment, stacked the money beneath the counter, then reached toward a row of hooks mounted behind him. A room key hung from one of them on a faded tag. He dropped it into my palm, the edge pressing against one of the cuts from the scraper.
“Three nights,” he said. “After that, you pay again or check out.”
“That’s right.”
“Don’t lose the key. I don’t have another copy sitting around for tourists who forget where they put things.”
“I’ll keep track of it.”
Wayne returned to his paperback before I had even collected my jacket.
Our transaction was over as far as he was concerned.
No concierge offered to take my coat, no security detail appeared to walk me through a private entrance, and nobody rushed over because Nolan Callahan had just checked into the building.
I took my jacket off the counter and went back outside.
The motel rooms opened onto a narrow exterior walkway facing the parking lot.
The neon from the sign washed across the doors in uneven pulses while traffic moved along the highway beyond the property.
My shoes scraped over the concrete as I followed the room numbers, key pinched between my fingertips because closing my hand around it hurt.
The lock stuck on the first try.
“Come on,” I muttered.
I jiggled the key, forced it to turn, and leaned my weight against the wood until it gave.