“It has a hot tub.”
“That’s basically a pool for fancy people.” He turns to Emma. “Mom.Mom!Can I go on it?”
“Not right now, buddy.”
“But it’s rightthere.”
“A lot of things are right there. The ocean is right there. You don’t jump into that either.”
“I jump into the ocean all the time.”
“That’s—we’ll discuss that later.”
Millie appears on the deck with a book and her reading glasses and the composure of someone who has seen everything and is impressed by nothing. She looks at the yacht, looks at her book, and goes back inside.
Aidan is now attempting to count the portholes. He’s gotten to fourteen and is standing on a dock piling to see the other side, which means I’m going to have a heart attack before breakfast.
“Aidan. Get down.”
“I’m counting.”
“Count from the ground.”
“The ground doesn’t have the right angle.”
“The ground has the right amount of not-falling-into-the-water.”
He gets down. Immediately starts walking the length of the yacht with his arms spread, pacing it off in eight-year-old steps. “One, two, three, four—Mom, it’s ahundredsteps long.”
“It is not a hundred steps long.”
“Ninety-seven. I might have doubled some.”
Steve the hermit crab chooses this moment to make a break for it. Aidan’s pocket—because of course he brought Steve on deck in his pajama pocket—produces a small brown crab that drops onto the dock and scuttles directly toward the yacht’s mooring line.
“Steve. Steve, no. That’s not our boat.”
I watch an eight-year-old in pajamas chase a hermit crab down my dock at six-forty-five in the morning while a four-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht idles in the slip behind him. This is my life. This is what I’ve built.
Emma catches Steve at the base of the mooring cleat. Hands him back to Aidan. “Pocket. Now.”
“He wanted to explore.”
“Steve can explore the houseboat. The houseboat is his jurisdiction.”
“Steve doesn’t recognize jurisdictions. He’s a free spirit.”
I turn to Justin. Justin is watching all of this like he just realized that the marina has become a sitcom and he’s a recurring character.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say something about how this dock usedto be quiet.”
“It used to be quiet.” He takes a sip of coffee. “I kind of like it better this way.”
I don’t respond to that. I respond by checking the mooring lines on the yacht, which need checking, and not thinking about how I might agree with him.
