“Okay….” My voice fades, unsure what he’s referring to. But hello, he just asked me to dinner! “Um, wait… dinners come with rings and wives asking for divorces. Nope. Not a chance. I’ll do lunch.”
He snorts, shaking his head, amusement lifting his lips. “Okay, lunch.”
“Perfect.”
A rush of nerves slices through me when I realize he’s leaving. “Be safe.”
Reaching down for the rope, Lincoln winks. “Always.”
Turning, I begin to walk away, my heart in my throat, when he yells after me, “Hey!”
I turn, waiting for his words.
“Try not to find any more stray dogs.”
Laughter rolls through me. Who knows what I could find in this town if I really tried. I watch their boat leave the marina, my breath dancing like his smoke curling around me. I hold it in, like the sweet taste of his smirking lips and the wildness now coursing through my veins. I don’t want to let go.
Sonar - An electrical device used to determine the depth of water. Sonar is also used to locate schools of fish and other large underwater obstacles.
“I really want to know.”
“I think you want to know more than me.”
Presley grins, floating a shot on top of a drink. She’s doing this because if you saw the guy seated at the end of the bar hitting up Mal, you’d do the same. He can hardly stay on the stool, and it’s only four in the afternoon. If you don’t know what floating a shot means, it’s when you pour half a shot after mixing a virgin drink. Smells like booze, but has half the alcohol content. “I do because I’d love to refer to your heart by name. I feel like we should acknowledge that Burt has feelings too, and they might not be what’s best for you, Ms. Journey.”
Burt has feelings? If so, I think he likes a rugged fisherman, who likes the taste of my blood.
Staring at my phone, I laugh at Presley. She constantly refers to my heart as Burt. She’s convinced that my heart came from an older man in his fifties who loved to bowl and casually sipped his espresso and would not ever eat tomatoes on anything.
Since my transplant, I no longer find interest in the things I once did. Like, tomatoes and coffee. To be fair, I was seventeen at the time. I didn’t know who I was, let alone what I wanted out of life. I spent the majority of it with a heart condition I was sure eventually, I’d die from.
Believe it or not, you can’t just google who your donor heart came from. You have to contact your transplant coordinator and go through the official process of writing a letter to the donor family. You can’t do this for one year following the transplant because of the risk of rejection, and, also, to give the donor family time to grieve.
I can’t, nor will I ever, understand what they’re going through. Yeah, I lost my parents, but I didn’t give a part of them away to someone else. That’s like giving your house away to those weird people who stayed at Presley’s parents’ Airbnb and then organized all your cups by color and put the toilet paper on the roll backward. You can’t trust anyone who puts the toilet paper on backward. But my real point, they gave me something and what was I doing with it?
I haven’t done anything worth saying to them, hey, look at my amazing life I now have thanks to the organ you selflessly gave me.
This is why it’s been six years, and I don’t know anything about my donor, or their family.
After emailing back and forth, my transplant coordinator directs me to a website and what to include in the letter. I can’t include my last name or the city I live in. Nor can I mention employers. What I can do is express what the donation meant to me and how my life has changed.
I set my phone down. “I think I’m going to need some time to think about this one,” I tell Presley when she returns.
“Okay.” She gives me that look of “yeah, right.” “But in the meantime, can we please bet on table three?”
Dylan walks by. “My guess is he’s previously married, divorced now, and thinking about how he wishes he wouldn’t have fucked things up with his wife.”
For entertainment, we bet on tables from time to time. Most of the time, it’s the ones you’re convinced are on