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“I wasn’t monologuing.”
“You were a solid forty seconds into a villain speech about paperwork.” She stuffs the strays back in the bag, knots it, and by the time she straightens up her expression is back to being pleasant and I can’t find whatever I thought I saw.
“For the record, I’m not building a case. I’m building a filing system. If I wanted to own the ground you’re standing on, I’d start by billing Prescott.”
“That supposed to be funny?”
“It’s supposed to be eleven thousand dollars.”
She drops the bag with the others and dusts her palms on her thighs. “You can stand there supervising me all day if you want. I don’t mind an audience. But the guys said a boat’s coming out of the water at eight, so if you’re the hands-on kind of owner I suspect you to be, you probably want to get out there and start working.”
She’s throwing me out. Of my own office. With manners.
Diesel, who’s been lying across the threshold this whole time like he’s her doorman, thumps his tail twice when I step over him. Fourteen years. Not once has that tail moved for anything I said before ten a.m. that wasn’t ‘breakfast’.
“You’re on probation too,” I tell him.
He yawns.
The picture of her stretching comes with me, and it stays all morning.
The eight o’clock job runs long because everything runs long in July, and by the time we’ve got the boat blocked and I’ve scraped enough of the bottom to confirm the owner’s worst fears about his own neglect, it’s past eleven.
Tommy comes to find me.
Tommy finding me is never hassle free.
“So, she alphabetized the parts shelf,” he says.
“She what?”
“The wall of doom. In the office. Where the special-order stuff goes to die? She’s got it labeled. There’s a clipboard.” He says clipboard the way other men say miracle. “Marcus found the part for the Hendersons’ boat. The one we reordered because we thought Doug never shipped it? It was there the whole time. Behind the-”
“Tommy.”
“Yeah, boss?”
“Why are you telling me this like it’s a hostage negotiation?”
“Because Marcus said to come tell you every good thing she does, and I quote, ‘until his face stops doing that.’”
I go find somewhere out of the way to seethe for a while.
Around noon I do the thing I’ve been circling all morning and hating myself for. I take my phone out behind the paint bay like a teenager sneaking a smoke, and I call the agency in Portland.
Three rings. “Coastal Staffing, this is Dana.”
“Dana. Aiden Cole, up at Cole Marine.”
A pause. The kind of pause where someone mouths a name across an office. “Mr. Cole. Hi. Is everything alright? Did Ms. Daniels not show?”
“She showed.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“Nothing happened.” The fact that they’ve got a whole tone ready for what happened is insulting and also fair. “I’m calling because I want to know what her deal is.”
“Her… deal?”
