Page 29 of Harbor Me

Two hours since the workshop and the want hasn't gone anywhere. It just hovers patiently, flaring up every time he moves. It’s gearing up to hit full inferno as I watch his hands disappear into the engine bay while he insults the maintenance schedule of a man standing three feet away.

The owner takes his verdict and his humbling and heads up to town for lunch while parts get sorted. Which leaves the two of us on the fuel dock with the lettering between us, blue and enormous.

"Ship Happens," I say.

"Don't."

"I'm just reading it."

"Read it in your head."

"That's paint, you know. He paid someone to do that. There was a conversation, possibly with a loved one, and at no point did anyone stop him." Something loosens in my chest for the first time since the workshop. "Is this normal? Is this what the summer's like?"

"This is mild." He wipes his hands and doesn't look at me, but he hasn't left either, which for him is practically pulling up a chair. "There's a Vitamin Sea moored off the point. A Seas the Day. Fella two harbors up named his lobster boat Bait and Switch and thinks he's the first man in Maine to do it."

"Those are terrible."

"Those are an ordinary Monday."

"There's no way it gets worse than Ship Happens."

His head comes around at that and he gives me actual, sustained eye contact. There’s something in his face I haven't seen pointed at me before. Not the suspicion or the scowl I’m so used to. Interest. The man heard a wrong statement and now he's constitutionally required to correct it.

"Worse than that'll come through this yard before Labor Day."

"It can't."

"Five dollars says it does."

The words are out of his mouth and hanging there between us over the water, and I watch him hear himself say them. He doesn't take it back. Just stands there with his jaw set like the bet was a fully considered position and not the first voluntary sentence he's ever aimed at me that wasn't about work.

"Define worse," I say, because if I let the silence linger, he might reconsider. "Who judges?"

"We'll know it when we see it."

"That's not a standard. You'll declare victory over anything with a pun in it."

"Five dollars," he says again, measured, final, hand out.

It's just a handshake. People do it all day without their entire nervous system lighting up like a switchboard, without cataloging the heat of the palm and the rasp of the calluses and the careful way a big hand closes around a smaller one, holding it the way he'd hold something he intends to put back exactly where he found it.

"Deal," I manage.

He lets go. Goes back to the hatch. Done, apparently, as far as his face is concerned.

Diesel settles on the warm boards between us with a sigh, and I stand there watching my employer dismantle a stranger's fuel system, doing the thing I promised myself I'd stop doing, which is hoping.

He obviously doesn’t realize what he just did. Labor Day is five weeks out. My trial ends next week. The man who's claiming to be counting the days until he can wave me off the property just made a standing bet with me that runs into September, shook on it, and set the stakes.

It’s beyond pathetic how happy it makes me. Like my crush passed me a note in class that says, DO YOU LIKE ME: YES □ NO □

And I know full well he’d deny in meant anything at all.

It meant something.

It has to have meant something.

It probably meant nothing.