“And now she wants to talk to little ol’ me? Oh wow. Just wow … This is the most exciting day of my life.” He snaps his fingers. “Dammit. And I forgot my autograph book.”
“Lucky, please!” I beg.
He gives me a withering look before glancing over his shoulder, checking to make sure his father isn’t nearby, I think. When he finds the coast clear, he pats the ladder. “Permission to come aboard, Miss Saint-Martin. Escape your adoring fans on the S.S. Fun N Sun—not to be confused with the Sun and Fun, which overheated last week.”
“You want me to come up there?”
“Did you develop a fear of heights over the last few years?”
“No. I just mean … it’s on blocks. Is it safe? Is this, like, a dead boat or something? It doesn’t drive?”
He laughs. “Pilot. You pilot a boat and drive a car.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” When we were kids, we spent most of our time in the apartment above the bookshop or running around town. The Karrases’ old boat-repair place was a lot smaller, and it was the last place we wanted to be. This boatyard here? It’s huge. And obviouslywaymore successful. This is new territory for me.
Lucky taps the side of the boat. “This here is what we in the boat-repair biz like to call a floating death trap out on the water. But right here, it’s perfectly fine. It’s been sitting on blocks for about a month because the cheapskate who owns it won’t pay for the repairs.I come up here every day. It’s not going anywhere, I assure you.”
“Fine,” I tell him. “I’ll come up.”
“Whoa, watch your step. Rickety ladder and seagull shit are a dangerous combo.”
“You just said it was safe!” I complain, stumbling as I clear the edge of the deck.
“Safe-ish. Sit down before you break your neck and I get blamed for that, too.” He gestures to an empty spot next to him on a built-in seat, moving a paperback out of the way.
Jesus. This is not how I thought this would go. My stomach clenches, and I feel a little sick and terrified. Gosh, it’s tight quarters up here. “Lucky …”
“Josie.” He leans back against the boat, legs sprawled, arms tightly crossed over his chest, and he stares at me from under a curved lock of dark hair that’s fallen across his brow.
I twist in my seat and try to focus on why I’m here. “What happened at the arraignment?”
He lifts one shoulder, lets it drop, and looks off into the harbor. “Eh, it was bullshit. Whatever. My dad has a lawyer he uses for the boatyard, so she told me what to say—that the whole thing was an accident. That I never intended to break the window or was even aiming for Summers & Co, because I wouldneverdo anything to hurt my father’s best client.”
“Oh God,” I whisper.
“So I said it ricocheted and hit the glass. Just a stupid mistake. Said I’m sorry, yadda-yadda-yadda. And my dad apologized.And my mom apologized. It was a disgusting suck-up fest of epic proportions, and Levi Summers said, ‘No problem. I won’t press charges—’?”
“Oh, thank God!” I say.
“?‘—if Lucky pays for the window to be replaced.’?”
“O-o-oh.”
“Oh yeah,” Lucky says with a tight smile. “Richest man in town. But he didn’t get that way by giving it away, right? Oh no. He watches every penny. And he wants me to pay every penny back. Guess how many pennies that is?”
He tells me. I nearly pass out.
“That’s …” I do a quick calculation in my head. “It would take me a year to earn that at the bookshop, working part-time.” Even with my Photo Funder subscriber donations, which are down to an all-time low of sixty-five dollars this month. Guess I’m not providing enough new content for my subscribers, because a couple of them bailed. Or maybe they don’t like all my new photos of signs around Beauty.
Maybe I should’ve given them actual nudes, like Adrian said.
“Well,” Lucky says, “your cheap-ass mom needs to give you a raise, because it will take me about six months to pay it off, working for my dad. Our lawyer negotiated that I pay for the glass itself and work off the cost of the repair labor by doing some tasks around the department store. Like tomorrow, I go in before the store opens to vacuum out the window display. I’ve already done it once, but the store manager wants me to go over it again, just to make sure.And I get to do other helpful things like”—he ticks off a list on his fingers—“sweep up the sidewalk. Repaint the lines on the parking lot. Wash the windows using the scaffold lift. Clean seagull nests off the roof. You know, fun stuff. All summer long.”
“That’s awful.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t have plans or anything,” he says, rancor in his tone.
“Hey!” I say, frustrated. “I didn’t ask you to do this, you know.”
