Kayak and the Caterer

The warehouse smelled like old velvet and salt, which is what happens when a band stores forty years of stage costumes a hundred yards from a canal in southern Spain. I had a van full of chafing dishes and a plan that had nothing to do with the food, and honestly the plan was the only thing keeping me cheerful.

Let me back up. My name is Beth Edwards, I'm fifty-three, and I cater parties for people in the film business because they pay well and tip badly and never remember my name. The retirement party was for Jake Fuller, who is fifty, who is retiring from the stunt union with a gold watch and a roasted pig, and who dumped me four years ago by not texting back. Ever. For three weeks. Until his buddy let it slip he'd been seeing a girl of twenty-nine the whole last month we were together.

So when his production manager called me, I said yes before she finished the sentence.

I hauled my crates in through the loading door and there he was, Jake, standing by the rehearsal stage laughing with two guys from the lighting crew. He had a tan and a linen shirt and one of those laughs that goes on two beats longer than the joke deserves. Four years and my chest still did that stupid drop thing. Then it turned into heat, which I prefer.

"Beth," he said, coming over with his arms half open. "You came."

"You paid me to," I said. "That's the arrangement. Fifty percent deposit, cash."

"You always were all business." He grinned at me like nothing had happened, like I hadn't spent a winter of my life at forty-nine eating cereal for dinner and crying at dish soap commercials.

"And you always were full of it," I said, and walked past him to set up the buffet.

Cynthia Rees found me twenty minutes later while I was fighting with a tablecloth. She's fifty-four, wardrobe manager, been untangling messes on productions since before I knew her, and she looked at me the way she looks at a hem that's about to fail.

"You're up to something," she said.

"I'm up to feeding sixty people."

"You burned the chicken last month for the director who shortchanged your invoice. You don't burn chicken, Beth. That was a message."

"His contract had a clause. I had a match. That's just business."

Cynthia folded her arms. "Jake's table is where?"

"By the dock doors. Nice view of the canal."

"Oh no," she said. "Beth. What's by the canal?"

"Nothing," I said. "A kayak."

"A kayak."

"A vintage kayak. Very scenic. Decorative."

She stared at me and I stared back and she said, "I'm watching you," and went off to pin a boutonniere on somebody, which is Cynthia for I'm warning you and I love you and I'm not covering for you.

* * *

The kayak was moored at the little dock behind the warehouse, where the canal water sits green and flat and about four feet deep. I'd found it through a rental guy in town, a plywood 1950s tandem with a slow leak I'd personally encouraged with a pin. The plan, such as it was: during the party, Jake gets handed a drink and talked into a little celebratory paddle for photos. The kayak sinks. The great Jake Fuller, stunt legend, retires soaking wet in four feet of canal water while sixty people film it on their phones. Not criminal. Not dangerous. Just embarrassing, which is the currency he'd paid me in.

I was down on the dock crouched over the hull with my thumbnail over the pin hole when a voice behind me said, "That's a fifty-year-old boat and you're picking at it like a scab."

Rico Royce. Fifty-one, Black, Atlanta-born, stunt coordinator, built like a filing cabinet, the only man I've ever dated who left a relationship the normal way, that is, by talking. We went out three months when he was forty-seven and I was forty-nine. It ended with a handshake, more or less, because I was still raw from a divorce-adjacent disaster and he wanted more than I had in the tank. He'd been a friend ever since, the patient kind.

"Hey," I said. "You're early."

"Early for what?" He came down the dock steps and looked at the kayak, then at my thumbnail, then at my face, and I watched the whole thing assemble in his head. Rico reads stunts for a living. He reads setups. "Okay," he said slowly. "Okay, so. Whose kayak is this?"

"Rented."

"From who?"

"A guy in town."

"Beth." He crouched next to me and ran a hand along the seam. "There's a pin hole here, freshly opened, right at the waterline. You put it there." He wasn't asking.

"It's a slow leak," I said. "Four feet of water, Rico. He'd be wet and humiliated and completely safe. I even picked a life vest in his size."

"Whose party is this?"

"You know whose party this is."

"Jake." He said the name like it tasted bad. "You rented a boat to sink the man's retirement."

"He ghosted me. Four years ago. Three years in he started sleeping with a twenty-nine year old and instead of telling me he just went quiet and let me figure it out from his friend's drunk mouth at a wrap party."

"I know," Rico said. "I know you told me. I bought you dinner that week, remember."

"That was you being a friend. This is me being an adult about it."

"Caterers don't sabotage boats." He sat back on his heels. "You want to ruin his photos. You want him wet in front of the union guys and the producers and that little swimming pool of a canal. That's not an adult, Beth, that's a woman with a pin."

I stood up because sitting felt like losing. "You don't get to judge me. You weren't there. You don't know what it's like to find out from a drunk gaffer that the man you were buying curtains with has a girlfriend young enough to be his daughter."

"I'm not judging. I'm pricing."

That stopped me. "Pricing."

"For the leak." He tapped the hull twice. "I can fix this in ten minutes with marine epoxy, or I can leave it and help you time the sink so it happens in front of the cameras instead of ten feet out where nobody sees. Your plan has a flaw, by the way. The boat drifts. You sink him out past the pylon and the phones won't catch it. Amateur work."

"You're a stunt coordinator. Sabotage is your industry."

"It is, and we always have a rate card." He looked up at me from the dock planks, and the light was doing that evening thing it does here, all gold and low, and his face was doing something I couldn't file under business. "Here's my rate. Nothing. I fix the leak, no sinking, no stunt, and it costs you zero. That part is a favor, and it stands whatever you say next. The dinner is a separate question, and the answer can be no. Real dinner, not wrap-party plates. One dinner, if you want one."

"That's a smooth way to ask a woman out."

"It's the only way I know. I'm bad at the other kind."

"We tried the dinner thing, Rico. Three months, four years ago. You remember how that ended. I was a mess and you were patient and I kept waiting for you to get fed up and vanish like everyone else, and it made me crazy, so I ended it before you could."

"And how'd that work out for you?" He stood up, unhurried. "You went back to work and you've been alone ever since, and now you're on a dock with a pin and a grudge against a man who doesn't deserve a second of your rent money."

"That's not fair."

"No," he said. "It isn't. And I never stopped caring whether you eat dinner, that's the part you keep missing. Three months was your timeline, not my limit. I would've gone longer. I was going longer. You just quit first."

The water slapped the dock posts a couple times. Somewhere behind us inside the warehouse the band was soundchecking and Jake's laugh carried out over all of it.

"Yes to the dinner," I said finally. "And you fix the boat anyway and say nothing to anyone."

"And you don't tell Jake I fixed it, because he'll want to fight me at his own party and I'm too old for that."

"He's terrified of you."

"Good." Rico held out his hand and I shook it, which felt too formal and also exactly right. "Then dinner Sunday. There's a place up the coast, the one with the sardines you like."

"You remember the sardines?"

"Beth," he said, picking up the kayak by the bow like it weighed nothing. "I remember everything from those three months. That was sort of the problem."

Sunday came around and I drove up the coast with the windows down and my stomach doing things it had no business doing at fifty-three. The sardine place hadn't changed. Same blue chairs, same man grilling at the door, same smell of salt and charcoal.

Rico was already there, at the corner table, and he stood up when he saw me.

"You look nice," he said.

"I wore a dress. Don't make it a thing."

"It's a thing."

We ordered. He got the sardines for both of us without asking, which should have annoyed me and instead made something in my chest go loose.

For a while we talked about work, the band, Cynthia's ongoing war with the rental lighting company. Then he set his fork down and looked at me across the table.

"I regret how we ended," he said. "Every year since. You shook my hand like I was the guy who delivered the propane and I went home and sat in my truck for an hour."

"We agreed it was sensible."

"I don't agree to sensible things, Beth, I agree to you. That was my mistake, letting you call the shots when you were in one of your tails-up moods. I should have fought for it."

"I wasn't in a mood. I was bracing. You know what Jake did to me, and then there you were being kind and patient and I kept thinking, he's going to find out I'm this much work and leave, so I'll leave first and at least keep my dignity."

"Did it work? The dignity?"

I looked at my plate. "I've been alone most of the time since then. I cater parties for other people's love stories. I go home to a quiet house and a cat who only likes me when I open a can. That's the honest answer, Rico. I got lonely and I got used to it and then I got a pin and a grudge and a