“Aidan, your shorts are on backward.”
“Can I invite Mr. Paul?”
“Donotgo onto his boat.”
“I won’t goontoit. I’ll stand on the dock and yell.”
“Do not yell.”
“I’ll stand on the dock and project my voice at a reasonable volume.”
He’s gone. Over the rail, onto the dock, bare feet slapping the boards, one shoe still in his hand for reasons he has apparently decided are self-evident. I hear him stop at Paul’s boat.
“Mr. Paul!”
So much for reasonable volume. Seagulls scatter. A heron on the next piling gives Aidan a look of pure contempt.
"Mr. Paul, do you want pancakes? My mom is making them. She didn't say so yet but I can tell because she has the overthinking face and she always makes pancakes when she has the overthinking face. It's a pattern. My teacher says I'm gifted at noticing things. She also says I need to stop noticing things out loud during math but that's a different conversation."
Silence from Paul's boat.
Then, muffled through the hull: "Give me five minutes."
I am going to have a conversation with my daughter about what we announce to grumpy neighbors before seven a.m.
“That’s a yes!” Aidan turns and gives me a thumbs up from the dock, grinning with every tooth he has. The backward swim trunks catch the morning light. The single shoe is now on his head. “He said yes, Mom! Make the good pancakes! With the chocolate chips! And whipped cream!”
This is the life Paul Spencer is voluntarily entering.
He runs back aboard and disappears below to presumably find his other shoe, or to inform Steve the crab about the breakfast guest, or to do whatever Aidan does in the mornings that involves so much noise and so little actual preparation for the day.
I sit on the deck.
He said he’d come. And I believe him. Because Paul Spencer has never once said he’d do something and not done it. The running light. The dock cleat. Showing up at the beach and the lighthouse and my dinner table with pickled okra and the quiet, terrifying willingness to be here.
The scared part of me is still there. It lives in me the way the tide lives in the marina—always present, always moving. I don’t think it ever fully goes away. I think you just learn to swim in it.
I go inside. Get out the flour, the eggs, the buttermilk. The good pancakes. Not the healthy ones.
And when Paul knocks on the hull right on time—because of course he’s right on time—I open the door, and he’s standing there with wet hair and a cup of coffee and an expression that’s trying very hard to be casual and failing completely. He looks like a man who rehearsed a face in the mirror and then forgot it the second someone opened a door.
“Morning,”he says.
“Morning.”
“Your son invited me to pancakes.”
“I heard. The retirement community three miles away heard.”
“He also told me jellyfish have no brains.”
“He’s been saving that one.”
“He then asked me if I had a brain, and before I could answer, he said ‘that’s okay, Mr. Paul, you can still have pancakes.’”
“That’s... generous of him.”
“I’ve been put in my place. This is rock bottom. I’m here for pancakes.”
