TWENTY-TWO
PAUL
The morning starts with a pelican stealing my breakfast.
I’m on the deck of my boat eating a blueberry muffin—the last one from the bag I bought at the marina store—when a brown pelican the size of a Labrador lands on the railing, looks me dead in the eye, and takes it out of my hand.
Not a piece of it. The whole thing. One fluid motion, like a pickpocket who studied at an elite academy.
“Hey —”
The pelican swallows it in two bites and stares at me with no remorse or gratitude. Just the dead-eyed superiority of an animal that has decided I exist solely as a food delivery service.
“That was my breakfast.”
The pelican ruffles its feathers.
“I hope you choke on the wrapper.”
It doesn’t choke. It launches off the railing, clips my coffee mug with its wing on the way out, and sends lukewarm coffee cascading down the front of my white T-shirt.
I stand on my deck, soaked, muffin-less, watching a pelican fly away with my dignity. It’s seven a.m. This is going to be a great day. I can feel it.
I’m changingmy shirt in the cabin when I hear Matt’s voice on the dock.
He’s early. That’s new. The Matt I’ve been observing for the past two days operates on a schedule that revolves entirely around himself—arrives when it suits him, leaves when he’s bored, checks his phone in the gaps between performing fatherhood. But today he’s here before the kids are awake, carrying two coffees and walking toward Emma’s houseboat with purpose.
I pull on a clean shirt and don’t go outside.
Through the porthole, I watch him knock on Emma’s hull. The screen door opens. Emma appearsin pajama pants and an oversized sweatshirt, her hair doing approximately nineteen things at once. She takes one of the coffees. They sit on the houseboat deck.
I can’t hear the conversation. I can see their faces—his animated, leaning forward, hands moving when he talks. Hers quieter. Listening. The way she holds the coffee cup with both hands, close to her chest, like a shield.
I should stop watching. This isn’t my conversation. This isn’t my business. Emma is a grown woman having coffee with the father of her children on her own deck, and I’m a forty-five-year-old man spying through a porthole like a character in a movie I’d be embarrassed to watch.
I step away from the porthole.
Step back.
Step away again.
Holly would be laughing at me right now. Full-body, head-thrown-back laughing. “Paul Spencer, you are a mess,” she’d say. And she’d be right.
I go to the dock office. Close the door. Open the logbook. Stare at it without reading a single entry. Holly’s sticky note is still tucked inside the front cover.Don’t forget to eat lunch.
A pelican stole my breakfast and I’m spying onthe woman I love through a window the size of a dinner plate. Lunch feels optimistic.
Harold shows up at nine.
He’s wearing his fishing vest—the one with forty-seven pockets that each contain something inexplicable—and carrying a Tupperware container of tomatoes from his garden.
“These are for Emma,” he says, setting them on my desk. “Let her know the Cherokee Purples are ready and she should grab them before the squirrels do.”
“You could deliver them yourself. She’s on her houseboat.”
“She’s got company.”
“You noticed.”
