Raffle Ticket

Let me explain what a customs broker does, because when I tell people at parties they nod and then their eyes slide off to the snack table. I sit in an office in Halifax and I make sure cargo clears customs without a hitch. Forms, tariffs, codes, more forms. It sounds dull and mostly it is, but it pays well and nobody dies, and twice a year I get to say the phrase "temporary admission of goods" out loud and feel like a wizard.

I'm Douglas, twenty-four years old, and I've been with Keith for eighteen months now. Keith is twenty-six and he's a harbor pilot, which means he climbs a rope ladder down the side of enormous ships and steers them into port. He does this in all weather, at all hours, and comes home smelling like diesel about half the time. He loves it the way I love finding a mistake in a tariff schedule before it costs somebody forty grand.

We met two years ago at the harbor pilot station's holiday party. I was there because one of the pilots, Charles, had hired my firm and decided I needed to see the operation firsthand, and also because Charles doesn't go to parties alone, ever. I was standing by the food table holding a paper plate I had already overfilled when this tall guy in a sweater came up next to me and said, "Careful with the meatballs, they're the first thing to go and you'll regret it."

He was right. I regretted it. We talked for two hours by that table, mostly about how the station's coffee machine had been broken since spring and nobody could agree on a replacement. He asked for my number at the door and I said yes so fast I nearly bit my tongue. We started dating six months later, once I stopped being nervous about it. Well, once I stopped being nervous most of it.

Anniversaries matter to Keith. Not in a demanding way, but he keeps track. He'll say a thing like, "Two years ago today you called me from the ferry just to tell me about a seal," and he means it warmly, and it makes me want to do things back. So this year, for midsummer, I decided to plan a bonfire on the little private beach near the pilot station where we'd had our first real date. Just the two of us, a fire, wine in a thermos, the works.

Then, the day before the bonfire, I walked past the church hall on Water Street and there was a folding table outside with a hand-painted banner. RAFFLE. PRIZES INCLUDE A HAM AND A HAND-KNITTED BLANKET. An older woman with reading glasses on a chain sat behind it looking bored out of her mind.

Now, here is where I have to admit my judgment got a bit loose. Because I looked at that banner and thought, Keith is going to love this. Not the ham. The idea. A raffle ticket. A goofy, three-dollar raffle ticket from a church booth, given as an anniversary gift, because it's funny and it's us and it's the kind of thing nobody else would think of. I imagined him laughing. I imagined him keeping it in his wallet forever. I walked up to the table.

"Can I buy one of those?"

The woman looked up. "Which prize do you fancy, dear? The ham or the blanket?"

"Doesn't matter. Whatever's behind door number two."

"You have to pick a number," she said, and tapped a roll of pink tickets with her finger. "I'm not choosing for you. Last time I chose for a man he ended up with the blanket and blamed me for his marriage."

I laughed and picked one at random. Ticket number 47. Three dollars. She wrote my name on the stub in careful ballpoint and said, "Drawing's Saturday afternoon, but you needn't be present, we'll ring you." And I walked away feeling like the most clever man in Nova Scotia.

To be honest about the rest of that afternoon: I told basically everyone. I told the girl at the coffee shop. I texted my sister, who replied with six laughing faces and the words "he's going to marry you, you dork." I even told Charles, who said, "A raffle ticket? For an anniversary?" in a tone I chose to ignore.

Keith came home that evening at seven, tired from piloting a tanker in from the anchorage. The Margaree Star, some panamax thing, and he'd been up since four. He came through the door with his bag over one shoulder and his hair flattened by the wind and said, "Hello, love. I have been awake since before the birds and I would like to sit down for approximately the rest of my life."

"You can sit down," I said, "but first I have your anniversary present."

He stopped halfway through taking off his boots. "It's not the anniversary until Saturday."

"I know. I'm bad at waiting. Hold out your hand."

He held out his hand, looking wary the way he does when I'm grinning too hard. I put the pink ticket in his palm. Ticket 47, Church of Saint Aldhelm Summer Raffle. First prize: one ham.

He looked at it. He looked at it for a while, actually, and I watched the amusement I'd been picturing all day fail to arrive on his face.

"A raffle ticket," he said.

"From the church! On Water Street! The ham, Keith. Or the blanket. We could win the blanket."

"It's a raffle ticket."

"Well, yeah, that's the joke, it's..."

He sat down on the arm of the couch. He still had his boots half off. "Douglas. I've been up since four in the morning driving a ship the size of a small town through fog. I came home thinking maybe we'd order food. And my anniversary present is a three dollar ticket to win a ham I can't even eat, because you know ham makes me feel sick."

"You could regift it."

"Could I."

That's when the bottom dropped out of my cleverness a little. Because I had spent the whole day picturing this moment and in my version he laughed, and in the actual version he was rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand like the light hurt.

"Okay, wait," I said. "I maybe messed up the timing. Sit down, take your boots off, and let me explain the actual plan, because the ticket isn't the present."

He took his boots off slowly and sat properly on the couch. "Go on."

"The present is tomorrow. Midsummer. I booked the little beach past the station, the one where we had our first date. Firewood's in the trunk of my car right now. There's a thermos. There were going to be s'mores but I couldn't find the good crackers, so there are ordinary crackers. And I bought the ticket today thinking I'd give it to you at the fire, and you'd laugh, and it would be this goofy little thing just for us, and then tonight you came home early and I got excited and ruined the surprise. That's it. That is the whole plan. The ticket was supposed to be a bit, not the gift."

He was quiet for a second. "The beach."

"The beach."

"With the flat rock that's warm until midnight."

"That's the one."

He tipped his head back against the couch and laughed, one long breath of it, tired and real. "God. Okay. I'm an idiot. I just, I got on a ladder at five this morning in the fog and I had salt spray in my mouth for six hours and I thought you'd lost the plot."

"You thought I gave you a ham ticket as a serious gift."

"I briefly did, yes. I was trying to figure out how to be gracious about a ham."

"You were not gracious about a ham."

"No," he said, and reached over and took my hand. "I'm sorry, love. That's a good plan. That's a really good plan. Come here."

I came around the couch and he pulled me down next to him and I ended up half across his lap with his chin on top of my head, and we sat like that while he told me about the tanker, the fog, the mate who'd dropped a radio in a puddle. The whole time I kept the pink ticket in my pocket, planning to bring it out again tomorrow at the fire, when he was rested and fed and the rock was still warm.

I got it right in my head this time. Mostly.

The next day Keith slept until noon and I puttered around the apartment trying not to wake him, which mostly meant I read the same page of a book four times and then gave up and stacked the firewood by the door in what I felt was an artistic arrangement. At two he shuffled out in his socks and said, "Is that my dinner?" pointing at the wood.

"It's fuel. For fire. For tonight."

"Right, tonight." He came over and kissed the top of my head. "I'm looking forward to it. Genuinely. I want you to know that even though I'm moving like a man made of wet sand."

We ate sandwiches and he dozed on the couch for another hour and by six the light had gone all gold and long the way it does here in midsummer, where it barely gets dark at all and you have to stay up late on purpose to see any stars. We loaded the wood in the trunk and drove out past the station, down the gravel track to the little beach. The air coming off the water was cool even with the sun up, salt-tinged, and Keith leaned out