by Grace Palmer
“You took a family vacation to Georgia one time!” Brent retorted. “That doesn’t exactly make you a Southerner.”
“Farther south than you’ve ever been, my culturally challenged compadre.”
“‘Compadre’ is even farther south, Marsh-head, and I’m darn sure you’ve never been to Mexico.”
“Woof, tough crowd tonight.” Marshall sighed, shaking his head sadly. Then a thought apparently occurred to him, and he perked up right away. Brent could only laugh. Marshall was interminably happy. Nothing in the world could keep him down. Not even the bitter moods of the two youngest Benson kids. “Say, you know what the best cure is for a bad attitude, Triple B?”
“Don’t start,” Brent warned. “We’ve been down this road before.” He knew exactly where Marshall was headed. But Marshall must’ve taken some lessons out of the Henry Benson book of stubbornness way back when, because he had a head of steam and he wasn’t anywhere close to stopping.
“Getting out on the water! Yessir, can’t be upset on the ocean. Physically impossible. A trip on the boat will fix both of you right up.”
“Sounds more like Brent’s cup of tea than mine,” Sara grumbled.
“It does indeed sound like it’s right up Triple B’s lane, don’t you think? C’mon, man, when’s the last time you went out?”
“Doesn’t matter. Not going again.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.” Brent meant it, too. Ever since the night he’d gone out rip-roaring drunk to the Garden of Eden and screamed at his dad’s ghost or memory or whatever he’d been screaming at, he’d sworn off the water forever. No more. Not again. It held only pain for him.
“Not even for forty bucks an hour plus tips?”
Brent sighed for the umpteenth time since Marshall had first burst onto the scene of his and Sara’s pity party. There it was, the question he’d been ducking away from forever now.
Marshall had been bugging Brent in one form or another for the last five years to start coming out with him as first mate on some of the charter fishing trips he ran for tourists to Nantucket. It had started as a small side gig and quickly blossomed into a lucrative business. Marshall complained all the time about how he often had to turn away paying customers because he just didn’t have time to handle everything by himself. He’d tried hiring other guys from the island to help him, but none of them worked out for one reason or another. He saw Brent as the answer to his problems. Best friend, first mate. Perfect fit.
Brent, however, didn’t agree. He hadn’t been anywhere near the water in months now, and he didn’t want to break that streak. Not for Marshall, not for anyone.
But he couldn’t deny that he needed the money.
“Forty bucks an hour plus tips is pretty good, Brent,” Sara said casually. She was on her third beer already. She must really be feeling sorry for herself this evening.
She wasn’t wrong, though. Forty bucks an hour plus tips over a six-hour trip could work out to over five hundred dollars if he did a good job and had some clients with loose wallets. Contracting jobs had been slow lately, so that money would really help him out. He’d be able to put up rent money, prolong his independence, stay away from the nightmare show of bad memories that was the Benson family home on 114 Howard Street.
But it would also mean facing something he’d been trying very, very hard not to face. Brent wasn’t exactly superstitious, but he was maybe a little “’stitious,” as the joke went. And going back on the water was bad news. It wasn’t quite ghosts or anything like that he was afraid of. Lord knew he had enough ghosts in his head. But the thought of going back onto the ocean felt like—well, like trampling on his father’s grave. Intruding on a dead man’s resting place. It felt utterly, creepily wrong. He wanted nothing to do with it.
But he needed the money. Gosh, did he need the money.
What else could he do? Beg on the docks? This at least was good work, honest work, work that he knew he could do well. The only thing stopping him was himself. Too bad that was one heck of an obstacle.
“I just don’t think so, pal,” he said. He couldn’t quite bear to look at Marshall in the face as he said it. He’d turned down his friend’s offer a thousand times before. What made this time any different?
As it turned out, Sara made it different when she leaned over to him and whispered, “Henrietta deserves some treats every once in a while, you know?”
“Oh, c’mon now,” Brent growled. “That’s a low blow.”
Sara shrugged. “I’ve gotta go get some fresh air. You boys have fun gossiping.” She stood, a little unsteadily, and headed for the front door.
Brent took in a long, slow breath. Henrietta. Why, of all things, was that the straw that broke the camel’s back? He pictured her. She had been his sidekick for over eight months now, ever since he found her rooting around in a dumpster, looking dirty and disheveled. He’d brought her home, cleaned her up, fed her real food. Didn’t she deserve nice things? Didn’t Brent himself deserve nice things?
He wasn’t so sure about the latter question. But he knew for darn sure that he was the kind of man who took care of his dog. So he sighed, drained the last of his iced tea, and looked up at Marshall, who had stayed uncharacteristically silent while Brent had wrestled with his thoughts.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
“Excellent!” Marshall cried. “Ladies and gentlemen, he’s doing it!” He held up his glass and looked around the bar. The bartender rolled his eyes. Nobody else paid him any attention.
11
Holly
Just past midnight on Friday night.
Holly slept like a rock, but she had nightmares that grabbed her in their claws and refused to let her go. Violent, gnashing, ugly nightmares. She was running and tripping and then she had a pain in her shoulder, a jabbing, sharp pain that struck her again and again until …
“Holly!”
She sat bolt upright. It took her a moment to get her bearings. It was dark outside. The house was silent. She must’ve fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, waiting for Pete.
Pete.
All the thoughts that had borne her off to sleep came rushing back in at once. Pete was cheating on her. Pete had lied about where he was. Pete was hiding secrets, and he was going to come tell her that he wanted a divorce because he was going to run off with some other, younger woman, and, and, and …
She realized suddenly that he was standing over her. The pain in her shoulder during her nightmare had just been Pete grabbing her to wake her up.
“You were whimpering,” he explained. He looked worried. Worried that he’d been caught, she wondered? That his little lie was up? She honestly couldn’t believe it had come to this. Never in a million years did she think Pete would cheat on her. Pete Goodwin was a lot of things, but cheater never seemed like one of them. Then again, no one really expected their partner to fool around on them, much less someone who’d married her high school sweetheart. It was always the nice guys who did you the dirtiest.
“I had a nightmare. Turns out it might’ve been true.”
He furrowed his brow deeper. “What? Wait, let me go first. I have news. Big news. Are you sitting down?”
She swallowed back the words that were fighting to rip from her throat. Let him try to explain himself, she figured. Then she’d bring down the sword of justice and give him the tongue-lashing he deserved. “Yes, Pete,” she drawled, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “I’m sitting down.”
“Okay, but are you ready?” He was grinning wildly. He looked way, way too excited. Holly looked at the clock over his shoulder. It was one-thirty in the morning.
None of this was making any sense. What kind of cheater comes home at one-thirty a.m. and wakes up his wife to deliver news of an impending divorce? Had she jumped to a really nasty conclusion?
No. He’d lied. His secretary had confirmed it. There was no other plausible explanation, as far as Holly could tell. Why else would a man leave work early and lie about
it? Why else would Pete not answer his phone when she’d called after arriving home?
“Tell me what’s going on, Pete.”
He wrung his hands in front of him like a little kid who couldn’t decide which candy he wanted at the movie theater. Holly felt nauseous. This was all so wrong. So messed up. Finally, he dropped onto the couch next to her, grabbed her hands in his, and launched into a speech he’d clearly been practicing.
“I know I’ve been working a lot, which is explicitly against the rules we made together. But the truth is that I have a secret.”
Here it comes. Holly closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see his face when he said the words. I’m leaving you. It’s over. There’s someone else.
Impact was coming in three, two, one …
“We’re moving to Nantucket.”
Holly’s eyes flew open. “What?!” she yelped.
Pete’s grin grew a notch wider. “That is, if you want to, obviously. But here’s the deal. I ran into a college buddy of mine at that conference in Boston a few months ago. We got to talking, one thing led to another, and we’re going to open up our own shop. Our own law firm, based in Nantucket. Maritime and property law. The market is huge, it’s underserved, we’re gonna make a killing, and we get to do it all at home.”
“Nantucket. We’re moving.” Holly knew she sounded dumb, but she was having an awfully hard time just processing the words coming out of Pete’s mouth.
“Yes, baby! Back to Nantucket! Beaches and lobster and home! I’m ridiculously excited. That is, if you are. You’re excited, right? You’re on board?”
It took Holly a few long seconds to find her voice again. “We’re going to Nantucket. We’re moving home.”
Pete nodded fervently. He was still holding her hands, and as she repeated herself again and again—“We’re going to Nantucket. We’re going home.”—she founded herself squeezing his hands tighter and tighter, too. “We’re going home. We’re going home!”
The gnawing dread that had polluted her stomach was gone now, wiped away by pure, sheer thrill. Home. Back home to Mom, to her sisters, her niece. Back to Nantucket. Home. Home. Home.
“You’re on board, right?” Pete asked again. He had finally realized that she was stammering a little, and he looked as concerned as he had when he first woke her up.
She grabbed either side of his face in her hands. “Yes! Yes!” She kissed him, or he kissed her, she wasn’t sure which, but either way, they ended up in a sprawl on the couch, kissing one another and taking turns saying, “Yes!” to each other over and over.
They were going back to her family and her home, leaving the dreary confines of Plymouth behind. They were going back to where they’d fallen in love the first time, and then for the second time that previous summer. Pete was starting his own law firm, getting away from the Zucker, Schultz, & Schultz misery factory. Their kids were going to grow up where she’d grown up. It all felt right. She felt horribly guilty for ever thinking that Pete could cheat on her. He was her man, her husband, her love, her Pete. She was his wife, his Hollyday.
And they were going home.
12
Brent
Pre-dawn, Saturday morning.
Brent sighed. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
Henrietta whined in response.
“Yeah, well, nobody asked your opinion, anyway.”
He locked the door to his apartment and made his way downstairs. Ten minutes later, he was at the dock. It was still early, almost forty-five minutes until sunrise proper, so he was alone at the marina. Roger hadn’t come to open the store yet. Prior to tourist season—which would be getting started in full force any day now—Roger usually just let Marshall use the dock for his charter trips as needed so he didn’t have to get his old behind out of bed at the crack of dawn.
Brent didn’t mind the mornings. He liked the silence, the crispness of the pre-dawn hours. It made him feel calm inside—most days. Not today, though. Today, he felt like a stormy ocean was raging in his gut. His fingers had tapped on the steering wheel the whole drive over, and he couldn’t stop blinking, like he was just one good blink away from realizing that this was all a big mirage and he was actually still safe in bed, dreaming.
He pinched himself. No dice. This was real.
He stood by his truck for a minute, kicking at gravel. Then, deciding that he was being stupid, he walked down to the dock to get it over with. He hopped over the gate and took the wooden stairs down to the water level. Every step made the ocean in his gut churn more violently. By the time he got to the bottom of the staircase, he thought he might vomit.
He held it together, though, enough to make his way to the very end of the dock and stare down.
The ocean—the real ocean, not the imaginary one suffering from hurricanes inside of him—was calm today. Placid, almost flat enough to see his reflection despite the low light. He could see his silhouette in the water.
“It’s just water,” he grumbled to himself under his breath. “Just a lot of stupid water.”
“Ahoy!”
Brent looked up. Marshall was standing at the top of the stairs. He had a cooler in one hand and a tackle box in the other. “Morning,” Brent rasped.
Marshall grinned wide and jerked his head back towards the parking lot. “You’re on the clock now, amigo. Come help me get the boat loaded up.”
Brent gave the water one last sidelong look—like he was checking to make sure it wasn’t gonna pull a fast one on him when he had his back turned—then headed back up the stairs.
Like it or not, he was gonna have to face his fears.
Marshall was waiting for him by the bed of his truck. The tailgate was down and a dozen fishing rods were stacked neatly inside. “Here, grab these,” he instructed. Together, they emptied the bed of the supplies they’d need for the day and stocked up Marshall’s boat, the Tripidation II. They had bottles of water and a few cases of beer for the passengers, along with a whole bevy of fishing gear: bait, rods, gaffs, nets, lures, extra supplies in case something broke or got dropped overboard. Time went by fast as the two men worked together silently to get everything stashed where it belonged. They’d fallen into a working pattern already, as if they’d been doing this for years. Mostly that was because they had been doing this for years—some version of it, at least.
Brent’s first memory on a boat was with his dad and Marshall. The three of them had spent more hours on the water together than Brent could count, joking and fishing and wiling the weekend hours away. Dad was always “Mr. Hank,” until Marshall got old enough to have the cojones to give him a nickname of his own, at which point he became “Mr. Hank the Tank.” No points for originality, but the name had made Brent’s father laugh every time. He called Marshall “Jitterbug,” in return. “You aren’t capable of sitting still for a New York minute, are you, kiddo?” Dad would joke.
He was right on that count. Marshall was a fidgeter for sure. Even when they were just lazing in the sun, waiting for a rod to hit, Marshall would be tapping a foot or twiddling his thumbs. Some people just had to keep moving at all times, Brent supposed.
It wasn’t long before their clients arrived, pulling up in a darkly tinted SUV with Tennessee plates. Brent held his breath, waiting to see what they would be dealing with today. He let out a sigh of relief when a trio of men emerged in well-worn fishing shirts and boat shoes that hardly had any tread left on the soles. That was good. Experienced pros who knew their way around a boat. Brent had been prepared for anything, but this was better than he’d dared hope for.
“Morning, gentlemen!” Marshall hollered from where he was standing on the boat. “Brent, you mind getting the boys situated while I finish up here? Just gonna put her in the water, then we’ll all get grooving.”
“Sure thing, Cap,” Brent said with a wry smile. He went over to greet their clients.
The men turned out to be three brothers from Nashville, up here on a low-key sort of bachelor party for the youngest o
f them, who was getting married in a month’s time. They were all friendly, polite, and easygoing. He could sense them sizing him up as he shook each of their hands and introduced himself. It was a relief to get a firm handshake, a nod, and a smile in return from each of them. He’d passed the first intangible client test, he figured. It oughta be smooth sailing from here.
And it pretty much was. The day went by faster than Brent had expected. The work was mindless, if a little sweaty and grueling at times. He’d practically spent his whole life training for this. He thought about how his mom had said that over and over the last few months whenever anyone asked her about how running the Sweet Island Inn for Aunt Toni was going. “Why, I feel like I was born for this, I really do! Like my whole life was leading me right here and now. It’s a blessing, I’ll tell you that much for sure.”
Brent wasn’t quite as effusive as his mother, but he was starting to understand the sentiment. All those hours of waking up early, of learning from his father how to prep bait, what to look for in the water, when to wait, when to strike—it all came to bear. The men were impressed with Brent and Marshall’s knowledge of the waterways.
But best of all was the fact that Brent didn’t think about his fears once. He kept his head down and did the work, nothing more and nothing less. Whenever the ocean in his stomach tried to get too rowdy, he just doubled down on whatever task lay at hand and tried his darnedest not to think about it. He couldn’t believe that strategy was working out for him, but working out it was, and he wasn’t gonna look a gift horse in the mouth.
So he kept his hands active and his mind occupied. Even when they skirted past the Garden of Eden on their way to a spot a little farther out, Brent didn’t panic or vomit like he’d feared he might. He offered up a silent Thanks, Dad, and then tried not to bring up the subject in his thoughts again.