The feeling of casting was both familiar and foreign. Muscle memory kicked in, and within an hour he’d hauled in a dozen pickerel. He threw back most of them but kept a handful.
At a certain point he decided he’d had enough and sat back and stared at the horizon.
His boy was in this lake.
He and Kerrie had agreed on that, easily and immediately, even though everything else between them at that point had been fraught. They’d gone out in this very boat with no particular destination in mind. He had driven. Told her to let him know when she felt like they were in a good spot. She had nodded, so he knew she’d heard him, but she hadn’t said anything, not for an hour. So he’d just kept going. It felt like they’d reached the middle of the damn lake by the time she signaled him to stop, though he knew with his rational mind that they had not even come close.
The weird thing was, they hadn’t said anything. He’d racked his brain, trying to come up with words appropriate to the situation, but he kept coming up blank. She had been silent, too, but that was more unusual for her, the lawyer who always knew what to say. Maybe she had gone blank the same way he had. Or maybe she’d had lots to say but had been holding it in. Regardless, he hadn’t asked her, and now it was too late.
But she’d held his hand as he’d held the urn out over the gray water. It had reminded him of the wishing flowers. A macabre, inverted version of the town tradition. Except there were no wishes here. Kerrie had wished for Jude, and Jude had come. But then he had gone.
He observed with mild interest that he was thinking about all this without losing his shit. More often than not when he went out on his Tuesday expeditions, he ended up doubled over and gasping for breath, and it was a toss-up whether he would stay out long enough to get anything to sell on the pier.
For some reason, today, he was able to look at the endless expanse of water and imagine Jude in a different way. He used to think of Jude buried beneath it, trying to get out. Like Nora’s zombies, maybe. It was a nightmarish scenario, made no less so for its irrationality. He had told Nora, way back in her early days in town, that he’d stopped wanting to go out on the boat after Jude was gone. That was why. The waves so often came for him out here.
But suddenly, damned if he couldn’t look at the lake and think of Jude with a sort of neutrality. Well, no, that wasn’t right. Not neutrality. Definitely sadness. But not the doubled-over, hyperventilating despair from before.
It occurred to him that another reason to have a cell phone was that if you wanted to ask your ex-wife if she was silent the day you scattered your son’s ashes because she didn’t know what to say or because she felt like she couldn’t say what she wanted to say, it would be easier to do that in a text than in a phone call.
When Nora got home from the high school, the Mermaid’s cocktail hour was underway. The thrice-weekly event was, on paper, for guests staying at the inn, and they did attend, but so did some of the downtown denizens of Moonflower Bay. Nora spotted Maya and Pearl off in a corner, huddled over a phone.
“They’re passing judgment on each other’s Tinder matches,” Eve said, reading Nora’s mind.
“That’s…actually kind of awesome,” Nora said, smiling affectionately at her friend. Well, friends. Nora and Maya had slid easily into a close friendship, but Nora realized to her slight surprise that she genuinely thought of Pearl as a friend, too, despite her constant need to censor herself around Pearl lest the woman make an entire life plan for Nora.
“How was the flu clinic?” Eve asked.
“It was great. I jabbed seventy-seven kids and twelve teachers, and the principal is going to do some flyers for kids to take home about their parents potentially needing the MMR booster.”
“Good for you!”
“Yeah, look at me. I’ve turned into a regular vaccine crusader,” Nora joked.
Eve didn’t laugh. “I’m serious. You’ve been here what? Four months? And you’re really moving the needle on all these public-health challenges. And that’s all in addition to actually being the town doctor! And by the way, Sawyer