“Craig used to enjoy making these.” Dennis lifted out the top tray to reveal rolls of monofilament line, plastic boxes containing metal swivels, packages of wire leaders, feathers and bucktail “teasers,” paint, brushes and nylon thread, and miscellaneous hooks and lead sinkers. He held up a particularly large fishhook. “They call this a number nineteen Tony. There’s some smaller sixteen, seventeen, and eighteens in here, too.”
I watched while Dennis selected a bright red “eel” fashioned of surgical rubber tubing and a large silver “spoon.” Looking not at all like an eating utensil, the spoon consisted of a six-inch fish-shaped piece of bright chrome with yellow tail feathers covering a wicked-looking hook. “Maybe we’ll catch some bluefish today. They say they’re running.” He attached a lure to the lines at the end of each pole, then swung the lures in turn out over the stern. I figured we could eat for weeks on any bluefish big enough to clamp its mouth around that spoon.
“Anything I can do to help?” Hal asked.
Dennis regarded him coolly. “Thanks. I think it’s under control.” Slowly he played out the fishing lines until the lures were trailing well behind the boat, held by lead sinkers at a depth of three or four feet under the surface of the water. At the leisurely speed we were sailing, they’d bob and weave, looking like tempting snacks to any hungry blues that might venture into the neighborhood.
“What do you do now?” I asked.
“We troll. We wait. And have another beer. How about it, Hannah?”
I handed him a fresh Heineken. This was going to be easy.
Dennis stretched his legs across the cockpit, leaned back against the seat cushions, and sipped his beer in contentment. Every once in a while in a quiet voice Connie would ask Hal, who was seated in the cockpit to her right, to make some adjustment to the sails. I had nearly mustered up enough nerve to ask Dennis a question about Chip when Connie inquired about Dennis’s father-in-law’s health. I listened to their conversation for a while, hoping to get a word in edgewise, but after a few minutes the topic shifted to his daughter Maggie’s current state of mind. I was annoyed at Connie for making me feel like an intruder, but I didn’t feel like horning in on their private tête-à-tête, so I excused myself and took a fresh Coke to the bow of the boat, where I lay down on the warm deck with my head resting against the bump of the forward hatch. I was nearly asleep, the sun full on my face, when everything went dark under my eyelids. I opened my eyes to find Hal sitting next to me. I was lying in his shadow.
“I thought you might like a sandwich.” He passed me a sub, still wrapped in white paper with “veggie” penciled on the side in black grease pencil.
I elbowed my way into a sitting position. “Thanks, Hal. Looks good.” We unwrapped our subs and ate in silence. I donated some limp lettuce and a surfeit of onions to the fish.
“I was wondering, Hal. How do you know those guys on the basketball team so well? Not that you look all that old”-I smiled at him-“but they must be at least fifteen years younger than you.”
“Sorry, Hannah. I thought Connie might have told you. Before Dad became too frail to run the day-to-day business of the marina, I was the high school basketball coach.”
“Really? For how long?”
“From the time I got out of the army until 1990. About ten years, I guess.” Hal took a sip of his beer and looked over my shoulder toward the Eastern Shore, still a blueish smudge on the horizon. “That last year was the best. We won the state championship.” He raised his bottle. “Here’s to the 1990 Wildcats!”
“You must have hated to give it all up.”
“Yes, but it was time to go. Move on. Quit while you’re ahead, my papa always said.”
That didn’t make sense. A coach with a string of losing seasons might see the handwriting on the wall and hang up his Nikes, but with a championship season under his belt, Hal should have been able to name his price. Maybe there was a woman involved?
“Have you ever married?” I asked.
“Came close to it once. After Vietnam.” He looked at me and beamed. “Other than that, never met anyone I particularly wanted to marry.”
He stared at me so long with that charismatic grin on his face that I began to feel uncomfortable. His hand reached out, touched, and lingered briefly over mine before closing over my empty Coke can. “Want another drink?”
“No, thanks, Hal. Not just yet. But I’ll bet Dennis does.” Hal disappeared aft but returned almost immediately with another beer, before I, heart racing, had had time to fully recover from whatever it was that had just happened.
As Hal stretched out on the deck close beside me, I searched through my database for some discouraging words. “Paul and I were married just out of college, in ’73.”
“Lucky guy.”
Maybe it was something in the way he said it or maybe it was the casual way he lay next to me, oozing testosterone and hops from every pore, that made me flash back to high school. I suddenly felt like the girl who prayed to God every night for a week that the sore spot on her nose wouldn’t erupt into a full-blown zit before Ron Belanger had the chance to ask her to the prom.
I floundered on. “We’ve been quite happy, but I sometimes think I’m more than he bargained for.”
Hal had been lying on his back but now turned on his side and propped himself on one elbow to look at me. “You seem perfect to me.”
“Hardly. Hasn’t Connie told you? I’ve recently had cancer. And a mastectomy. Under these clothes and this ridiculous wig, I look like an anorexic Yul Brynner.”
His face turned serious. He turned on his back and rested the beer bottle, half full, on his chest. “My mother died of breast cancer, Hannah, when I was seven. But that was a long time ago. Medical science has come a long way since then.”
“That’s what I’ve been told, but I’ve read that the ancient Egyptians treated breast cancer about the same as we do today-slash and burn-although I will give medical science points for Taxol, tamoxifen, and Herceptin.”
“You crack me up, Hannah!” He adjusted the bill of his cap to shade his eyes better and was silent for a moment. “You ever worry about dying?”
“Every day. That’s why I find myself wanting to spend time with my family and friends, doing things I love. I want to make memories, Hal. Not only for me but for them. Maybe that’s what immortality is all about.”
“No one could forget you, Hannah. You could be anywhere in the world right now. Instead you’ve chosen to be here in Podunk, U.S.A.”
I decided not to mention that my choice to come to this forgotten little corner of the world was triggered by the possibility that my husband had been unfaithful.
“I know I should be back home in Annapolis right now, but I can’t get Katie Dunbar out of my mind.”
“She was a likable kid.” Hal turned his head and stared off toward the horizon, where the water met the sky in a seamless wash of blue and gray.
“Did you know Katie well, Hal?”
When he didn’t answer right away, I figured he hadn’t heard me over the wind. Or maybe he’d nodded off. “Hal?” I poked him with my finger.
“Huh?”
“I was wondering if you knew Katie Dunbar?”
“Not really. Saw her around, is all.”
“But you just said she was likable.”
“Everybody liked Katie. Most popular girl in the high school.”