Sandbar Confessions

The plan was simple, drive onto the ferry at Port David, ride across the lake, unload a sled at my apartment, and pretend the whole day had been ordinary. Nothing about the day had been ordinary, and the ferry part was about to get a lot less ordinary, but I didn't know that yet. I'm Velma Hahn, twenty-eight years old, an elevator mechanic by trade, which means I get paid to argue with machinery that always thinks it's right. Nichole Granger, who is twenty-eight and has been my best friend since we were both twenty-two and miserable at a trade school mixer, was in the passenger seat of my truck watching me pay the ferry fare and trying very hard not to laugh.

"I can't believe you bought that sled," she said as I pulled onto the deck and set the brake.

"It's a good sled."

"It's a terrible sled. I priced it at forty dollars out of spite because I didn't want to deal with it, and you paid forty dollars out of spite because you don't like losing."

"Then we both got what we wanted," I said, "which is more than most people can say at the end of a Saturday."

The sled was wedged in the bed of my truck under two ratchet straps and a moving blanket, and it was, I will admit, ugly. It was one of those old wooden runner sleds with the iron rails and the paint gone to gray, the kind of thing that looks great in a farmhouse catalog and terrible in the bed of a 2014 F-150 at eleven at night. I had bought it four hours earlier at the estate sale Nichole ran for her grandmother's house, an event she had been dreading for two months and I had been dreading for her.

"Forty dollars," Nichole said again, like a hymn.

"Your grandmother owned that sled for sixty years. You priced it at forty, I paid forty, the estate is forty dollars richer, and I'm happy. Everybody wins."

"Except the sled. It wanted to stay."

"Sleds don't want things, Nichole."

"This one did. It had a personality. It was ornery."

I looked at her. She was doing the thing she does when she's sad and doesn't want anybody to see it, which is talk about objects like they're people so she can have feelings about them at a safe distance. I've known her long enough to spot it from across a room. I let it go, because that's also something I've learned, and because there's only so much a person can say on a ferry deck with diesel running.

The sale had gone fine, actually, better than fine. She'd cleared most of the house over the weekend, and what was left was boxes and the sled and a porch full of things nobody wanted at any price. I'd shown up at noon to help carry stuff, which was the arrangement, and stayed until seven, which was not the arrangement but is what happens when the two of us are in the same room with heavy objects and opinions. We argued about whether a butter churn was worth thirty dollars. We argued about whether her grandmother's coffee mugs should be sold as a set or individually. We argued about a lamp for twenty minutes. That's our whole relationship, honestly, six years of arguing about things neither of us cares about because it's easier than talking about things we do.

"You know what your problem is," Nichole said now, as the ferry loader waved us forward and I crept the truck into position on the deck, "you can't stand an unpriced item. You see a table with no tag on it and you physically suffer."

"That's true. It's a job hazard. I price elevators all day."

"Nobody prices elevators, Velma, elevators come with contracts."

"Everything comes with a contract if you're brave enough."

She laughed at that, a real one, and I felt stupidly pleased about it, which I noticed and then decided not to notice. The deck hands chocked my tires and pointed at the chain, and I got out to hook it, and Nichole got out too, because she never lets me do a two-person job alone, even a two-person job that is actually a one-person job. She was wearing that green coat she's had since before I met her and a knit hat with a moose on it, and the ferry's lights were doing that sodium orange thing on the water, and I caught myself looking and made myself stop.

"Third crossing tonight," the deck hand said. "Cold one."

"Coldest yet," Nichole agreed, and got back in.

The ferry pulled out around eleven fifteen, and it's a long crossing, forty minutes or so, and normally I like it, the engine throb and the dark water and the handful of other night people scattered around the deck. There were three other vehicles, a bread truck, a Subaru with a sleeping college kid in it, and some guy in a sedan who was on his phone the whole time. Nichole had her boots up on my dash before we were a hundred yards out, which is against two separate rules of mine, and I let it happen, which is against a third.

"So," she said. "You want to talk about Jo?"

"Nope."

"Okay."

"She texted me a paragraph today. A whole paragraph. Nine sentences."

"Was the ninth sentence the bad one?"

"The ninth sentence was 'I wish you well,' which is the worst one. That's the one you send a coworker."

Nichole nodded and looked out at the water, and for a while neither of us said anything, which for us counts as a whole conversation. The truth was I'd broken up with Jo eight days ago and it had been my idea and mostly a good one and I still felt like a tire with a slow leak about it. Nichole knew all of that without me saying it, because she'd been on the phone with me for three of those eight nights, and the estate sale had been a good excuse for both of us to be around somebody.

"Thanks for coming today," she said. "For carrying stuff. And for buying the stupid sled."

"It's a good sled."

"It's a terrible sled and you know it."

"I know it's forty dollars of mine now, is what I know."

She grinned and dug in her coat pocket and came out with a roll of wintergreen Lifesavers, which she has carried for the six years I've known her, and offered me one, and I took one, and that constituted the entire ceremony of us being us. The ferry ran steady. I watched the lights of the Vermont shore way off and thought about how the sled was going to sit in my apartment and hold nothing, and how I'd probably keep it anyway.

Then the ferry shuddered.

It wasn't dramatic at first. It was the sound of the engines changing pitch, going from that steady throb to something straining, and then the whole deck tilted just a little, maybe a degree, maybe less, and the truck rocked on its springs, and Nichole took her boots off my dash.

"What was that," she said.

"I don't know. Sandbar, maybe."

"Sandbars aren't a thing in the middle of a lake."

"They're a thing at the ends of lakes, which is where we are."

The engines stopped altogether then, and the silence was worse than the shudder, and a minute later the PA crackled on with the captain, a woman's voice, tired in a way that told me this was not the first time she'd made this announcement. Folks, she said, we've touched bottom on the shoal off Port David, we're not in any danger, the boat is stable, but the tide and the dispatch have us sitting here until first light, when a tow can come out of Burlington. Apologies for the delay. Please stay in your vehicles or in the passenger cabin, there's coffee in the cabin, it's not good coffee.

"Until first light," Nichole said.

"Until first light."

"That's five hours."

"It's six, actually, sunrise is at five forty-something this time of year, I checked it for work last week."

"Velma."

"Yeah."

"We're stuck on a sandbar in your truck with a sled and wintergreen Lifesavers for six hours."

I turned the engine off and pulled my jacket from behind the seat and tried to feel annoyed about it and couldn't quite get there, which should have told me something right then, if I'd been paying attention.

"Well," I said, "at least the coffee's bad."

* * *

We sat in the cab for about twenty minutes with the heater ticking and the radio off, and then Nichole said she was going to stretch her legs and I said I'd come too because sitting in a stopped truck on a stopped ferry in the dark is the kind of thing that makes a person start thinking, and thinking was not on my list of activities for the night. The deck was cold enough that my breath showed, and the deck lights made little orange pools every twenty feet or so, and the water off the sides was flat and black and close. The guy in the sedan was still on his phone, pacing a tight little circle like a dog on a chain, and the sleeping kid in the Subaru hadn't moved.

Nichole walked over to the sled, which was lashed down in the bed of my truck with two ratchet straps I'd borrowed from her grandmother's garage, because apparently the estate sale included the ratchet straps and apparently I'd said yes to that too. She looked at it for a while with her hands in her green coat pockets and her moose hat pulled down over her ears, and then she said, "You know this sled sat in Grandma's barn for sixty years, right. She pulled kids on it. It was never for sale, I just put a tag on it because you kept staring at it."

"I wasn't staring at it."

"Velma, you stared at it so hard I had to invent a price."

I laughed, and the laugh came out bigger than the joke deserved, which happens when you're tired and cold and a little sad and your best friend knows how to make you do it anyway. And then she said, "Okay, new idea, since we've got six hours and nothing to do," and she unhooked one strap and swung herself up onto the sled, sitting cross-legged on the gray slats like it was a throne, and I want to note here that she's twenty-eight and did it as smoothly as anything, no stiffness, no wobble, just up and settled like a cat on a fence.

"What are you doing," I said.

"It's a game. Sled truths. You sit on the sled, I ask you a question, you answer it honest, and then we trade. Nobody gets off the sled until they've answered."

"That's not a game, that's an ambush with furniture."

"It's an ambush with a sled, and it's the only entertainment on this boat that isn't bad coffee or a man on a phone. Get up here."

I should have said no. I want that stated plainly, because the whole rest of the night came out of that sled, and I could have just stayed at the rail and looked at the water and kept my slow leak to myself. But it was cold and I was tired and it's Nichole, and there has never once been a thing she's dared me to that I haven't done, going back to the trade school mixer six years ago where she bet me a plate of crackers I wouldn't introduce myself to the entire hydraulics table. I did it. I got the crackers too.

So I climbed up and sat on the sled and she stood over me with her arms folded and the deck light catching the moose on her hat, and she said, "First question. Why'd you really break up with Jo?"

"Nichole."

"Rules are rules. Honest answer."

I looked out at the black water, and I did the thing where you try to find a smaller version of the truth to hand over, and then I thought about the nine sentences and the ninth one, and I didn't want to hand her the small version. "I was bored," I said. "And lonely, which is a stupid thing to be inside a relationship, that's supposed to be the one place you're not. But that's it. She was fine. She was great, actually, she never did anything wrong, and I kept sitting across from her at dinner thinking, I've got nothing to say and I'm going to have something to say someday and it won't be to her. That's a rotten reason to leave somebody."

"Is it?"

"Feels like one."

"It sounds like an honest one," Nichole said, and she didn't do the thing people do where they rush to tell you you're not a monster, she just let it sit there, and I don't know why that hit harder than comfort would have. "My turn to ask a follow-up is not allowed, by the way, I made that rule just now."

"You can't make rules up as you go."

"It's my sled. My grandma's sled. House rules." She hopped off and waved me off the slats, and I took my turn standing, and I asked her whether she was glad the sale was over, and she said yes and no, mostly yes, she'd been dreading it for two months and now the dreading was over and what was left was just boxes and a barn and a lot of quiet, and she said all of that