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She smoothed her hands over the T-shirt and pouted at him.
“What?”
“Where’s the other shirt?”
“Laundry bin, I guess. Why, did you want it?”
“I’m not really a T-shirt collector, but…” She shrugged.
“I’ve got plenty of Dowd T-shirts. I’ll get you another one.”
“An old one like that one?”
“Nah, that’s the only one I have of those.”
“Your old logo was cooler than your new one. Sorry.”
He pressed a hand over his heart and cringed in mock dismay. “That hurts, Valerie. You should be kind to an old man.” He knew the new logo sucked from a stylistic standpoint, but according to his ad guy, it had all the right cues boat owners looked for and conveyed speed, quality, and durability—all within one elongated oval.
“The boat with the wave chasing it was more fun. It was a little campy, but it stood out to me. I was disappointed when you swapped out your branding.”
“You remember that happening?”
“Mm-hmm.” She took a big bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully for a while. “I don’t follow much what happens in the boating world, but my grandmother used to take me and Leah to this festival on the Potomac every year, and your company started sponsoring it around the time I was in college. The posters had the advertisers listed in pretty much the exact same order every year, so it was easy to remember. The Dowd placement was at the top right corner of the group of logos. I had to do a double take. One of the reasons we kept going to the festival every year was because Dowd Wave Cruisers sponsored that big barbecue meal for the first hundred folks and Mama Kay always got us into the first twenty spots to be sure we got it.”
“When the logo changed, you thought for a moment that you’d wasted a trip.”
“Yep.”
“Did you get the barbecue?”
She laughed. “Yes. I don’t remember what it tasted like, though, because I was chewing so angrily and wondering what asshole went and took a perfectly good logo and turned it into…well…” She pointed to the embroidered image on her new hat. “That.”
“You wound me, Valerie.”
She shrugged and took another bite. “I was, like, twenty-one and thought I knew everything.”
Damn, it was that long ago?
Yep. That sounded about right. Ten years ago was when he’d forked over the cash he hadn’t really wanted to part with and updated all the branding. That had been the “spend money to make money” phase of the business, and every penny going out had hurt. He sponsored food at events like the one Valerie went to only because folks in his network organized them and told him it’d be a good way to get his name out. Cutting that check every year made both him and Heidi a little green around the gills, but he couldn’t say he regretted it. All those folks had been right about the name recognition.
He grinned behind the mouth of his water bottle, and some tiny anal-retentive thing inside him gave a sigh of relief at having that question answered. Valerie being, “like,” twenty-one ten years ago made her, like, thirty-one.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Nothin’.” He scrolled down the list of emails, cringing at the handful of “urgent” business items forwarded by Heidi, and found Clay’s message buried between some penis enlargement spam and an advertisement for a Sperry Topsider sale.
Clay wrote:
Okay, you know I can’t say shit. Being lowdown in such an epic capacity requires that everyone keep shit to themselves, especially me since I’m the King of the Filthy Freaks.
Clay actually had that title screen-printed on a T-shirt. Their mother had seen him in it once, and he’d made up a quick like that it was the name of a music group. Tim had had to jog away before he let the laugh out and blew Clay’s cover.
What I can say without breaking my own rules is that girl is fine. I mean FIIIIINE, and I don’t mean in the response to “How are you doing today, ma’am?” kind of way, either.
Tim rolled his eyes. He’d never been able to figure out Clay’s taste in women, so Tim couldn’t even begin to guess what the woman looked like.
She was only gonna be down for the night since Valerie wasn’t around. She drove Carine home and was going to head back up to Virginia from Elizabeth City.
