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“That’s a mile and a half.”
“Well, he’s here, and he’s asleep in front of my bed, so I don’t know what to tell you.” Diesel’s ear twitches. “Do you want to come get him or should I bring him back? I don’t mind if he stays until Monday, he’s good company.”
Another pause.
There’s a grinder running somewhere behind him, and someone, Tommy probably, yelling a question, and Aiden not answering either of us.
I stand there with the phone against my ear listening to the workshop in the background, picturing him. Phone jammed between ear and shoulder, hands covered in engine grease, that permanent line between his brows.
I’ve only been here a few days, and I can draw him from memory. Which isn’t new. I had the man memorized before I ever crossed the state line, and that’s the part nobody here can ever find out.
“Keep him till Monday,” he finally says. “Saves me feeding him.”
He hangs up. No goodbye. Just the click, and I’m left standing in my crooked kitchen holding a dead phone, grinning at a wall, my heart going quick, light, stupid. Thank God there’s nobody up here to see me want something I’m not allowed to want.
“You heard the man,” I tell Diesel. “You’re mine until Monday.”
He doesn’t even open his eyes.
Unpacking a life doesn’t take long when the life fits in one truck. It’s just as well I don’t have more stuff, because there’d be nowhere to put it.
By mid-afternoon the dishes are in the cabinet, the clothes are in the dresser, and I’ve got exactly one box left.
The one that rode shotgun the whole way up instead of in the bed with the rest. It’s sitting on the closet floor where I put it the first night. It can keep sitting there.
Diesel needs a walk before the storm, or I do and he’s my excuse, so we go down the stairs and along the harbor road.
It takes four minutes for the town to make me.
“You’re the new girl at Cole’s,” says the woman restocking the postcard rack outside the food market. Not a question, so there’s no point trying to deny it.
“I am. Vanessa Daniels.”
“Ellie. Nice to meet you.” She looks at Diesel sitting at my heel like he’s Exhibit A.
“Well, that answers that. Carol told me, but I didn’t fully believe it.”
She doesn’t explain what that is. I’m tempted to ask but she doesn’t seem like she’d be shy about telling me if she wanted me to know.
She sells me a coffee I didn’t order, and mentions the market takes special requests on Mondays before they do their orders for the week. I guess in case I want some fancy big city stuff they have no use for around here normally.
Two more people nod at me and greet me by name before I reach the pier.
A commercial fisherman I’ve never met tips his chin and says, “Ma’am,” and then, to Diesel, “Sir,” with more respect, which feels about right.
There’s a bench at the end of the pier, under a wooden roof, which offers a view straight across the harbor to the marina. From here you can see the whole shape of the place at once, the way you can’t when you’re standing in the middle of it.
Diesel leans against my shin. The wind’s coming up off the water, creating small gray waves which slap against the posts under the bench rhythmically.
The coffee goes cold in my hand while I sit there looking at that marina like it’s a photograph I’ve carried in a wallet for fifteen years, because in every way that matters, it is.
We don’t stay long.
Walt’s rain shows up at two on the dot, which is frankly disturbing. It hammers the roof for an hour while Diesel and I split the rest of the chicken, all raisins carefully removed from his portion, and I make a list of everything wrong with the apartment in order of how likely it is to kill me.
The stove’s number one. The outlet in the bathroom that sparks when you look at it is number two. The shower doesn’t even make the list, which shows what I know.
Around six I turn the hot tap, and the handle comes off in my hand.
