June
One
The summer I turned thirty started to unravel as soon as it began. It was the last day of charter season, and I was ironing a billionaire’s underwear in the laundry room of theSerendipity, the superyacht I’d worked on for the last five years, when Nina called for me over the radio.
I set down the iron and unclipped my walkie-talkie from my shorts, kicking aside a pile of dirty sheets from last night’s toga party. I’d been on laundry duty all morning, but I didn’t mind, seeing as it had gotten me out of earlies—the first shift of the day.
“Jo?” the radio called again. “This is Nina. Do you copy?”
I rolled my eyes, glad she couldn’t see me. I knew Nina was worried, given everything that had happened, but she could at least give me a second to respond.
“Go for Jo,” I sang into the walkie-talkie.
“We need you in the galley.”
“Copy that.”
I clipped my radio to my shorts and turned off the iron. Off the boat, Nina was my best friend, but on it she was chief stewardess, aka my boss,meaning she made my life alternately fun and miserable. But over the last three months, ever since the accident, she’d been softer on me, letting me out of earlies because mornings were hardest, not complaining as much as she normally would when I missed a water spot on the faucet in the master bathroom. I was appreciative, but the special treatment made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t like how she kept checking up on me. She’d corner me in the crew mess or pass me a drink in a Bahamian bar and ask how I was holding up.Fine, I always said, taking a long pull of whatever tropical concoction she’d ordered for me. Was I fine? Nope. Not even close. But that didn’t mean I wanted to talk about it, not even with Nina.
Other than the week I’d gone to my sister’s house in North Carolina, the last four months of my life had been back-to-back charters in the Bahamas. Every week the cycle repeated: pick up the guests, cater to their whims—including ironing their ridiculously expensive underwear (we’d googled the brand; who seriously spends $165 on a pair of briefs?!)—drop the guests back at port, flip the boat, enjoy a well-deserved night off, pick up the next guests. It was chaotic, and exhausting, and exactly what I needed. Out here in the middle of the ocean, I could pretend my real life, the one where I drove a car and wore shoes and lived alone, was on hold. But even I had to admit the cabin fever was starting to get to me.
Before Nina could radio me again, I raced up to the main deck and pushed through the galley doors where, as always, chaos was waiting for me.
“There you are!” Nina called, a wrinkle of concern on her brow. She sat at a small table, her fingers nimbly folding a mound of cloth napkins into little sailboats. “We have a beach picnic, remember?”
Beside the pantry stood Britt, third stewardess and my painfully messy bunkmate. Her curly hair shook as she dug through a plastic bin of decor, piling dried starfish, delicate sand dollars, and seashells at her feet. Once I’d asked her how she could be a stewardess and such a slobat the same time. We were essentially maids on fancy boats, after all. Britt replied that she spent so much time cleaning up after other people, she had no energy to pick up after herself.
“Fecking beach picnic,” Ollie, theSerendipity’s chef, muttered. He whizzed around the galley like a pinball, his Irish accent rising above the hiss of pans on the stove.
“He’s having a bad day,” Nina said.
I glanced at Ollie, who was now hacking a watermelon to pieces. “When isn’t he?”
“Touché.” Nina tugged the sail of a napkin turned boat in her hands. Her dangling unicorn earrings, the ones she wore every day, swung back and forth as she looked me over. They were the only sign of the goofy Nina I knew outside of work, a stark contrast to her neat high ponytail and severe expression. Though she was tiny, and at five-two was a couple inches shorter than me, she carried herself with a confidence I doubted I’d ever have. We must have made an amusing pair: petite, dark-haired, intimidating Nina, and me, your nonconfrontational, average-everything blonde.
“What took you so long?” Nina said when I sat beside her. “Find skid marks in the primary’s tighty-whities again?”
I swatted a napkin at her. “Why would you put that image in my mind?” Nina didn’t usually joke about the primary—the guest who’d booked the charter—but this primary was... different.
Nina gave me a tight-lipped smile, then set a sailboat napkin on the table and handed me a checklist of everything we’d need to pack for the beach picnic. “Double- and triple-check it. I don’t want another dessert spoon incident.”
On my mental list of things that didn’t belong on the beach (which included closed-toed shoes, reality TV weddings, and laptops), fancy silverware was one of them. “Because God forbid they eat dessert with any other type of spoon.”
Ollie glared at me from where he stood over the sink, runningwatermelon purée through a strainer. “If I’m spending my entire morning spherizing watermelon, they’ll eat it with a fecking dessert spoon now.”
“All right, all right, I’ll pack the dessert spoons.” I held up my hands in surrender and backed away, joining Britt at the pantry, where her pile of seashells was growing larger by the second.
I prodded a seashell with my foot. “The picnic is on a beach, you know. That’s why it’s called a beach picnic.”
Britt turned a conch shell over in her hands. “It’s the last one of the season, so it has to be perfect.” She sighed and clutched the shell to her chest. “Tell me again about your trip. I want to live vicariously through you. What’s first?”
“Paris,” I said, dragging a bin of silverware (including dessert spoons) onto the counter. Next month I’d be off to Europe to check off the last five countries for my thirty-by-thirty list—the list of thirty things I wanted to do before my thirtieth birthday at the end of the summer. I still had nine things to go, but hopefully I’d be able to complete them and get some great fodder for the blog I’d started to document my progress.
“And then Spain, right?”
“Barcelona and Madrid,” I said. “Then Switzerland, Austria, and Scotland.”
Nina joined us, dropping a handful of sailboat napkins onto the counter. “I’m horrified you’re not going to Ibiza. That would’ve been my first port of call.”
