At the end of a long Wednesday, Faye put her car in park and looked around the marina parking lot for Amande’s car. No luck. The young woman was still out making her rounds. Or maybe she was picking up Michael, strapping him in his car seat, and bringing him home. It was well past five, so they both must be exhausted. Faye certainly was.
She saw Joe waiting for her on the deck with a cold drink, and she tried to remember where their boats were. If Amande’s boat was here, then she and Joe could get in the one that had brought them ashore and make tracks for home. If Amande’s boat was back at Joyeuse Island, then they’d need to wait. It would be really embarrassing to get a call and hear her say, “Mom? Do you want to come get us? Or do you want Michael and me to sleep in the car?”
Oh, yeah. They’d figured this all out over breakfast. Amande’s boat was here. Faye and Joe could go on home in her oyster skiff, because Amande kept a tiny little life jacket for Michael on her boat at all times.
She cut across the parking lot, waving at Joe to meet her at the boat ramp, because she was just too tired to walk out of her way. And also because she was too bone-tired to make idle conversation with Manny.
Then she saw Manny standing by the boat ramp, chatting with Joe’s buddy, Nate Peterson, and she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to avoid him. From this distance, even Manny looked a little worse for wear, and that was notable because his personal brand was to be utterly chill. She wasn’t sure that twists and curls as bouncy as Manny’s could be said to droop, but his were hanging closer to his sweaty face and neck.
As Faye drew near, she heard Manny and Nate talking, mostly about the price of gas and the heat, which was still a stifling ninety-five with only an hour or two left before sundown.
“Nice new paint job on that sweet, sweet boat,” Manny said. He appeared to be speaking of a sleek twenty-four-footer with twin engines big enough to make a boat that size really go. Nate’s boat must have cost a fortune, and it must move like a bat out of hell. Not coincidentally, that was its name. Bat Out of Hell was stenciled in black across its platinum gray stern, and matching black pinstripes swooped down its sides. It sat on a trailer behind a charcoal-gray pickup truck big enough to haul this boat that was almost too big to trailer. Even the truck had black pinstripes. Faye thought that the gray-and-black color palette totally suited Nate’s floating bat-boat.
“Thanks. Cody did it. He’s a real pro.”
“I only hire the best. Hey, that was a nice article about the hurricane cleanup, man. It tells it like it is,” Manny was saying. “I mean, I always read your fishing column, but it’s time your old man let you do some real reporting. He was right to put that article on the front page.”
“It was Joe’s picture that sold him the article. I did the reporting first. Talked to a bunch of people. Got their stories about living through the storm. Made sure to pack the piece with plenty of human interest stuff. Then I took it to Dad, but I made sure he got a good look at that picture before he started reading. He said I did a good job on the article, but what he really wanted was that photo for the website. He thought it might go viral and get a lot of clicks, and that’s exactly what it did. It’s a weird way to do business, but that’s how the newspaper biz works these days.”
“Is Joe getting paid by the click?”
“No, he gave it to me. No charge.”
Manny grunted, but he didn’t say anything at first. Faye wanted to butt in and say, “Is that how you treat your friends?”
After that initial grunt and after a moment to think over the situation, Manny said exactly what Faye had been thinking. “You stiffed Joe for a picture that got you on the front page?”
“And all over the internet.”
“Yeah. The internet. I guess that’s where the money is these days. Is that how you treat your friends?”
Nate laughed it off, and Manny didn’t push the issue any further.
Late afternoon was a busy time at the ramp. Some people were coming in off the water, but people with day jobs were rushing out to spend the end of the day enjoying the boats they’d worked so hard to buy. Nate was clearly one of the day job crowd. He was literally unbuttoning a dress shirt while he and Manny talked. His chestnut hair was trimmed razor-sharp, so sharp that a fine white line of untanned skin along his hairline proved that he’d seen his barber within the past twenty-four hours.
After shedding the shirt, Nate removed his dress pants to reveal a light beige bathing suit that was surely chosen to be close to his skin color, so that it wouldn’t show through the fabric of his work clothes. One of his buddies, whom Faye recognized as Cody, was yelling good-naturedly out of Nate’s truck window as he confidently maneuvered the truck and the trailered boat behind it down the boat ramp.
Within minutes, Cody had gotten Bat Out of Hell afloat and was driving the truck back up the ramp. Somebody else, another of Nate’s friends, based on the trash talk being thrown his way, was piloting the boat, easing it up near the dock where they stood. When the boat pilot turned his shaggy brunette head Faye’s way, she recognized Thad from the dive shop.
As if the entire procedure were choreographed and rehearsed—and perhaps it was, since these men probably did this several times a week in the summertime—Nate tossed the dress shirt, the pants, a belt, and a tie over his shoulder into the boat. Based on his carelessness with his dress clothes, Faye inferred that a dry cleaner took care of them for him. Reaching down to grab the dress shoes sitting beside his bare feet, Nate flung them into the boat without looking to see where they fell. Faye wondered how long a pair of dress shoes lasted him. Thad, who seemed like a fastidious boat captain, stashed Nate’s discarded clothes and shoes in a compartment near his feet.
Now that he was stripped down to his bathing suit, Nate was dressed just like Manny, but his I-work-behind-a-desk pallor distinguished them. Stepping easily into the boat, he lifted a hand in Manny’s direction and said, “Later, man. I can hear the fish talking and they say they miss me.”
Cody parked the truck that was pulling the empty boat trailer and hustled back to the ramp, wading out toward the boat and hauling himself up the ladder. Thad had just finished raising a black bimini that set off the boat’s crisp black pinstripes. He held up a bottle of something unidentifiable, wrapped tight in a plastic bag, calling out, “Nate and Cody! Time to celebrate!”
Nate slapped Manny on the shoulder, said, “Later, man,” and stepped into the boat. He took the captain’s seat as Thad handed Cody and Nate each a plastic cup.
“What are we celebrating?” asked Cody as Thad poured something golden-brown into his cup.
“We’re celebrating making it through another day, dudes! And we’re celebrating this afternoon on the beautiful water. It’s been…well, it’s been at least a couple days since we were all together. We’ll toast…um…we’ll toast Nate’s dad for buying Nate the boat that’s making this fine moment possible. How ’bout that?”
Nate seemed about as happy with his father as Amande was with Faye, most days. He held his empty cup in his lap until Thad snatched it up and sloshed an oversized shot into it.
“You don’t wanna toast your dad?” Thad asked. “You should try running the business your dad built, every day that rolls, like I do. He’s dead and I’ll still never measure up. If I make it big and take home millions, it’s just because he handed me the business and conveniently died. But if I fail, the whole town will say I disrespected his memory by running his business into the ground. I can’t win.”
Nate and Thad looked at Cody, as if hoping he’d unload some daddy issues, too. And he surely had them, because he said, “I showed my old man my back on the day I turned eighteen,” but he didn’t tell them why.
Faye cringed at the thought of these guys being miles from shore and drunk, but Florida had no open-container law to keep passengers from drinking. As long as the person piloting the boat stayed sober, these men were perfectly within their rights. And Nate wasn’t drinking yet. He had let Thad pour him a drink, then surreptitiously set it on the deck, holding it upright between his feet.
Thad held the boat in place, holding the bottle in one hand while he kept the dock at arm’s length like a man determined to protect Nate’s flashy paint job. He gave a hard shove. As the boat floated away from the dock, he lifted the bottle to his lips for a long swig. “Just a pick-me-up, y’all, nothing that’ll impair my ability to help Nate captain his ship like the pirate captain that he is! Yo ho!”
As the boat moved slowly away, it passed Amande’s oyster skiff, tied up in its usual place. So Faye’s weary brain had been right that she and Joe could take Faye’s skiff home now.
She was ready. More than ready.