Crew Change Letters

The letter started out the way I meant it to, all business, date and everything, a Tuesday in March. Dear Dev, I wrote, and then I sat there with my pen hovering because I'd promised myself I'd keep it short and professional, and short and professional was already dying on the page.

I told him the shop would close the first week of June, that I'd give him a fair severance, and that I was sorry, which was true. And then my pen drifted, the way it always does when I'm tired, and I wrote a whole second paragraph about how he'd better stop laughing at me when I fight with the espresso machine, because honestly, the way he leans on the counter and grins while I'm threatening a thirty-year-old La Marzocco with a wrench is not the kind of support a woman needs from her only employee.

I crossed it out. Then I didn't cross it out. Then I read it three times and decided I was too tired to be embarrassed about anything, and I sealed the envelope and left it on the counter for him with the morning deposit, like it was just another piece of paperwork.

The shop has been mine for six years, you should know that up front. I bought it when I was forty with money I didn't really have, back when my marriage was still the kind people envy at barbecues, and I named it Latitude 32 because the bait shack it used to be sat right at the thirty-second parallel, or close enough, and I thought that was romantic. Now it's mostly romantic the way an old boat is romantic, meaning beautiful in pictures and expensive in person, and the fog horn outside competes with the grinder every single morning like they're both trying to annoy me on purpose.

Dev read the letter on his break, I know because he read it standing right there at the register instead of taking it to the back like a person with manners. I watched his face do about four things in a row.

"First week of June," he said, flat, like I'd told him a fish had died.

"That's the plan."

"You can't close in June. June is when the gloom comes in and everybody on the base gets moody and buys pastries."

"That is not a reason to keep a business open, Dev."

"It's a great reason. It's the best reason. Also the pastry guy flirts with me every Thursday and I'd miss him."

"The pastry guy is seventy."

"He's a gentleman of seventy, Juliette, and he has excellent taste."

And that was Dev for you, thirty-two years old, off-season crabber, full-time smart mouth, the only person I knew in Port Ochoa who could turn a going-out-of-business notice into an argument about weather. I went home that night and wrote him back a proper letter, because apparently we were doing letters now, and because texting felt too fast for the kind of thing I wanted to say, which I still couldn't entirely name.

I told him about my daughter. She's twenty-six, she's grown, and she moved to Oregon last fall with her husband, and I miss her the way you miss a limb, some dull phantom ache every time something funny happens and she's not there to text it to. I told him I was tired, real tired, the kind where you sleep eight hours and wake up tired anyway. And I told him the part I'd never told anybody, which is that the shop has Mark all over it. He used to sit at the corner table every Saturday morning doing his crossword while I worked, and it turns out he was doing his crossword the same year he was doing Carmen from his office, and every time I look at that corner table now I want to put it through the front window.

I texted him the next day, because the letter felt too heavy to carry alone, and my text was strictly work hours, twelve forty on a Wednesday, me behind the counter: Letter in your box. It's the real reasons this time. I'm sorry about June.

He texted back a thumbs up and then, three minutes later, okay I read it, and then nothing else all day, which was somehow worse than an argument.

So then, Thursday morning, two in the morning, the shop's ancient landline rings. I almost didn't answer, but the machine picked up and his voice came rolling out of the speaker in my dark kitchen and I just stood there holding a glass of water, listening.

"Hey, it's Dev, it's late, I know, I'm calling the landline because I figured you wouldn't answer your cell and I needed to say this to somebody who wasn't a crab." There was a long pause and the sound of water somewhere behind him, the dock, I guessed. "The pots came up empty again. Fourteen pulls, nothing, not even a crab with the decency to feel bad about it. Bruce always says when the pots come up empty you chase odd comforts, you know, weird little things, the stuff that doesn't make sense to anybody else. And I've been thinking about what my odd comfort is and it's real stupid, it's this stupid shop, and the way the machine wheezes in the morning, and the way you talk to the milk steamer like it's a lazy cat. Anyway. Don't close the shop. Or do. But don't do it because you're sad. That's a bad reason, that's how Bruce and I ended up in crab-processing class at twenty-five, both of us sad. Okay. Bye. Sorry about the hour."

The message ran another forty seconds of him apologizing about the hour, which I listened to twice.

And then Friday morning I came in early, before him, which I never do, and there was a yellow sticky note on the grinder, pressed right over the dose chamber where I'd see it first thing. I'll buy the shop. You stay.... D.

I stood there holding it while the machine ticked and warmed up behind me, and the fog horn went off right on schedule, and I thought, this boy has lost his mind. So I dug a pen out of the drawer and wrote underneath it, You can't afford it, because that was true, he nets maybe eleven grand off the boats