A Layover to Remember

The ferry dumped me off at Sausalito on a Tuesday afternoon in November, and I want you to understand right off that this was not my idea of a good time. Six hours of layover between a morning meeting in San Francisco and a dinner thing with a client across the bay. My heels were killing me, my coffee had gone cold somewhere around the Golden Gate, and the ferry guy, some kid with a clipboard, told me the next boat back wasn't until evening.

So there I was, Abby Foss, forty-three years old, fifteen years married, twenty-two years out of being the kind of person who wanders docks for fun, standing at the end of a pier that smelled like rope and salt and dead bait. The sign said SAUSALITO SAILING SCHOOL in peeling letters. Small teaching sloops bobbed along the dock, and there was a hoist and a shed stuffed with life jackets and what looked like a hundred years of somebody else's junk.

I was mostly thinking about coffee. There had to be coffee somewhere.

"Hey. You the adjuster?"

I turned around. A guy in a rain jacket, maybe thirty-one, with a clipboard already extended toward me like a communion wafer. He had the look of a man who had been managing a dock for twelve years and had seen everything go wrong at least twice.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"The adjuster. From the insurance outfit. You're early, but hey, early is fine, early is great." He pressed the clipboard into my hand before I could say no. "Troy," he said, shaking my hand like we'd closed a deal. "Dock manager. You're here about the Sure Bet, right? The boat with the, uh. The problem."

"I'm not, actually. I'm just..."

"Great, great. It's the blue sloop, third slip down. You can't miss it. There's a hoof issue."

I blinked. "A hoof issue. On a boat."

"On the dock, technically. There was a horse out here earlier." He said this the way you'd say there was a coffee spill out here earlier. "Don't ask. Long story, involves a film shoot that got cancelled and a farrier who showed up anyway. Point is, there's a stray shoe from it somewhere near the Sure Bet and the underwriter wants everything documented before the inspection sail. You take her out, you check everything, you sign the form. Right down there."

And he walked away. Just walked away, whistling, like he had solved both our problems with one clipboard.

I stood there holding a clipboard I had no right to, wearing heels on a wet dock, looking down at a form that wanted things like "hull condition noted" and "standing rigging satisfactory." I should have walked back up the ramp and found a café. Let me be truthful about why I didn't. The honest answer is that I was bored out of my skull and the form had a little pen tied to it with a string, and there is something about a pen on a string that makes a person feel official.

So I started walking down the dock toward the blue sloop.

* * *

Now, Mike. My husband. Forty-five years old, a farrier, which means he shoes horses for a living, which means he drives hours in a truck that smells like a barn to bend over all day and file the toes of animals that could kill him without malice. He had known about my trip for a month. What he had not told me was that he finished his Tuesday rounds early, packed the truck, drove down from our mountain town, and planned to "surprise" me, which is a word that in Mike's mouth has never once ended well.

He arrived at the sailing school dock at 2:40 in the afternoon carrying a rolled-up rug.

I should explain the rug. For our fifteenth anniversary, which is in March, Mike had been hunting a specific kind of Turkish rug, the kind his mother had in the hallway of the house he grew up in, red and navy, worn down the middle. He found one at an estate sale two counties over, paid cash for it, rolled it up, and decided he could not wait until March to give it to me. So he drove four and a half hours with a rug in the passenger seat like it was a relative, planning to find my hotel, leave it with the front desk, and surprise me at dinner.

The truck broke down in Mill Valley. That part matters later, sort of, but mostly what matters is that he was already in Sausalito on the ferry loop, and he figured, correctly, that I would be somewhere near the water, because I always am, so he walked down the ramp with a rolled rug over his shoulder like a plumber with a pipe.

Troy saw him from thirty yards and made his decision instantly.

"There he is," Troy called out. "Hey! You're the instructor, right? The guy for the inspection rig?"

Mike, who is a man who has never in his life turned down the chance to be helpful, and who had a horse-sized question forming in his head that he hadn't gotten to ask yet, said, "Uh, sure?"

Nobody in this story comes out of this section looking smart. I want that understood.

"Perfect. Boat's the Sure Bet, blue sloop, third slip. She's already been brought around, I cast off in ten. You and the adjuster take her out, run the whole checklist, bring her back by five." Troy clapped him on the shoulder. "Nice rug, by the way. Very nautical."

"Thanks," said Mike, who had never sailed a boat in his life. "It's for my wife."

"Sentimental guy. I respect it. Go on, she's waiting."

And that is how my husband ended up walking down a dock toward a boat he could not sail, carrying a rug, because a stranger with a clipboard told him to.

* * *

I saw him before he saw me, which is the only reason any of this happened the way it did. There he was, six foot of farrier in a flannel shirt and work boots, carrying a rolled carpet down a wet dock in the rain like it was the most normal Tuesday of his life, and I swear to God my first thought was not "why is my husband here." My first thought was "who is this gorgeous idiot and why is he dressed for a barn."

Then my second thought caught up, and I laughed out loud, alone, on a dock, like I was insane.

"Mike!"

He stopped. He did that squinting thing he does, the one where his whole face reorganizes itself around a problem. Then he said, "Abby? What in the hell are you doing holding a clipboard?"

"I could ask why you're carrying a rug onto a sailboat, but I'm honestly afraid of the answer."

"I bought it at the Henderson estate sale, the one I told you about, and the truck died in Mill Valley so I..." He stopped, because he had apparently reached the end of the sentence and realized how it sounded. "Why are you holding a clipboard, Abby."

"Troy gave it to me. He thinks I'm the insurance adjuster. He thinks there's a horse problem on a boat."

"There was a horse on the dock," Mike said, nodding like this was reasonable. "I saw the shoe. I almost picked it up."

"Why would you pick up a horse shoe on a boat dock?"

"Because I'm a farrier, Abby, it's basically littering to leave one lying around."

We were both laughing by then, standing in the drizzle three slips from the blue sloop, me in my ruined heels and him with his anniversary rug, and I want to tell you we walked off that dock right then and got coffee and laughed about it for twenty years. We did not. Because Troy came jogging down the dock with a set of keys and the kind of momentum you cannot argue with.

"Great, you two found each other. Adjuster, instructor, perfect. Cast off's in ten." He unlocked the gate, opened the last cleat line, and physically steered us, one hand on each of our backs, onto the deck of the Sure Bet, a sloop about twenty-four feet long with a tiller and a marine toilet the size of a shoebox.

"Troy, I really need to explain," I started.

"No time, no time. Take her out, check everything, hull, rigging, head, the works. Sign the form. Back by five." And then, because the universe had not yet finished humiliating us, he cast off the lines, gave the hull a shove with his boot, and stood on the dock waving like a man sending his kids off to camp.

"Hey!" Mike shouted. "I don't know how to sail."

"You're the instructor," Troy shouted back, walking away. "Figure it out."

The dock got smaller. The rug rolled gently against the mast. My husband looked at me, and I looked at him, and the Sure Bet drifted out into the gray water of Sausalito with two liars, a carpet, and a clipboard aboard.

"Well," Mike said finally. "The rug's for you. It's early. Happy anniversary."

"I can't believe you're doing this right now."

"When else am I gonna do it? You're holding the only clipboard."

The first thing we learned about the Sure Bet was that she had an engine, and the second thing we learned was that the engine was a lie.

Mike turned the key maybe six times. Each time the boat made a sound like an old man clearing his throat and then gave up. I stood at the tiller doing nothing useful, because the tiller did not appear to be connected to anything that mattered, and the rain came down in that fine California way that is not quite rain and not quite fog but still gets your hair wet.

"Try it again," I said.

"I did try it again. I've tried it six again."

"That's not a number."

"It is today." He popped the little panel under the companionway steps and looked at whatever was in there, which he understood exactly as well as I did, meaning not at all. "There's a thing in here that's supposed to be connected to another thing. It isn't."

"Can you fix it?"

"Abby, I shoe horses. The inside of a boat motor is a whole different country."

So we drifted. That was the situation. We were adrift in Sausalito harbor, in November, on a boat neither of us could sail, with six hours to kill and a clipboard between us. The shore was maybe four hundred yards away and it might as well have been four hundred miles. I did try the sails, because I figured a sailboat has sails for a reason. I pulled on the one rope that looked pullable and something clanged somewhere and the big canvas thing unrolled about a third of the way and then stopped, and I decided that counted as effort.

"Look at us," Mike said. "We're sailing."

"This is not sailing. This is a rug floating with luggage on it."

He unrolled the end of the rug along the cockpit bench, about a third of it, and I will admit it looked nice there, red and navy against all that wet gray. Then he went below to use the marine toilet, because apparently two large coffees plus terror equals need