B-side, Part Three

The walk back is a hundred yards and I make it last about four minutes, which for me is a personal record in the wrong direction.

The tide's all the way out. Beyond the shoulder, the exposed flats lie in ridged gray-brown bands, slick between the eelgrass clumps. The pilings stand naked to their barnacle skirts, each one darkened where the water usually holds it. The gravel on the shoulder makes that soft cornstarch sound under my sneakers, the one that means the water's pulled back past the pilings and everything down there is breathing sulfur and cut grass at the sky. Up ahead the sign does its thing—the R's been dark since April, so the wet part of the lot goes pink, not pink, pink, not pink, and every car in it looks like it's having a slow medical event.

The asphalt has a skin of old rain in its low places, with tire marks shining black through it. Salt has filmed the windshields nearest the water, turning the reflected letters soft at their edges.

Okay, so—option one. Walk in, point at the deck door, say *forgot my jacket, classic*, and leave. Breezy. Four words and a hand gesture, out in under twenty seconds.

Option two, which is worse, is the one where I explain that I only realized halfway up the shoulder, and that I only realized because my hand went for the left pocket and there was no pocket, because there was no jacket, because my hands don't know what to do with themselves when they're not holding something. Nobody needs that much information. Nobody has ever needed that much information from me and yet.

Option three is I don't go back at all and I get the jacket tomorrow and I let the whole thing sit out there on the rail overnight in the salt air like a dropped glove, and the reason I'm not doing option three is not the jacket.

It's that I want to see if he looks up.

That's the actual sentence. I keep it under my tongue.

Because here's the problem with the deck. Twenty minutes ago he put a song on his phone and set the phone face-down on the rail between us so neither of us was in charge of it, and we listened to the whole four minutes and eleven seconds of it without either of us saying one word about it, and at the end he breathed out through his nose like something had been settled, and then his break was over. And the thing I cannot figure out, walking on gravel in June with my arms cold, is whether that was a *thing* or whether it was a mood—whether it was him and me, or whether it was low tide and string lights and a ballad that ruins people doing exactly what it was engineered to do to anyone standing near a rail at ten at night.

Those are extremely different facts. I'd like to know which one I have.

The back door latch doesn't catch unless you pull it the second time, so I pull it the second time, and the room hits me all at once—fryer, beer, wood polish, the jukebox in the corner running something with a lot of guitar that nobody in here chose within the last ten minutes.

Warm air beads faintly on the cold metal push plate and carries a greasy shine over the threshold. The floor just inside is tacky in the old, familiar patches where spilled beer has dried and been mopped around.

The room's turned over while I was outside. The woman who was nursing one glass of white wine at the end of the bar and looking at her phone like it owed her money is gone. The pool guys are gone, cues racked, one of them left half a pint behind. The abandoned glass has a pale foam crescent drying above the beer line, and a wet ring spreading into the scarred bar top beneath it. Chalk dust still ghosts the green felt of the nearest table. Cindy's at the till with the phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, counting twenties with her mouth moving, and she doesn't look up.

I go three steps toward the deck door and look through the glass at the rail.

Nothing on it. Just the rail and the sign screwed above it about no open containers past this point, the one with the little anchor somebody drew on it in Sharpie a decade ago, and beyond that the black water sitting there being water.

The rail is silvered smooth where hands have worn the paint away, damp at its underside with night mist. Outside the deck boards show thin black seams between them, opening onto the dark below.

And I get about one full second of the cold drop of *okay, so someone took my jacket*, before I turn around and see it hanging on the hook on the post at our booth.

Folded.

I cross the room to it.

Not hung. Folded—square, sleeves tucked in, hung by the fold-line so it sits on the hook like something in a shop. The denim catches the booth lamp in blue-gray planes, with the seams pale and slightly furry at the elbows. Its weight pulls the folded edge into a neat shallow curve over the hook. And the left pocket is facing me, and there are two pairs of sunglasses through it. The tortoiseshell in front, the black plastic aviators behind, arms crossed over each other and braced above the hole so that the hole is under them and they physically cannot go anywhere.

I see the crossed arms before I get that somebody's hands did that.

That's the part. That's the part I'm going to be thinking about at two in the morning. Because a person who is tidying up puts a jacket on a hook. A person who is being nice folds it. And a person who crosses the arms stood there at the booth with one pair in each hand and turned them until they caught on each other, because the first way he tried it they went straight back through.

"There she is," Bram says.

The three of them are still in the booth, which I did not plan for. The tabletop is stippled with old nicks and circular moisture marks, its lacquer sticky-looking in the corners. Isolde's on the inside with her sweater sleeves over her hands, Nikki's next to her writing something on the back of her hand with a pen that's clearly dying, and Bram's in the corner rotating a coaster up on its edge with one finger.

"You were gone twenty minutes," Nikki says, not looking up from her hand. "Okay but genuinely, where do you go? Because I keep looking over and the booth is like—structurally short one person, and then you're back with wet hair."

"My hair's not wet."

"It's damp." Nikki points the dying pen at me. "It's damp, Wren."

"That's the marine layer. It's not a personality." I stop at the outside edge of the table, where I always stop, close enough that the mounted lamp over us is right by my ear—buzz, quiet, buzz, quiet, every two seconds, forever, and I've never once mentioned it to any of them. The lamp's yellowed shade throws a hard little island of light over the table and leaves the booth corners tea-brown. Its metal stem is furred with dust except where fingers have rubbed it clean over the years. "I left my jacket outside."

"You never leave anything," Isolde says.

"I know."

"No, but you *never* leave anything." She says it warm, up out of the sweater. "You're the person who finds my stuff. You found my keys in the kayak shack in April and I hadn't even been to the kayak shack."

"You'd been to the kayak shack."

"I had not."

"You'd been to the kayak shack, and you had a coffee, and you set your keys down on the register shelf next to the tide chart, and then you told me a whole thing about how you were going to start walking everywhere this summer." I hold up my hand like I've got the keys in it. Exhibit. My hands do this whether I authorize it or not. "Which was the tell, actually. Nobody announces they're going to start walking everywhere unless they've just misplaced their car."

Bram sets the coaster down flat. "No, yeah. That tracks. That absolutely tracks."

"So you left your jacket," Nikki says.

"I left my jacket."

"On the rail?"

"On the rail."

"Okay but that's not a thing you do," Nikki says, and she keeps going, right through the part where a normal person would let it go, because that's what she's for. "That's like—that's a Bram thing, no offense—"

"Some taken," Bram says, one beat late, to the table.

"—and you've got a whole system, you've explained the system to me twice, there's a *pocket order*—"

"There's a pocket order," I say.

"So what happened to the pocket order?"

And there it is, the plain question the rest of the table was too cool to ask, and my mouth opens and what wants to come out is *I think Toby Lund learned every song this band has ever released in four days and then didn't say anything about it,* and what actually comes out is nothing, for one full lamp-buzz.

Then I say, "The hole's gotten bigger."

Which is true, and which is not the answer, and Nikki accepts it immediately because Nikki accepts everything immediately, which is a small mercy and also a thing that's going to gut me one of these days.

"You should sew that," Isolde says.

"Okay, so—I know how to sew. Sewing is not the bottleneck."

"Okay but that jacket does a lot for you. It does—it does too much, and now it's got a hole in it—"

"It's got a *hole* in it, it's denim, it's not in hospice." I hear my own voice come out fast and I ease it. "Okay, so—it's on the list. It's low on the list. The list is long."

"What's above it?" Bram says.

"Everything."

"Cool. Healthy."

Nikki blows on the back of her hand and holds it up to check whether the ink took. The pen marks sit glossy for a moment in the lamplight, blue-black in the lines of her knuckles. A faint purple smear has transferred along the side of her hand where it rests against the table. Whatever she's written has gone half to smudge, and under it, faded almost off, you can still see the handle she put there weeks ago in a better pen. She doesn't wash that one off so much as she keeps re-inking it. I've never asked why. I know why.

I look at the bar.

Toby's got a stack of pint glasses and a bar towel and he is very, very busy. The glasses are nested in uneven columns beside the sink, their rims catching the bar's low light in thin white arcs. The towel is bleached nearly colorless at its folds and darkened with damp near his hands. He's got a glass in the towel and he's turning it, and he's angled maybe eight degrees off from facing me, which is a lie, and he's holding it up like he's checking it for spots, and the thing about him is he already knows who's at every table and who's low on what without ever moving his head, so the checking-for-spots is entirely decorative.

Behind him, bottles make a dim colored grid in the mirror, labels doubled and softened by fingerprints and bar haze. The steel sink throws back a narrow, wavering strip of light from somewhere under the counter.

He does not look over.

And I stand there by the outside edge of the booth with the lamp buzzing at my ear and I get it, all at once, the way you get a math thing after twenty minutes of not getting it.

He's letting me pick.

That's what the not-looking is. If I want this to be nothing—jacket on a hook, guy who works here tidied up, end of story—then he's not going to make me hold anything. He's going to keep drying glasses and I can walk out and tomorrow it's a Tuesday. And if I want it to be a thing, the thing is right there on the hook, folded, with the pockets solved, and all I have to do is say his name across eleven feet of sticky floor.

He went out to the rail after I left. That's the part I keep landing on. His break was over, and he went back out there anyway.

"Are you going?" Isolde asks.

"I'm going. I've got the shack at six."

"Six," Bram says, appalled on principle.

"Somebody has to hand strangers a paddle and lie to them about the current."

"You don't lie to them about the current," Nikki says.

"I round the current." I lift the jacket off the hook.

The hook leaves a brief flattened crease across the fold, and the fabric hangs dense and cool-looking from one hand. Frayed white threads show at the pocket hole against the darker denim.

And this is the part where I could check. It would take a second and a half. Two fingers into the left pocket, feel how he's done it, confirm the crossed arms, confirm the hole is covered, run the whole thing through my head with the evidence in my hand.

I don't.

Because checking is admitting I saw, and if I look at the pocket with three people at this table and him eleven feet away pretending a pint glass is interesting, then it's out, it's in the room, it belongs to everybody. And I want to have it for a while first. I want to keep it all the way up the shoulder in the dark and take it apart by myself where nobody can watch my face.

So I unfold it like it's just a jacket, left hand flat over the pocket, and I put it on, and I feel the weight of the left side settle against my hip and I do not look down at it.

The denim settles stiffly across the shoulders before warming, its collar carrying a trace of outside damp. The loaded pocket makes a small, firm shape against the hip through the fabric.

"Text me when you're home," Isolde says.

"It's a fifteen-minute walk."

"Text me when you're home, Wren."

"Okay." My voice comes out smaller than I meant, so I put a joke on the end of it. "Don't let Bram order anything."

"I never order anything," Bram says. "Food arrives. I'm a passive recipient. It's a whole philosophy."

Cindy's still got the phone wedged in her shoulder when I pass the till, and she does the wave she does, four fingers off the stack of twenties without breaking the count, eyebrows up, mouth still going at whoever's on the other end.

And behind me, from the bar, one sound.

A pint glass, set down on the rubber mat. The mat is black and honeycombed, wet in its shallow cells, with a thin line of foam caught along one edge. Under the bar lights, the glass leaves a clear crescent of reflected shine. Not a clunk. He put it down carefully, the way you put something down when you've decided not to say a word.

The door doesn't catch until I pull it the second time.

Outside, the night air presses cool and wet against the doorway, smelling of salt, mud, and the faint metallic tang of the lot. Pink light from the sign skips across the door's damp lower panel.

Outside the lot's still doing pink and not pink, and the air off the water is cold enough that I get the collar up and the zipper going for once, and the gravel starts making that cornstarch sound under my feet.

I get four steps.

Then I stop, and I put my hand flat over the left pocket, and through the denim I can feel both pairs. Tortoiseshell in front, the harder edge of the aviators behind, the two sets of arms hooked into each other and sitting up high, above the soft place where the fabric gives out. Blunt little rectangles under my palm. Nothing going anywhere.

I don't take them out.

Because here's the thing I didn't have on the walk down. The song on the rail could have been a mood. Four minutes and eleven seconds, low tide, string lights, a ballad engineered to do exactly that to anyone standing near a rail at ten at night—I could have talked myself out of that one by morning, and I was planning to.

A mood doesn't do this. A mood doesn't go back out to a wet rail after its break is over. A mood doesn't fold denim square as a napkin. A mood doesn't stand at an empty booth turning two pairs of sunglasses in its hands until they catch on each other, because the first way it tried them they went straight back through.

That's not a feeling. That's a decision, made with hands, in a room where nobody was watching him make it.

And then he set a pint glass down quiet and let me walk out.

Okay, so—that's what I have.

I carry it up the shoulder in the dark, all hundred yards and then the rest, gravel doing its cornstarch thing, the flats out there breathing sulfur and cut grass at the sky, the sign going pink and not pink behind me until the bend takes it. My hand stays where it is the whole way. I don't need it to. It stays.

At my door I get my phone out.

[[text]]

Me: Home

[[end]]]]

She sends back a heart and a color, and the color is orange, and I don't have the bandwidth to find out what that means tonight.

I sit on the end of the bed with the jacket still on. Then I take them out, one pair at a time, and set them side by side on the quilt, arms open, tortoiseshell and black, and I look at them the way I look at liner notes.

The hole's still in the pocket. It'll still be there in the morning. It's going to stay there, I think, for a while.

Six a.m., the shack, paddles and strangers and the rounded current. And then, at some point tomorrow, I am going to have to decide what a person does about a man who solved her pocket and never said a word about it.