Today at lunch, Alex suggested we might want to cancel our sail, with the tide not high enough until dinnertime, and the potential rain, but we’d been trying to get over to the Salt House for weeks, and we finally agreed that we’d take a short sail, downriver and back at the most, just long enough to check the repair.
I’d met him in the parking lot after work, and we’d grabbed sandwiches from the sub shop and pulled up at the Salt House just before six, when the tide was at its highest.
But by the time we took the tarp off the sailboat, and carried it across the marsh to the water, the first drops of rain tapped lightly on our foreheads. The weather report said there was a chance of a thunderstorm in the evening, but later, after midnight. By the look of the clouds forming above us, the storm had arrived six hours early.
The wind had picked up even in the short time it took us to get the boat to the water. The river was dark under the overcast sky. Alex motioned for us to head back to the shed just as the sky opened, rain pouring down on us, the rumblings of thunder in the distance.
We grabbed the sailboat and hurried toward the house, the boat slipping from my grip and knocking against my shins. Lightning flashed over the water behind us. Alex dropped his end and grabbed the bag out of the boat, holding it out to me.
“Go inside,” he yelled. “It’ll be quicker if I drag it.”
I took the bag and sprinted to the house, my shorts and T-shirt drenched through, drops of rain slipping off my nose. There was a small cluster of rocks by the front steps, and I turned them over, forgetting which one the key was hidden under.
When I finally unlocked the door and stepped in, the smell of the house made me stop where I was. The house didn’t look the same because of the renovation, but it had the same smell—briny and musty mixed together. The way you’d expect an old house at the ocean to smell. I breathed in deep and closed my eyes, realizing how much I’d missed this place.
In the back hall, there was a raincoat, and I grabbed it and brought it out to Alex, but he was stripped down to his board shorts, apparently unfazed by the rain with the way he was taking his time with the tarp, smoothing down every gap. He laughed when I held out the jacket and told me to go get warm while he finished covering the boat.
Inside the house, I lit a candle in the kitchen and left a towel in the front hall for Alex so he could dry off. Upstairs, I took a quick shower and slipped on jeans and a long-sleeve shirt that were packed in a bin in my bedroom. They were from last year, tighter than the clothes I normally wore, but when I looked in the mirror, I didn’t mind what I saw.
There wasn’t a hair dryer, but there was a fan in Kat’s room, and I dried my hair in front of it. Then I rifled through the box on my mother’s bureau to see if there was some perfume to dab on.
I heard Alex open the front door, and I retraced my steps, cleaning up after myself so I didn’t leave a trail for my parents. Then I walked down the stairs and turned into the kitchen.
Alex was at the window, looking at the water in front of us. He’d draped the towel over the faucet, where it dripped into the sink.
“You’d never guess this was the view from the front,” he said, stunned.
I walked over to where he stood. “Yeah. It’s pretty great. I used to hate it when I was younger, though. The water at high tide seemed like it might come in the house.”
As soon as I said it, I wanted to take it back. I thought of Alex’s house on the train tracks. How the view from his house was a chain-link fence and steel rails.
But he was looking out at the water, nodding to himself.
“My father and I used to go fishing before he died. I was young. Six. Seven, maybe. My uncle came with us once, and he wanted to go out deep, so my father motored out until we couldn’t see land.” He rolled his eyes, shook his head. “It was just this crappy dinghy, and the water was so black. As far as I could see on every side was just water. And there was this leak in the boat, so my father had to keep bailing to keep us afloat.”
“What happened?” I asked, and he looked at me, his eyes going down the front of me and quickly back up.
“Wow,” he said, and coughed, flustered it seemed. “I mean, wow, you’re all showered and everything. Um, what was I saying? Oh, nothing happened. They fished for a while until they realized I was petrified. Then we went in.” He shrugged. “Probably why I got interested in boats, though. Or fixing them, I mean. All those nightmares about that leak.”
“You don’t talk about your father a lot,” I said.
“Well, he isn’t alive, so . . .”
I cut my eyes at him, and he tried to keep a straight face, but it didn’t last long, a smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Don’t give me a hard time. You know what I mean.”
“What do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking, Everything. When I looked at his face, I saw that he was serious. So I said it out loud. “Everything.”
He tipped his chin to the screen room and grabbed the bag off the table. I followed him to where our couch was covered with a blue tarp. Outside, the rain had stopped, and orange streaks split the sky. Alex pulled the tarp off the couch, and we put the bag on the seat between us. The sandwiches had miraculously stayed dry, and we ate them from paper plates on our laps.
It turned out Alex telling me everything about his father took less than ten minutes. He’d died when Alex was eight, and his memory of him was vague. He repeated the things his mother had told him—that his father loved black licorice and his job as a school counselor and hated spiders and hiking—but since they were his mother’s memories, they somehow seemed empty to him.
“So what about you?” he asked when he was done talking.
I looked at him. “What about me?”
“You don’t exactly talk about your father either. And he’s alive.”
A persistent fly buzzed around us, hovering over Alex’s plate, now empty. Alex put our trash in the bag and put it on the floor in front of us. He sat back against the couch, turning so his body was facing me, his arm resting on the back of the couch. I’d put the candle on the stack of boxes in the corner, and the light from it was a soft glow on his face.
He was looking at me, waiting for me to answer.
“He’s my father. There’s not much to say.”
“He’s good with me fixing the boat, right?” he asked. “I felt kind of funny being in the yard, working on it, you know, without having met him.”
“It’s my boat. It’s not like I needed to get his permission.”
And he has no idea you’re fixing it was what went through my head.
The boat had been sitting with a hole in it for three years. I was betting that my father wouldn’t notice it was fixed for another three years.
“I know. But I should’ve checked with him just the same. What if he had shown up here when I was working on it? ‘Boy, eighteen, has his face rearranged after found trespassing.’?” He said this in a voice of a news reporter.
“You’re still hung up on that? I told you, Boon was kidding. He’s harmless.”
“He might be. But your father isn’t. He’s got kind of a reputation.”
I screwed up my face at him. “As what?”