Page 35 of Presumed Dead

“I have a half-day charter that booked through the website at eight this morning. Three men from Lakeland looked at the photos and decided they wanted to fish. I said yes. The third spot in the cockpit is open. I’d like to take you out with me.”

“Why?”

“Because you bought a boat that needs work and you spent your first afternoon sanding the rail instead of drinking a beer, and a man who works on a boat for a living is a man I like to have on my own boat for an afternoon when I’ve got the room. Also you’ll meet a few people. The Lakeland boys won’t talk to you. Greg Bonner will. He runs Reel Therapy and he’ll be at the cleaning station when we come in.”

“I’d be glad to come.”

“Twelve thirty at my slip. Bring water and a hat. Don’t bring anything else. The Lakeland boys are paying for the bait and the beer.”

“Twelve thirty.”

George rowed back across. Ethan washed his hands at the slip hose and changed into a clean T-shirt and put on the cap he’d bought at the Jacksonville hardware store, and he was at the head of the Tarpon Lady’s slip at twelve twenty-eight.

The Lakeland boys were already aboard. Three men in their fifties, the kind of men who’d grown up fishing together and hadn’t been able to do it as often as they wanted to in the years since, greeted Ethan with the small careful interest of men who’d been told a fourth man was coming along and had been relieved to learn it was somebody George thought was all right. Ethan shook three hands and gave three names back. The names went into the back of his head the way names had been going into the back of his head for nineteen years, and within four minutes he’d collected three new pieces of information he hadn’t had four minutes ago, which was that the man on the left was a retired sheriff’s deputy from Polk County, the man in the middle owned a roofing company, and the man on the right had a wife who’d told him he could come on this trip only if he brought her back a pelican carving from the gift shop at the marina, which George informed them didn’t have a gift shop, which prompted forty seconds of laughter.

Ethan let himself laugh.

He laughed easily with them, slightly louder than he meant to, with the easy correctness of a sound that fit the moment. George caught his eye over the captain’s console while he started the engines and gave him the small approving look of a man who had judged something and decided it was going to work.

They cleared the breakwater at twelve forty-six.

The Gulf at noon was the white-blue of a postcard, and the Tarpon Lady ran along the channel marker line at twelve knots while George talked through the plan, which was a half-day run to a reef about eleven miles out, two hours on the reef working a bottom rig for grouper, then back in by five. The Lakeland boys nodded. Ethan nodded. The boat ran smoothly, and Ethan watched George’s hand on the wheel for a count of about a minute and noted that George Halsey had the unhurried particular hand of a man who could probably run his boat through a hurricane, wouldn’t enjoy doing it, but wouldn’t be surprised by it either.

At one-fifteen they reached the reef. The Lakeland boys baited up. Ethan baited a rod for the man whose wife wanted the pelican carving, who was the least experienced of the three and had been pretending not to be, and the man took the rod gratefully and didn’t say thank you out loud because that would have admitted he had needed the help, and Ethan let him not say it.

Then the fishing happened.

Two hours of grouper coming up off the bottom in a slow, steady cadence, two hours of George reading the wind and adjusting their position with small touches of the throttle, two hours of three men from Lakeland and one man from Jacksonville and a charter captain on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico doing the thing the boat was built for. Ethan ran the cooler, gaffed two fish, took two pictures of the deputy with a six-pound grouper, drank one beer because refusing the beer would have been worse than drinking it, and made small talk about Jacksonville with the roofer that didn’t include a single sentence about logistics, because the roofer didn’t want to talk about logistics, the roofer wanted to talk about whether the Jacksonville Jaguars were going to draft a defensive end this year, and Ethan had spent an hour on the drive down south Monday afternoon listening to radio DJ's hashing this very subject out. Which, in turn, came in handy in a moment like this one.

By three forty the cooler was full and the Lakeland boys were happy and the sun had moved off the worst of the heat and George was running them back.

Ethan stood at the gunwale on the way in.

He was looking at the chop along the starboard side, and the running lights coming on at the marker, and the gulls following the boat in a slow, lazy line in case the gut bucket got dumped on the way back, and it landed on him that he hadn’t thought about her in forty-five minutes.

Forty-five minutes.

He’d known her for thirty-three hours, and he’d just gone forty-five minutes without thinking about her, and the moment it landed, he thought about her, and the thinking-about-her landed in his chest the way it had been landing for thirty-three hours, which was warmly, and inconveniently, and without his permission, and he stood at the gunwale of George Halsey’s Tarpon Lady at three forty-one on a Wednesday afternoon and let himself, for the small count of breaths it took George to bring the boat around the channel marker and into the approach, look at it.

She’d walked over to slip seventeen at noon yesterday and again at twelve sixteen today. Yesterday she hadn’t stepped onto the boat. Today she had. The half-second on her face when he’d looked up from the binder this morning had been the half-second he was going to be carrying in his head for the rest of the trip and the rest of the week and the rest of the operation, because the half-second had been a woman with her armor off looking at a man, and the man had been him, and the man hadn’t been Ethan Vale from Jacksonville with a fixer-upper Sundancer, the man had been him, and that was the part he was going to have to figure out what to do with.

George brought the Tarpon Lady through the breakwater at four oh-three.

Ethan helped tie up, helped offload the cooler, and shook three hands again and got three names back the second time, which was a courtesy he gave the Lakeland boys without their knowing he was giving it. The deputy clapped him on the shoulder. Then the roofer told him the Jaguars were going to take a defensive end in the second round, and they would talk about it next year when Ethan came down for a follow-up trip. The third man bought him a beer at the cleaning station, and Ethan drank it.

Greg Bonner came over from Reel Therapy.

Greg was a smaller man than George, lean in the way some charter captains went lean in their sixties, with a face that had spent thirty-five years in the Gulf sun and had stopped pretending the sun had done it any favors. He stuck out a hand.

“Bonner. Reel Therapy.”

“Ethan Vale. Pier Three, slip seventeen.”

“Don’s old boat.”

“Yep, Don’s old boat.”

“I’ll come look at her tomorrow. I owe Don ten years of unsolicited opinions on his bilge pump. You bought the rest of them along with the boat.”