“God, it’s so true,” she laughed. “It’s like clockwork with him. He’s always a little nuts, but when there is a full room, I do anything in my power to avoid him.”
“Well then, thank God for Cuba,” I said. “We should have him shipped there every full moon.”
“Let’s just ship him there permanently.”
She took my hand, and we walked onto the dock.
Since the dock was new it didn’t smell of fish, and there were no shrimp heads or squid guts or anything else littering the floor of the dock.
“It’s beautiful out here,” she said.
“We used to come out here to fish,” I said. “Never took much stock at the time of how nice it was.”
“This would have been such a great area to grow up.”
There was a bench along the railing and we sat down to look out over the water. I put my arm around her and she laid her head on my shoulder. I absently started playing with her hair.
“You know,” I said, “I have a friend I graduated high school with named Laura. We both went into teaching, but after she graduated college she moved to North Carolina, got married, and started working in a high school up there. At the end of last school year, she sent me a message on Facebook to tell me that one of their English teachers was leaving. Asked if I would be interested in applying.”
“Did you?”
“I thought hard about it. I mean, after Carrie died I kind of wondered what my place was here anymore. Yeah, I’m from here, but after going through all that I was tempted for a long time to just drop everything here and go somewhere new. Start fresh.”
“You rarely answer a question directly, you know,” she said. “It’s kind of frustrating.”
“Not the first time I’ve been told that,” I said.
“So what made you stay? Did you apply and they turned you down?”
“Laura sent me the paperwork. I filled it all out. I was on my way to send everything out, and Robin called me. Her tire had gone flat on the bridge to Tampa. It was during the day and her husband was at work. So she called me.”
“But, you still could have sent them afterwards, right? Or even the next day.”
“Yeah. But I’m kind of, I don’t know, maybe superstitious is the right word. I had told Robin I was going to apply. She thought it was a great opportunity and was excited for me. She said that she and Walt would be praying. And as I was driving, I remember even thinking how smoothly everything seemed to be going. How it seemed like nothing was going to stop it. I had even started looking at houses up there.”
“Slightly premature,” she said, rubbing my chest with her hand.
“Yeah, but you know how it is. I was mentally preparing myself for the idea. And then, bam, tire goes out. They had just put new tires on the car a month before. And so I drove out there and spent the afternoon fixing her car on the bridge. Finally, I got her back on the road. And Walt called me from work and was beyond grateful. I guess Robin hadn’t even told him until afterwards because she knew he couldn’t have left his job to help. So she didn’t want to worry him.”
“What does Walt do?”
“He’s an air traffic controller at the Clearwater airport.”
“Oh wow, Yeah, he wouldn’t have been leaving work then.”
“Exactly. So, he called and was so thankful. And I guess because they had always been so good to me, I felt like I was a little in debt to them. Not in a bad way, just that I wanted to repay them for how they had treated me, you know?”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“So, for whatever reason, I just took the tire popping and me losing the day as a sign that maybe I wasn’t supposed to get to the post office to send out the paperwork. Then Robin got sick. And then you walked into my life.”
I decided to just go for it. Fuck it.
“And I know that her tire popped for a reason.”
“You knew right away?”
“I knew you were something special. I knew I had never met anyone like you. You turned around that day and it was like a scene from a movie. The ones where the guy sees the girl and she is brightly lit, like the light is shining only on her. Everything else goes blurry and fades out. I swear I thought you’d notice that I froze and think I was a creep.”
“I think I was too nervous about working again to notice that. Obviously, I did notice you check out my ring.”
“Sorry for making that so obvious.”
“It was cute. And I remember thinking I never had a teacher who looked like you when I was in high school.”
I laughed.
“Yeah, you were probably thankful!”