ADAM HAD THE KIND OF CAR THAT RAN ON ELECTRICITY instead of gas. I didn’t realize that until he walked around to plug it into a charging station. I’d never been in an electric car before, and I was curious about it, but I didn’t ask any questions. That wasn’t the kind of information gathering I was here for.
“Are you starving?” Adam asked. “We could check out the boats, if you want. But if you’re starving, we can eat first.”
“I’m not starving,” I said. The last time I’d been starving had been before Talley died.
The breeze kicked up and I folded my arms across my chest. “I really am very sorry about your pants,” he said. “Are you cold?”
“I’m fine.” As long as the list was fine, I was fine. But I still felt shaky from the near miss of it. Lamination was happening as soon as this lunch was over. I couldn’t take any more chances.
We walked across the parking lot to a pathway that led to the docks. There were rows and rows of docks, and a couple dozen boats tied up in each row, swaying in the breeze. Had Adam done this same walk with Talley? What did she think about it?
Since she’d died, I’d tried to look at things the way she would’ve, tried to see things Talley’s way.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that this place is called Grizzly Cove?” Adam said, breaking the silence that had grown between us. “Grizzlies aren’t exactly aquatic animals.”
In my googling of California grizzlies, I’d seen pictures of them wading into the water, spearing fish with their bare hands. “Bear hands,” Talley would’ve said, enjoying my accidental pun. And she would’ve teased me, saying how else were they supposed to catch fish? With fishing rods and tackle?
“Do you want to know why?” Adam asked me.
“Sure.”
“I should warn you, it’s a pretty intense story.”
“Duly warned,” I said. “Go on.”
“Okay. So. Legend has it that about a hundred years ago, a California grizzly attacked a guy named Terrance J. Tenterhook, right here on this property.”
“Oh, God, really?” I asked. A chill moved up my spine. I’d already crossed my arms to the cold, but now I pulled them tighter. Maybe a walk on the dock had been a bad idea. California grizzlies are extinct, I reminded myself.
“Apparently Terrance thought it was possible to befriend a bear. But bears are bears, and humans are—well, to bears, humans are just lunch. Or dinner, depending on the time of day.”
“God, that’s awful,” I said. “Why didn’t they name this place after the human who was killed instead of the bear who did the killing?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Adam said. “But it may be because I just made the story up. I wanted to make you laugh. You’re not the only one who likes making up stories.”
“You thought I’d laugh at a story about a guy being mauled by a bear?”
“So it was a misguided story,” Adam said. “But at least Terrance J. Tenterhook still lives!”
“I should’ve known from the name,” I said. “Tenterhook.”
“Yeah. I was trying to be clever.”
Adam and I had walked to the end of the dock, and I turned to head back, but he stopped me. “Wait, you can’t leave before you see what we came here for.”
“What’d we come here for?”
“The view of the Bay Bridge,” he said. I looked where he was pointing. The bridge was far away enough that it looked like a toy bridge, like it could be a bridge in Eddy’s Lego collection.
“The Bay Bridge goes to Oakland,” Adam told me. “And the Golden Gate goes to Marin County—to wine country. It gets all the attention, but you get more bang for your buck on the Bay Bridge. It cost more to build and it’s much longer, but the tolls are the same amount.” He paused, then added, “And that’s a real story, not a bullshit story. We did a bridge project in fourth grade. It’s funny—I remember so much more of what I learned in elementary school than what I learned last year.”
“Our brains are more plastic the younger we are,” I said. “It makes it easier to take on new information.”
“And how do you know that? Did you do a fourth grade project on brains?”
“No. Talley told me,” I said.
We turned to walk back the length of the dock. Adam bent down and pulled on the rope that was mooring one of the boats. The name Cara’s Joy was written on the back ledge (the “stern,” Adam said it was called). When he’d pulled the boat close enough, he stepped onto it. “Are you allowed to do that?” I asked.
“I know the owners,” he said.
“Who’s Cara?”
He shrugged. “When you buy a used boat, you keep the name that it comes with, otherwise it’s bad luck. Though I gotta tell you, I think this particular family is beyond whatever help they can get from obeying some stupid boat-naming superstition.”
“What happened to them?”
“That’s a long story,” Adam said. I understood that was code for: I’m not going to tell you. I didn’t press the point, because it didn’t have anything to do with Talley. “Wanna come aboard?” he asked.
Cara’s Joy was swaying back and forth in the water, a little closer to the dock, then a little farther away. A little closer, and then much farther away. If I didn’t time my step right, I’d end up in the water.
I shook my head.
“Don’t be afraid,” Adam said.
“I’m not,” I told him. “I’m just getting hungry.”
“All right, then.” He hopped off the boat. “Let’s go eat.”