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“No. It is because my name is Jacques, and I am your captain.”
“A hundred dollars, Jacques?” a woman with a long gray braid and startlingly blue eyes asks. “That seems a little much, even for you.”
“She offered this much.” Jacques shrugs. “Also, now I will have more money to lose to you in poker.”
“Ahh, good point,” she says.
“Are you leaving now?” I ask.
“Soon.”
“When is soon?” It’s after four. The day is speeding by.
“You cannot rush these things.” He flicks his hand in the air. “Time is like the water. Fluid.”
Time doesn’t seem fluid to me. It seems real and animate and hard as a rock.
“What he means,” says the guy with the ponytail, “is that the trip to Arsenal takes a while and we were just about to open a bottle of claret. Come on, Captain Jack, let’s shove off. For a hundred bucks, you can have your wine later.”
“We’ll continue with this fine French gin,” the braided lady says.
He shrugs and then pockets my bill. I turn to Willem and grin. Then I nod at Captain Jack. He reaches out for my hand to escort me onboard.
The four passengers introduce themselves. They are Danish, retirees, and every year, they tell us, they rent a barge and cruise a European country for four weeks. Agnethe has the braid and Karin has short spiked hair. Bert has a shock of white hair and Gustav has the bald spot and the rat’s tail of a ponytail and is sporting the ever-stylish socks-with-sandals look. Willem introduces himself, and almost automatically, I introduce myself as Lulu. It’s almost as if I’ve become her. Maybe I have. Never in a million years would Allyson have done what I just did.
Captain Jack and Willem untie the line, and I’m about to say that maybe I should get some of my money back if Willem is going to play first mate but then I see that Willem is bounding about, having a blast. He clearly knows his way around a boat.
The barge chugs out of the broad basin, giving a wide view of a white-columned old building and a silver-domed modern-looking one. The Danes return to their poker game.
“Don’t lose all your money,” Captain Jack calls to them. “Or you won’t have any left to lose to me.”
>“Yes,” I say.
“Me too.”
“Our parents quit while they were ahead,” I say, repeating the line Mom and Dad always use when people ask if I’m an only child. We quit while we were ahead.
“I never understand some English sayings,” Willem replies. “If you’re ahead, why would you quit?”
“I think it’s a gambling term.”
But Willem is shaking his head. “I think it’s human nature to keep going when you’re ahead, no matter what. You quit while you’re behind.” Then he looks at me again, and as if realizing that he has maybe insulted me, he hastily adds, “I’m sure with you it was different.”
When I was little, my parents had tried to have more children. First they went the natural route, then they went the fertility route, Mom going through a bunch of horrible procedures that never worked. Then they looked into adoption and were in the process of filling out all the paperwork when Mom got pregnant. She was so happy. I was in first grade at the time, and she’d worked since I was a baby, but when the baby came, she was going to go on an extended leave from her job at a pharmaceutical company, then maybe only go back half time. But then in her fifth month, she lost the baby. That’s when she and Dad decided to quit while they were ahead. That’s what they told me. Except even back then, I think I’d recognized it as a lie. They’d wanted more, but they’d had to settle with just me, and I had to be good enough so that we could all pretend that we weren’t actually settling.
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell Willem now. “Maybe nobody quits while they’re really ahead. My parents always say that, but the truth is, they only stopped with me because they couldn’t have any more. Not because I was enough.”
“I’m sure you were enough.”
“Were you?” I ask.
“Maybe more than enough,” he says cryptically. It almost sounds like he’s bragging, except it doesn’t look like he’s bragging.
He starts doing the thing with the coin again. As we sit silently, I watch the coin, feeling something like suspense build in my stomach, wondering if he’ll let it fall. But he doesn’t. He just keeps spinning it. When he finishes, he flips it in the air and tosses it to me, just like he did last night.
“Can I ask you something?” I say after a minute.
“Yes.”
