Annie’s trawler smelled a little like cigarettes and dust, but it wasn’t an unpleasant smell, because most of the cabin was taken up with her galley, and so it also smelled like a pantry, mixed in with the breeze that came through the back and side doors. Bob had covered the back deck with a plastic tarp for shade, and she’d hung a wind chime, and so if you sat at the high table of the galley, you could hear the plastic rustle and flap gently in the wind, the clicking of seashells on strings. The day I said goodbye to Annie, we ate cookies and Ritz crackers at her galley table, so tall it came up to my chest. My cola can and her beer can sweated in the warm air. She rubbed a dry, cracked foot along Spot’s back while we talked about her granddaughter and her garden, her husband, Bob, me.
“What’s Marilyn going to do while you’re at college?” she wondered, leaning her head against her clawed hand.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, she’s got plenty to look after, with Sir Richard and all. You be sure to write her.”
“I will. I’ll write you too,” I finger painted loop-de-loops in the condensation on the Formica. I don’t remember if I kept that promise.
“Now, what you going to study at the university?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe biology? I think I’m going to major in biology or history.”
“Well, you do good. You be careful too.” She took a drag off her cigarette.
“Careful of what?”
“Just be careful. Don’t do anything stupid.” She looked at me seriously, conveying a deeper meaning in her blue eyes, one I didn’t understand. Did she mean sex? Alcohol?
Annie was one of the smartest people I knew at the marina. She’d been a tennis star in high school. Bob said she had flaming red hair when she was younger, a real beauty. I wondered if she’d ever wanted to go to college. If something had gotten in the way.
Sitting there, looking at her, I didn’t realize how much of a difference she and the people at the marina had made in my life. They gave a child attention and a listening ear when she needed it most. When I was young, I thought people like Annie—and Josette and Pete and Gil the Barber and countless others—took an interest in me because I was a special person. But now I know it was actually because they were special themselves. They helped raise a child not their own.
“I’ll try not to do anything stupid,” I smiled, “but that might be hard for me.”
She snorted at the joke.
“I’ll see you when I come back at Christmas,” I promised her as I got up to leave.
“That’d be real nice,” she said. “If we’re still here.”
“Well, hopefully everyone will still be here.”
Annie said she doubted it.
All through my senior year of high school, there had been rumors that Donahue’s was going to close. Even though Sonny and Gunner owned the marina, the city owned the actual land—as it did for all the harbor—and leased it to the marina. The American President Lines cargo terminal that abutted the marina needed to expand; people said that when Donahue’s lease was up, the harbor department would grant the land to APL for sure. Worse yet, the city had begun to limit the number of liveaboards in the harbor. No one at Donahue’s knew where they would move to or if they’d be able to keep their boats. Where would they find the money to rent an apartment in LA when they could barely afford the three hundred dollars it took to rent a slip each month?
I hugged Annie goodbye, the skin on her arm dry and fragile as I held it, the muscle beneath strong.
“Bye, sweetheart,” she said. “Don’t forget I love you.”