Off-Season Reckoning

My name is Colleen, I'm twenty-three years old, and I live in a town so small that our biggest civic scandal last year was whether the bait shop could sell hats. So when I made the finals for the Cove Vision grant, you'd think people would've been happy for me. You'd think wrong.

Here's how it went down at the town hall last Tuesday. I got up in front of maybe forty people with my slides and my little laser pointer, and I pitched my plan for a modern visitor center, year-round events, the works. And it was going well, it really was, until a man in the third row stood up and read out some "facts" about my proposal that were flat-out lies. That my budget had a hole in it. That I'd already lined up an out-of-town developer. That I wasn't planning to stay in Sandpiper past the grant payout. Three years I've lived here, three years, and some guy I'd never seen before is reading fiction about me off a folded piece of paper like it's scripture.

I know who put him up to it. I've known Cade Marten since the week I moved here, we dated for two years, and we broke up six months ago when he found out I was entering the contest. He didn't yell. He just said, "Well. Guess I know where you stand," and left my cottage, and that ended it. But Cade's family has run the boatyard on the cove since before there was a road in, and half the town still calls his dad "Captain," and if anyone could find one friendly stranger to stand up and read lies on cue, it's him.

So I wrote him a note. I could've called. I could've knocked on the door of his workshop like a grown-up. But my hands were shaking and my pride was in pieces, and it's easier to be cruel on paper, isn't it. I wrote it at my kitchen table that night while the rain came down sideways, and in the morning I tucked it under the wiper of his truck outside the marina.

It said, in full: *Cade. Whoever that man was at the meeting, we both know who sent him. You couldn't beat my plan, so you tried to poison the room. You didn't even have the spine to do it yourself. I hope the grant committee sees you exactly the way I do now. Colleen.*

Short. Clean. Ugly, maybe, but I meant every word.

* * *

His reply showed up the next day, taped to my cottage door with blue painter's tape like he was hanging drywall, which, honestly, is very Cade. It was on the back of an old work order from the boatyard, and his handwriting is as bad as ever, all slanted caps reminiscent of a ransom note.

*Colleen. Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing about the leaflets. Oh, you didn't hear? Somebody's been stapling little flyers to the poles on Front Street about how my "arcade barn" will bring crime and rats. Cute word, rats. Here's the difference between us. My plan keeps the cove looking like the cove. Yours turns it into a tourist-trap mall with a lighthouse gift shop and a fudge counter, and you'd pave the crab flats for parking if the county let you. You want my vote? Try harder. Or better yet, go back to wherever it is people like you come from. Cade.*

I read it twice. I will state that up front, because the second read is where the trouble started, since the first read I was just angry, and the second read I was standing in my doorway with my coat half on and my chest getting warm in a way that had nothing to do with anger. He called my plan a tourist trap and I should have thrown the thing in the sink and burned it, but instead I caught myself smiling at "cute word, rats," and that annoyed me more than the insults did.

The arcade barn, by the way, is his whole vision, a restored cannery building where he wants to put old pinball machines and a boatbuilding school, because Cade thinks nostalgia is an economy. It's not, I should mention. It's a hobby with a grant application stapled to it.

So I sat down that same night and wrote him back, and I'd had exactly two glasses of the cheap pinot I like, and somewhere in the middle of the second glass the letter stopped being about pinball. I wrote it fast and I didn't cross anything out, which for me is basically a dare.

*Cade. I didn't staple anything to any poles, but keep going, you're almost interesting. You want to know what I think about when I read your notes? I think about the night the contest is finally over, whoever wins, and walking down to your workshop with nothing on the table but the two of us, and I think about what you'd do, and what I'd let you do. I think about you pinning me against that workbench full of sawdust and old brass fittings, your hand flat between my shoulder blades, and neither of us saying one civil word the whole time. Then I think about going home and never speaking to you again. Seems like the only part of your plan with any upside. Colleen.*

There. I put that in an envelope, sealed it, and in the morning I taped it to HIS door, my tape this time, and drove to work with my heart pounding, and I don't care if that's a cliché, it was.

* * *

Two days of nothing. I checked my door about forty times a day like an idiot. Then Sunday morning there it was, another work order, blue tape, and this one had a drawing on it, which I was not prepared for. The man can actually draw, which seems unfair. It was a rough pencil sketch of the town hall interior, the podium, and me, unmistakably me with my hair down my back, bent over the thing, and underneath it in those slanted caps: *Funny, I've had the same thought, only mine ends with you on your knees on the council floor, begging me to quit being right about everything. I'd give you that anyway. But you'd have to ask nicely, and you've never once asked me for anything. That was always your problem, Colleen. It was never the plans.*

I read it four times. Then I read it standing in front of the mirror while I brushed my hair, which tells you where