Page 67 of Open Water
"Two. The fleece couple were both wrecked." I bumped his shoulder with mine.
That got the laugh, finally… small yet real. He scrubbed a hand down his face, breathed out, looked at me sideways.
"You came," he said. Like it mattered more than he was going to admit.
"Course I came."
He nodded, then he knocked his knee against mine, once, and let it go.
"Don't make it weird."
"You're the one crying at your own movie."
"I'm not—" He laughed again, and this time it held. "Okay. A little. Shut up."
***
We spilled out of the theater into the cold with the rest of the crowd, forty people thinning to a dozen as they peeled off toward cars and B&Bs, and the few of us left drifted down Hartwick's main street toward the one place still lit at the end of it.
It wasn't far. Two blocks of brick storefronts gone dark for the night — the bookstore with its window display, the coffee shop with the chalkboard sign flipped around to CLOSED, a hardware store, a bakery window. Our breath went up in clouds. The cold had teeth this far north and the whole street was empty except for us and the streetlights and a single traffic signal blinking yellow over an intersection.
Then a door, and warmth, and noise. The Bullfinch — gold-flaked letters on the glass, half worn off, a corner bar that had clearly been here longer than I'd been alive.
The bar hit all at once when Ethan pulled it open and a wall of heat and yellow light and what sounded like forty conversations going at the same time, the windows already fogged from the inside, the cold burning off our shoulders in seconds. The music was something old and warm with too many horns. The place was small and packed and gloriously mismatched: a long folding table down one wall with cheese gone soft and crackers and two boxes of wine set out like a centerpiece, chairs that looked collected one yard sale at a time, string lights, the smell of spilled beer and somebody's perfume.
The festival had taken the back room over and made it theirs.
Ethan walked into it like he'd been doing this his whole life. Three conversations deep in ninety seconds — a handshake here, a hand on a shoulder there, somebody calling his name across the room
I stood at the edge with my bad wine and watched him fit into his artsy film crowd.
"You're the rower."
The woman from the front row. Up close, fifty-five maybe, gray hair cut short, the combat boots, a festival lanyard flipped around backward so you couldn't read it.
"Ethan talks about you," she said.
"Yeah. I'm Alex." I said.
"Frankie." She didn't offer a hand, she took a sip instead. "I run this festival. And I make documentaries. Thirty years of it. His is good. Tell him the second act's too long, because he'll need to hear both eventually."
She looked at me like she could see everything — I didn't like it.
"You don't look like you're having a good time," she said.
"I'm having a fine time."
"Sure." She nodded at the room. "These are my people. Took me forty years to find them. You've got the face of someone who hasn't found his yet."
I should have deflected. I'm good at deflecting. The one skill I was taught that I'd wanted to keep on purpose. Instead I heard myself say, "You said it took forty years."
"Give or take."
"What were you doing before that?"
"Disappointing my family." She said it lightly. "They're from Greenwich."
That meant money, old money.
