Ahoy!

by Maggie Seacroft

“Oh, I see. So, Mrs. Chris told Mr. Beedle that her ever-lovin’ hubby couldn’t work here any longer, right?” I mused.

  “Yeah, but that’s ok. I still have Carlos and Ryan in rotation.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. I wouldn’t want you to have to wear socks to bed to keep warm,” I said, kicking her under the table.

  “But this new guy is supposed to be here this afternoon. I hope he’s cute.” She said the words in a way that told me she’d already imagined him to be just her type—ten years her junior with six-pack abs and a few bad habits.

  “For the sake of Carlos and Ryan, I hope he’s not your type, but if he is, I hope he’s single,” I tossed out there and took another satisfying bite.

  We chatted a little longer, speculating about the incoming manager, covering the highlights from her latest dates with Carlos or Ryan – I couldn’t keep them straight, and gossiping a bit about the perpetually sparring couple in the marina. For the sake of anonymity, we had named them the Bickerlys, though anyone within earshot on a Saturday night knew exactly who they were. It was a nice break from talking propellers and barges with strange men I’d never met before. All the while, Aggie was glancing at her phone which was placed on the table so she could, I take it, see and then intentionally ignore those instant abbreviated messages of undying adoration from her beaus on the other side of the screen.

  She sighed. “Well, I should get back to the store. I said I’d be back at three and it’s just after.”

  It was at that moment a voice from the dock jarred us, shattering the calm of the afternoon and interrupting the pleasantries we were exchanging while I folded the wax paper wrappers the sandwiches had come in. “Would either of you two know who runs that poor excuse for a store up there?”

  As though in a synchronized fashion, Aggie and I looked at each other and then in the direction of a man standing at the dock. His foot rested on a dock line, my dock line, and it agitated me.

  “Why do you want to know?” I asked the impertinent stranger. I admit that when I chucked my corporate finance job, I may have also tossed out my people skills and ability to filter my words, but the man at the dock had only himself to blame with his inauspicious greeting.

  “I’m the new operations manager here. I left word I was coming to meet with her at 15:00 today.”

  I felt my arched eyebrow hit new heights as Aggie and I exchanged looks of doom and puzzlement. Apparently, we were now on military time.

  “I own that miserable excuse for a store,” Aggie piped up. Her hot-blooded French heritage was showing.

  “Hmph. I said poor excuse,” the man corrected her, posturing with his hands on his hips like he was anticipating a showdown. It was at that moment I knew we were in for some fun times with the newcomer who then introduced himself as Bill Beedle — a.k.a. the son of the marina owner.

  Some terse parting remarks later, I watched Ags trudge back to her store with all the enthusiasm of an inmate headed to death row, the new warden not far behind her. Then I got back to the business of some household maintenance. As it turned out, the task I’d assigned myself that afternoon allowed me to keep an eye on things in Aggie’s direction. You know, intervene if she sent up a flare for help or scrape together the bail money if she lost her cool with the new manager and the cops hauled her off. It was hot work and without so much as a blessed whisper of a breeze, and at the end of a job well done, I headed to Aggie’s for some of her famous peach iced tea and, of course, the lowdown on her meeting with Beedle Junior.

  “Argh. Alex, would you believe it! The nerve of that guy!” Ags spouted at me over the sound of the ringing bell that announced my arrival into her store. She must have seen my blonde head bobbing up the steps to her place because she launched into venting as soon as I crossed the threshold. I debated my option of turning tail and heading back to the boat until Ags cooled down, but that damn peach iced tea was my kryptonite.

  “You can’t have been talking to him this whole time,” I said, forging ahead, undaunted and scanning the area for my beverage of choice.

  “Wanna bet?” she carped back, shaking her head and then letting out a deep, exasperated breath like a puff of steam.

  “What… uh, what did he want?” I asked, happy to have finally spotted the iced tea and happier still that it looked as though it had recently been topped up.

  “He wants me to paint the outside of the building, fix the roof, and fill the holes on my side of the parking lot! Chris didn’t mention any of those things!” she said as she tossed a handful of utensils from the counter into the sink. The crashing clank of the stainless steel made me cringe.

  “Well, Chris was not exactly impartial, now was he? Look, take a deep breath. Let’s sit outside for a few minutes, get some fresh air, and you can tell me all about it.”

  “Deal!” Aggie said through a sigh. “Want some iced tea?” she asked, already positioned at the dispenser with a couple of plastic cups in her hands.

  “Oh, sure. If you do.” I was nonchalant, keeping cool about my admiration for the elixir.

  “Bails…we’re going to just be out front,” Aggie tossed over her shoulder at the teenage girl in the kitchenette. Bails, or Bailey, had been hired on to help part-time over the summer. She’s related to the man who delivers the ice to the marina, and the fact that she speaks French like Aggie is probably what landed her the job. There’s nothing like finding someone who speaks your language, literally, especially in California where finding a francophone is about as rare as finding a natural blonde. I was at long last handed a large iced tea, heavy on the ice – just the way I like it — and we made our way out to the table where we routinely sat to solve all the problems of the world, discuss the latest romantic developments of either of us – though mostly hers, and as was the case that day, have a bitch fest.

  After a short pause where she looked like she was mentally sorting the bullet points of the diatribe to come, Aggie relaxed her pose, sighed wistfully, and began. “You know how I was planning to rent Mr. Beedle’s cottage over there and then rent out the top of the store?” she said, nodding toward the building a few hundred feet away.

  “Yes?” How could I have forgotten; she’d only mentioned it ten times in the past few months alone. Last I heard, she wanted to try to get in there in the fall and rent out her place to her cousin who would be attending university close by starting the next semester.

  “Well, number one son is moving in there,” Aggie grumbled and took a big sip of the icy cold beverage, though I had a feeling it’d take more than that to put out the fiery mood she was in.

  “What?”

  “Yep, apparently he’s here for the duration.” She shook her head and glared off distantly.

  “Sorry, I know you had your heart set on that place.”

  Ags nodded. “Oh, it’ll be ok.” She sighed again. “I don’t really mind living above the store. At least I have a big balcony and I have it decorated the way I like. Besides that, I’m hardly home just to hang out. I’ll just spend more time out on my motorcycle. It’s no big deal. Really.”

  It was true. Ags had fixed up the place over the store quite nicely and, indeed, she was rarely home. But maybe somewhere deep inside herself she wanted a place like the cozy cottage. A place to settle into at the end of the day. I even wanted her to rent the cottage. I wanted her to have a home she loved being in and couldn’t wait to get to, like the way I felt about the Alex M. I wondered if the cozy cottage signified her desire to settle down in other ways too but decided she wasn’t in the mood for me to broach that subject.

  Aggie continued to rationalize her disappointment and straight out of the Good Friend Handbook, I put forth a litany of negative observations about the cottage that I knew she still yearned to move into, and with good reason. Despite my imaginative musing to the contrary, it was a cute little white cottage. Sitting about four hundred feet from the store, it looked original to the marina which would probably put it around circa 1920 or so. It had a wrap-around p
orch, pillars, a fireplace, and loads of windows.

  By the time we saw Nat strolling in our direction, though, we could have convinced anyone that the cottage should have been condemned and we almost pitied the new manager-chump who, as it turned out, came into view, backing up his pickup truck toward his new digs.

  “What are we watching, ladies?” Nat asked as he continued toward us. The crunch of the gravel under his canvas tennies halted, and he looked in the direction of our matched set of scowls.

  “We’re not quite sure, Nat. Pull up a seat,” I said, and Aggie and I scooched our chairs away from one another to make room for our guest, and the three of us sat facing the show like we were at a drive-in movie. Instead of the sickly gross smell of “buttered” popcorn, the air between us was dusted with Nat’s perfect blend of soap and Coppertone. And instead of a good flick, we settled into a reality show about moving.

  In a spectacle of demonstrable manliness and complete ineptitude, the star of the show, Manager Beedle, repositioned his truck at least three times. It reminded me of when I was sixteen and was learning to drive. From where we sat, the bed of the truck looked piled high with boxes. Some big, some small, and had he asked for help, two-thirds of us likely would have pitched in. But he hadn’t, so we didn’t. Instead, the three of us played Guess What’s in the Box. There’s some skill attached to the game, believe it or not, though there’d be no way of ever knowing if our guesses were correct.

  You’d be surprised at the multitude of factors we used in predicting the contents of the boxes Beedle removed from his truck. The weight of the box was, of course, directly correlated to the degree of strain in the facial expression. And, if you were lucky, you could pick up on the sound the contents made when he jostled the box, like the one I was sure had to contain cutlery. And then there was the X factor. That’s the certain degree of profiling that goes into the game, and from what little we knew of the man, our guesses ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous as we hypothesized about the man’s proclivities. Aggie’s guesses tended toward the cynical side.

  “See that teeny tiny box? That’s got all his books on manners and people skills,” she said and shook her head, then she plucked some ice from her cup to crunch on. It was going to take a while for her to get over the burn of losing the cottage to Beedle’s son. Fortunately for Aggie, “Enduring Protracted Rants” was another chapter in my dog-eared version of the Good Friend Handbook I keep in my virtual library.

  Now, we might have all been looking in the same direction, but I’m pretty sure we saw different things. Funny how that works, isn’t it? For instance, Aggie might have been looking at public enemy number one and Nat might have seen a fop rookie marina manager with questionable etiquette, but I saw someone who was trying too hard and was out of his element. I’d say he was a fish out of water, but considering our setting and my general disdain for puns, I’ll not go there.

  On the bright side, he was interesting to look at. He was trim and dressed in khaki pants and a blue buttoned-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and from his brief appearance at my dock earlier, I’d also noticed he wore, what by all appearances, were brand-spanking-new work boots with not a scuff mark on them. The subject also sported his phone in a holster on his hip like some modern-day gunslinger, technology his weapon, an angry text his ammo. He was not quite six-feet tall, but he probably told people he was – he seemed like the type of man who would round up when asked that question.

  He also seemed to know that he was being watched and didn’t relish it, but then again, I don’t know many people who do. And the ones who do like it, well, I wouldn’t want to know them anyway. While we watched him, Beedle repeatedly checked his phone; for what, who knows. Could have been some vital instructions from on high or perhaps, like a condemned man, a pardon from his father to overturn his sentence and inform him that his placement at the marina had all been a bad joke or that his “time out” was over. If there’d been liquor at our little impromptu get-together, we would have gotten smashed on a drinking game based on how often he pulled out that phone. Aggie insisted it was synchronized to his watch and the clock in his truck. She was probably right.

  While Nat provided some colorful commentary on his casual study of Beedle, Aggie and I finally got around to discussing the serious proposition of painting the store, craning our necks to look at the building, imagining what color would suit it best. The horizontal wood siding was an unremarkable shade of washed-out grey with flaking white paint on the window frames and some boards here and there that looked not only distressed but suicidal.

  We weren’t long into our deliberations when Nat elbowed each of us and we turned to find Mr. Wonderful standing on the bed of his truck, hands on hips, sizing up a box that must have pissed him off. He stood for an inordinate amount of time in what I had by then dubbed his trademark confrontational pose. He looked back in our direction, and in an almost synchronized fashion, we averted our gaze, though I would guess unconvincingly so, unless Beedle would buy that we’d all bowed our heads in spontaneous prayer.

  The next sound I heard made my entire body flinch. I bit my lip and I couldn’t keep the corners of my mouth from turning up. The distinctive sound of crashing dishes put an abrupt halt to the activity at hand and, when I looked up, the dish-less wonder was making hasty tracks to his new home and then slammed the front door. The remnants of the torn box and dishes lay on the ground behind the truck like some strange ceramic roadkill.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Aggie laughed and pounded her fist gleefully on the picnic table. Nat and I suppressed our giggles for the most part, and we all surmised that the chap’d be eating out for a while.

  While we waited for ole butterfingers to emerge from his new old house, we drank down our iced teas and the heaping amount of ice that had melted. Beedle was either hiding or biding his time indoors, waiting for us to find some other way to occupy our time or for the sun to go down, whichever came first. And, like concertgoers waiting for an encore that is too late in coming, we eventually made our leave. Aggie headed toward her store, grumbling about her lease while Nat and I headed uptown for a stroll.

  Unlike most other nights we did this, Pepper, his black lab, hadn’t joined us. The little miscreant was, instead, a guest at the vet clinic for a concerning stomach ailment. A gregarious fellow, he’d probably gotten into some garbage in the marina dumpster that didn’t sit well in his tum-tum. So, over ice creams procured on our walk—chocolate fudge ripple for Nat, mint chocolate chip for yours truly—we chatted until the sun went down.

  The night breezes were warm, and the clear sky yielded more stars than usual, despite the light pollution from the street lamps. It was the kind of early summer night you didn’t want to end. Topics ranged from the July Fourth festivities – two weeks away—to the laundry list of items that Aggie had to complete on her place and, finally, we rounded out the conversation with our latest “did you know” bits of trivia about the last movies each of us had seen.

  Had I known it would be the last time I’d ever see Nat, I’d have never let him out of my sight.

  CHAPTER 2

  The next morning, I woke to the sound of rain tinkling on the roof of my boat. If you’ve never heard it, rain on a steel roof sounds something like a gentle tattoo on a snare drum. And it always makes me smile.

  The starboard porthole was open, and the cool air drifting in made me pull my cotton quilt up over my arms during a protracted bit of laziness. Once vertical, I lifted the blind on a stern porthole and, smiling out at my beautiful little neighbourhood, observed that Aggie had neither blown up her store, which may have been less work than all the mandated fixes, nor set fire to the cottage into which our illustrious new marina manager had so entertainingly moved. All was quiet on the western front. For the moment.

  After I’d made my coffee, poked around the internet to make sure the world as I knew it was still out there, and caught up on some correspondence, I got dressed and headed out to Aggie’s place. The air wa
s warm again and, combined with the rain, it was fast becoming one of those days that would wreak havoc on my longish hair. Thwarting the situation, I donned a cap sent to me by King Marine in New York and pulled my ponytail out the back of the hat. I pulled on my navy shorts, white boatneck top, and an oversized yellow rain slicker that was long enough to cover my butt, and considered myself dressed to impress. At least the kind of people I wanted to impress. It was even money that number one on that list, Nat, would be sitting in the small lounge Aggie had carved out at one end of her store. Most mornings, Nat and his buddies could be found watching cable news and discussing politics while they gulped down coffee and savoured the apple fritters Aggie brought in from the bakery on State Street. If I got to her place early enough, I could usually score one for myself.

  After dashing through the rain, dodging the puddles, and finally reaching the store, I spotted Ags with her elbow propped up on the dining counter flipping through a brochure of exterior color choices.

  “Well, how are things today? You call a truce with Bugsy yet?” I asked and hung my wet raincoat on the peg near the entrance.

  “Bugsy?” Aggie screwed up her face like a question mark.

  I plopped myself down on one of the stools at the counter, one of those retro red vinyl and chrome numbers that make a whooshing sound as the air escapes from under the seat.

  “Yeah, Beedle. Bug. Bugsy.” I smiled back at her, confident that the newest marina resident wouldn’t see the humour in the moniker I’d picked out, which is why I couldn’t wait to use it on him.

  “No. Haven’t seen him today,” Aggie said distractedly with a smirk. “What do you think of pink for the outside of the store? That should tick him off, don’t ya s’pose?” She smiled and held up the page of color swatches. Her index finger was just below the most hideous shade of pink that reminded me of that antacid liquid that coats your stomach and makes it temporarily impervious to spicy foods.