Page 110 of Everything You Hate
“Fuck off, feather duster,” Captain says.
Dean drops my bag by the couch and crouches to scrub Doug behind the ears. “The bird’s a filing cabinet. My dad taught him half of it before he died. You wind him up enough, you get a dead man’s whole vocabulary back.”
Captain, delighted to be discussed, bobs his head and offers, in a rasp that isn’t his own—older, gravelly, an old man’s cadence—“Not dead yet.”
Dean goes still for half a second. Then he huffs something that isn’t quite a laugh. “That one’s my father’s. He said it every morning of his life. Coffee, then ‘not dead yet,’ then he’d go untie the boat.” He straightens up. “Captain said it at the funeral, and everybody laughed. I’m sure Dad was slapping his knee in heaven.”
“I think I would’ve liked your dad.”
Dean looks wistfully toward a photograph on the wall. It shows a man who had the same blue-gray eyes Henry gave to all his kids, and Dean’s smirk. “He would’ve loved you, Hollywood.” He shakes his head and straightens. “Well, let me show you around.”
The cottage is small and worn, and every single thing in it is load-bearing. Three mugs in the cabinet, one chipped past saving and still in the rotation. A dent in the left couch cushion where he sits. A shelf of paperbacks so cracked and swollen they’ve clearly all been read in the rain. And in the back, a wall of windows offers a breathtaking view of the whole harbor, the water flat and pewter in the afternoon light, his boat small at its slip.
“Oh. Dean. This is…” I trail off. I don’t have words.
“I know.” He makes me coffee without asking how I take it—two sugars, cream until it goes the color of wet sand—because he watched me make it once, at the diner, and filed that away too.
We drink it at the little table by the windows. Doug arranges himself across both our feet.
“I know what I’m writing,” I say. The idea has been bubbling in the back of my brain since before the storm, but I didn’t settle on it until I was waiting for Dean to wake up in the hospital.
Nothing good will ever come of the treasure hunt story.
But I do have another story to tell that might just help someone who feels like they are drowning.
Dean looks up. “You’re still writing a story?”
“Yes, but not about the treasure. Not the Merricks, the feud, Evangeline… not any of it.” I turn the mug in my hands. “I’m going to write my story.”
He still doesn’t say anything, but his hand comes across the table and covers mine.
“It’s a breast cancer piece. Reconstruction. What it’s like to rebuild your body and your entire career at the same time, inpublic, while the internet decides you’re a punchline.” My throat closes and I push through it. “Not an inspirational one. Not sunshine-and-survivor. Just true. The version I was too proud and too scared to tell while I was busy being the girl who fell apart on camera.”
“Good,” Dean says.
One word. No speech. He says good the way he says everything he means—flat, level, no decoration—and it lands harder than any huge, declarative speech could have.
“I’m not giving up the work, though.” I lace my fingers into his. “The asking. The listening. Finding the story under the story. That part I loved. I’m just done performing the rest of it.”
“Then don’t give it up. Write what’s true. The rest is noise.” His thumb runs over my knuckles, then he reaches into his jeans pocket and sets something on the table between us.
A key.
Brass, old, worn smooth at the shoulders from years of riding around in the same pocket.
“And I want you to write it here. Right here at this table, overlooking my harbor, with my parrot cursing at you and my dog snoring at your feet.”
I pick it up. It’s warm from his body. I close my hand around it, and the teeth press into my palm, not hard, just enough to be real.
“Okay,” I say.
He kisses me across the corner of the table, slow, unhurried, a kiss with no clock on it, and Doug groans in protest at the disruption to his bed, and Captain mutters something obscene in Mimi’s voice.
But I pull back before he can deepen it. “But there’s one thing we need to do first.”
His brow furrows. “What’s that?”
“The box on No Name. I need to see what’s in it.”
