Off-Season Current

Yolanda's bus dropped her at the end of Paloma Bay's main street at four in the afternoon, and she stood there a minute with her duffel bag and her swim gear, listening to the rain come down. The town looked tired. Half the shops had plywood over the windows or handwritten signs saying they'd reopen in spring. It was exactly the kind of place she wanted. Nobody around, gray water, cold wind off the Pacific.

The Driftwood Inn sat two blocks off the sand, a long low building painted the color of sea foam, with a wide deck that stuck out toward the water on posts. Lukas was already out front under the awning when she came up the walk, wearing a flannel shirt and an expression she'd known for over thirty years.

"You look wet," he said.

"That's what rain does, Lukas. It's a whole thing."

He took the duffel off her shoulder before she could argue and carried it inside. Fifty-six years old and he still moved like he was forty, which annoyed her in a comfortable, familiar way. He'd bought this place two decades back, right after he'd walked away from his old career, and she had visited maybe six times since. This was the first time she'd stayed longer than a weekend.

"Month, right?" he said, setting the bag at the foot of the bed in the corner room upstairs. It faced the ocean. Of course it did. "I told you, no charge. Off-season I've got eleven empty rooms and a maid who comes twice a week. You're doing me a favor by filling one."

"You're doing me a favor and we both know it."

"Fine, we're mutually favoring each other. Shake."

They shook, which was dumb, and they both laughed at how dumb it was.

They'd met in graduate school when she was twenty-three and he was twenty-five, both of them broke and overworked, and they'd been friends ever since. Real friends, the kind where you could go two years without seeing each other and pick up mid-sentence. She'd never told him about the other thing, the quiet hum that showed up now and then when he stood too close or said something funny and she caught herself watching his mouth instead of listening. She figured he had no idea. She figured it was safer that way.

Her routine started the next morning. Up at five-thirty, coffee in the little kitchenette, down to the beach by six. The rain had eased to a drizzle and the water was cold and gray and perfect. She swam parallel to the shore for an hour, counting strokes, thinking about the open-water marathon she'd signed up for in April. Fifty-four years old and training for a ten-mile swim, which her doctor called ambitious and her ex-husband would have called insane, which was part of why he was her ex.

Lukas was on the deck with a mug when she came up out of the water, hair plastered to her head, wetsuit half peeled.

"How was it?"

"Freezing and great."

"You're a lunatic."

"I'm a professional lunatic. There's a difference and it's about four hundred training hours."

Dinner that night was on the deck, under the big heat lamp he'd rigged up, because the rain had quit and the sky had gone that soft purple it does over the ocean in February. He made pasta with clams, because he always made pasta with clams when she visited, and there was bread and half a bottle of white wine, which she mostly drank because he mostly cooked.

He had his reading glasses on and was squinting at a notebook she'd left on the table.

"Is this the training log?" he said. "Yolanda, there are graphs."

"There are not graphs."

"There is absolutely a graph. You graphed your resting heart rate. By week. With little dots."

"The little dots are motivational."

"Who is motivating whom? Are the dots motivating you or are they judging you?"

"Both, honestly." She reached over and he pulled the notebook away, holding it up like a hostage. "Lukas, give it."

"Tell me about the little dots."

"The little dots are my resting heart rate and they're trending down, which means I'm getting fitter, which means give it."

He gave it back, grinning. He had that quality. He'd tease and then quit the second you actually wanted him to. Twenty years running a hotel in a dying beach town had made him patient in a way that used to drive her crazy in grad school and now just made her feel calm, as if the whole world had slowed down to his speed.

"I notice you're not teasing me about the driftwood," she said, pointing her fork at the corner of the deck. He had driftwood everywhere. Driftwood on shelves, driftwood leaning in the stairwell, a piece the size of a surfboard mounted above the front desk like it was art. Some of it was art. Some of it was just a stick.

"Hey. The driftwood is a legitimate collection."

"You pick up sticks on the beach, Lukas. You're a dog."

"I curate sticks. There's a difference and it's about four hundred training hours." He was laughing into his wine. "Every piece has a shape. I have to walk past a hundred boring ones to find the good one."

"What makes a stick good?"

"Can't explain it. You know it when you see it."

"Uh huh. That's what everyone says about art and nobody can back it up."

"You'll see one someday and you'll get it," he said, and something in how he said it made her look at her plate for a second. She hated when he did that. Said a normal sentence that landed somewhere it didn't need to land.

The rain came back on a Tuesday and it came back mean, a real storm, the kind that flattened the ocean and made the windows rattle. No swim that morning. She did her stretching in her room, drank too much coffee, and by two in the afternoon she was pacing the empty lobby like a zoo animal while rain hammered the deck.

Lukas appeared from the office with a deck of cards and a look on his face.

"Okay. You're annoying me and you've been here four days. Sit down."

"I'm annoying you?"

"Your pacing. The floor above my office creaks. Sit down, we're playing cards."

He cleared the front desk with one forearm and dealt them out at a small table by the window. Old game, the one they'd played in the grad school lounge, cutthroat and dumb. The stakes started as pennies from the dish by the register and escalated fast.

"Okay, new rule," Lukas said, shuffling. "Winner of each hand picks one thing the loser has to do tomorrow. An activity. Nothing evil."

"Define evil."

"Like, if I win, I make you take a rest day instead of swimming ten miles in a storm."

"That's evil disguised as care. Fine. And if I win, you have to come down to the beach and time my intervals like a real coach, in the rain, holding a stopwatch like a chump."

"Done."

She took the first hand and made him carry all the deck chairs inside from the storm deck, which he did while narrating his own suffering. He took the second and made her sit through thirty minutes of a documentary about lighthouse maintenance, which was somehow worse than it sounds. He took the third. She took the fourth, and by the fifth the light outside had gone blue and dark and the rain hadn't let up at all, and they'd stopped keeping real score because they were both losing count and neither of them cared.

"You know what your problem is?" he said, dealing again. "You can't stand not moving. A storm keeps you out of the water for one day and you're climbing the walls."

"My problem is I have a race in April and one lazy friend with a hotel full of empty rooms."

"The empty rooms are the point. Off-season. Quiet. You picked the quiet."

She picked up her cards and looked at them and did not see them. What she was actually thinking was that the room felt different tonight, and it wasn't the storm. It was that she'd been here four days and every day had ended exactly like this, the two of them at some table, close enough that his knee had been bumping hers for the last hour, and neither of them had moved it.

She'd spent thirty-one years not moving that kind of thing along. She was starting to wonder what for.

"Your deal," he said. "Yolanda. Your deal."

"Sorry. Zoned out. Deal."

Lukas took the next hand too, and he didn't even gloat about the cards. He just laid them down, leaned back, and looked at her with the face of a man about to name a terrible prize.

"Okay," he said. "You have to let me teach you how to dance."

"In the lobby."

"In the lobby."

"There's no music!"

"There's a radio behind the desk. It gets one station and half the time it's weather."

"That sounds like the worst dance lesson in history."

"It's the only one you're getting. Rules are rules." He was already up, digging behind the desk, and came out with an old silver radio that had a coat hanger jammed into the antenna slot. He fiddled with it and got the station, which was playing some slow thing with a saxophone in it, half buried in static. Then he pushed the table with the cards on it out of the way and stood in the middle of the lobby like an idiot, hand out.

Yolanda stayed in her chair. "Lukas. I've known you for thirty-one years. You have never once seen me dance. There's a reason."

"I know the reason. You think you're bad at it. Everybody thinks they're bad at it. Come on, you lost the hand."

She got up, mostly because it was easier than arguing, and put her hand in his. He pulled her in the way a dance instructor would, one hand in hers, the other at her back, and she noticed immediately that this was closer than the two of them had ever stood on purpose. She could smell rain on his flannel. He started moving, this simple two-step, and counted