The guys had a field day with that one over the radio. Stuff like, “Hey, Grady, I thought the nurse was supposed to do the drilling,” and, “Stan the Man, you go to the dentist to have a cavity filled, not the other way around.” And so on and so forth. So much of it I’d finally yelled over the radio to shut up or get off the channel. They were good guys, but enough was enough.
The back deck of the Wharf Rat was full of people, even though it was almost closing time. I blocked out the noise, the music. All I wanted was quiet. And sleep. I climbed over the rail of Hope Ann, the deck still slick from when I hosed it off earlier.
Below deck, the cabin was crammed with foul-weather gear piled in heaps, crates of WD-40, liters of oil, and coils of line stacked three high. I pushed the mess over and spread out on one side of the cushioned V-berth.
I hadn’t wanted the dinner party from the beginning.
Hope had suggested it one night when I got home from the boat. I’d started to say I could do without it—but fine if that’s what she wanted—when she’d scowled and said I’d always hated parties. Why should this one be an exception?
She said it in the way she spoke to me lately, light and airy but cold. Like fake snow blown from a can. She looked over at me after she said it, and her face softened when she realized my mouth was still open, my unfinished sentence lost in the air.
“It’s the decent thing to do,” she said. “Peggy’s new to town and it’s what we would have done before.” Her eyes filled when she said this, and I knew “before” meant before Maddie died, before we became who we were now.
Part of me wanted to see Hope do something . . . anything . . . that she would have done before we lost Maddie. I didn’t question the party because of it. I didn’t know anything about Peggy except that she’d moved to Alden last year, and somehow she and Hope had met and hit it off.
And then, before I knew what was what, the party had come, and Finn was standing in my kitchen. I was stunned, speechless when he appeared in the doorway across the crowded room. He said, “Hey, man,” and Hope introduced him as Peggy’s husband, and then she frowned at me when I didn’t cross the room to shake his hand, only nodded my head.
I didn’t mean to bring Finn into the fight with Hope; she didn’t know anything about that time in my life. But I wasn’t any good at fighting about one thing when it was really about another, and before I could stop it, Finn’s name came out of my mouth, and then Hope said his name: Ry. The way she said it, so easy, rolling off her lips stained red from the wine—I snapped.
Not from anger, though. Not at her. Even though it came out that way. Even now, thinking about that time, my body felt heavy, weighed down. If Finn felt the same about his role in the mess, he hadn’t shown it.
I’d heard him ask Hope at dinner what someone had to do to get a boat named after them. She was at the other end of the table, and people were talking in various conversations. But I tuned out everything but them, nodding now and then to show I was listening to the Martins discussing the proposed budget for the town’s new fire station. But I was listening to Finn, watching his every move.
His voice was playful when he said it. So what does someone need to do to get a boat named after them? He put the emphasis on do and leaned toward her when he said it. If he meant to startle her, it didn’t work. He didn’t know Hope. She laughed, as if it were a ridiculous question, and pointed at me.
“Marry him,” she said.
When Hope excused herself to the kitchen, Finn looked over at me and saw that I was watching him. It’s quite a boat you got there, he said, his words slurred.
I ignored the comment, pretended the noise between us at the table had drowned out his voice. The last thing I wanted was to ruin the night for Hope.
But he found me on the back deck smoking a cigar later that night, the rest of the party inside.
“Got another one of those?” he asked, gesturing to the cigar in my hand.
“No,” I said, even though there were a dozen of them in the drawer inside.
He leaned against the railing in front of me. When he crossed his arms, his shirt strained against the movement. His biceps were small boulders.
He hadn’t changed much in the twenty years since I’d seen him. Deeper lines cut his too-tanned face, and a blond crew cut spiked with gel showed more scalp than hair, but he had the same girth from high school.
He’d been a juicer back then, a linebacker who broke the opposing quarterback’s leg in the last game of the season, even though our team had been up by three touchdowns. His buddies had high-fived him after the game, saying, You told him, like a team wasn’t really beat until an ambulance showed up.
I heard he’d gone into the army or navy after high school, or maybe it was the coast guard. Probably whoever would take him after the DUI. After he smashed his truck into the stone wall at the edge of Jeremiah Road and the cops found him with a broken nose and his hands covered in blood.
The cops had assumed the broken nose was from the impact. Only Finn and his buddies who’d jumped me knew it wasn’t. They also assumed the blood all over his hands was his, but they were wrong about that too. Most of that blood had belonged to me.
I flicked my cigar in his direction, and he sidestepped to avoid the ash. It was a slow, wobbly step. He leaned back against the railing to steady himself.
“I guess I’m a little drunk,” he said when he caught my eye. “Tell your wife I’m sorry to be the drunk asshole at the party.”
“I guess times don’t change.” I leaned down, ground the tip of the cigar into the metal sand bucket on the step.
“Got me there, good buddy.” He shook his head in an aw-shucks kind of way, as though we were old friends just shooting the shit. “Cut me some slack. It’s a party after all. Who would’ve guessed our wives would end up friends?”
“Go find your wife and go home,” I told him. “Party’s over.”
He blinked, his grin wobbling. “Well, so much for small talk,” he said.
I got up out of the chair and stood in front of him, the stench of booze hitting me. Whiskey, maybe, or scotch. Stuff I never went near. His eyes were glossy, red rimmed, and his wide, flat face was damp with sweat, even though the night was cool. If he wasn’t drunk now, he had been at some point in the night.
Finn cleared his throat, stood up straighter. “We’re grown men now, Kelly. What happened between us was a long time ago. I was hoping we could put it behind us.”
He’d been a shadow standing over me. I’d been passed out on Pop’s boat, sleeping off the twelve-pack Boon and I had split after work. There was a flash in my mind of the steel tip of a leather boot. The thud as it slammed into my head.
Without thinking, my hand went to the scar above my eye. I felt the thick line that sliced through my eyebrow. Boon always said I was color-blind. I never told him my right eye had taken the brunt of that blow. That the doctor told me my vision in that eye would never be the same. That it would be hazy, unfocused. Permanently.
“Is that what you came to tell me?” I asked.
“You say that like I just showed up here. You forgetting that I came here because I was invited?” His voice was upbeat, a nervous twitch on his lips that he forced into a smile.