Float Plan(11)

“What? Now?”

“Sashimi doesn’t get any fresher,” he says, offering me a ragged sliver of raw fish.

The flesh is warm and minerally on my tongue, nothing like the cool, tidy rolls at my favorite sushi bar. Here we have no little bowls of soy sauce or decorative mounds of wasabi, just a cockpit that looks like a crime scene. I eat a second piece, and a third, feeling slightly Lord of the Flies. “I thought this was going to be terrible, but—”

“Incredible, right?” Keane says, separating the meat from the skin. He tosses the offal overboard. “I’ll portion a bit out for dinner and put the rest in your freezer for another day.”

He gathers up the remaining fish and carries it down to the galley, while I use my dishwashing bucket to rinse down the cockpit. When he comes back to resume his watch, I stay on deck.

“Where in Ireland are you from?”

“You probably haven’t heard of it, but a small town on the southwest coast called Tralee,” Keane says. “The closest town people know is Killarney.”

“I haven’t heard of Killarney, either, so…”

He laughs. “You’re from Florida?”

“Born and raised in Fort Lauderdale.”

“What do you do there?”

“Are you familiar with Hooters?”

Keane glances at me, but his eyes are shaded behind aviator-style sunglasses, so I have no idea what he might be thinking. “As a concept, yes, but I’ve never been.”

“The place I worked was like Hooters, but with a pirate theme,” I explain. “The waitresses dressed like sexy pirates and the bartenders wore black tank tops with the word wench across the back.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“When you work in a restaurant like that, people tend to think you’re either flaunting it and you think too highly of yourself, or you’re degrading yourself and you have low self-esteem,” I say, thinking of the little side comments Ben’s mother used to make. “There’s very little accounting for how most of the women are simply trying to pay bills or support their families in a patriarchal system that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. I’m not thrilled with being objectified, but I’ve made a lot of money letting it happen, so my feelings are complicated.”

“Mine too. I’m not certain I’d feel entirely comfortable eating in a place where it feels like the staff is part of the menu, but sexy pirates?” Keane grins. “I wouldn’t hate it either.”

“That’s fair.” I stand and head toward the companionway. “I’m grabbing a Coke. Would you like one?”

“I would, thanks … wench.”

I give him the finger and his laughter follows me down into the cabin. I open the refrigerator hatch, my eye catching on the bulkhead wall. I & LOVE & YOU. Sadness tumbles me like a wave, and I climb into the V-berth to look at Ben’s photo.

The morning we snapped that Polaroid, he woke me when it was still dark, whispering, “Come on, babe, let’s go watch the sunrise.”

I threw on some clothes and he drove me to Hillsboro Inlet. We sat on the hood of his old blue Land Rover as the sun came up, and he kissed me under a sky of golds and blues threaded with ribbons of pink. We took the picture—with the lighthouse in the background—to mimic the one we’d taken on our first date, my lips pressed against his cheek as he smiled at the camera. I had no idea it would be our last photo.

It’s so fucking unfair that Keane is here, and Ben is not. Keane shouldn’t be the one sitting in Ben’s favorite spot with his hand on the tiller. Tonight he’ll be sleeping aboard Ben’s boat and there’s no fairness in that, either. Keane Sullivan seems like a good person, but he’s not Ben, and I can’t help wondering if I’ve made one more mistake. I touch my fingertips to the border of the Polaroid on the wall. He’s here to do a job. He’s doesn’t have to be my friend. He doesn’t have to be anything at all.

I grab the cans of Coke from the fridge and go back out on deck, but my mood is thrown off.

“Would you mind taking over for a bit?” Keane says.

I’m relieved when he goes belowdecks, but after a bit I hear him rattling around in the galley and catch a whiff of frying fish. He emerges half an hour later with plates of fried mackerel, red beans, and dirty rice.

“I don’t expect you to do the cooking,” I say. “That’s not in the job description.”

“Seemed like you needed a bit of space.”

“I—Yeah, I did. Thanks for making dinner.”

“You’re welcome.”

We reach the anchorage at Chub Cay at midnight. Together we furl the sails before Keane makes his way up to the bow. He directs me to a large space between two bigger sailboats.

“Now back it up,” he says.

I shift the throttle into reverse and watch as he lowers the anchor slowly into the water, letting the boat drift backward until the anchor line grows taut and the hook catches on the bottom. It’s a very different method than my throw-and-hope-for-the-best technique in Bimini, when I was lucky the anchor held.

“Next time, in daylight,” Keane says, returning to the cockpit and killing the engine, “you should do the anchoring.”

I realize now how much Ben used to do when we were sailing together, how often I sat back and let him. Ben might not have been a very skilled sailor, but at least he’d learned how to plot a course and drop an anchor. How naive I was to think I could make this trip alone. “Okay.”