The Anchor Chain

I've been stretching on the pier at dawn for six years now, ever since the co-op put that wooden platform on the end and some yoga teacher from St. Anthony talked us into morning classes. Most days it's just me, the gulls, and the fog rolling off the Strait of Belle Isle. This particular morning in early September there was a man standing at the landward end of the pier with a rolled-up mat under his arm, like he wasn't sure he was allowed to walk any farther.

I'm fifty-two. I run the fish processing co-op here in Forteau Bay, which mostly means I argue with freezers and fill out federal paperwork, and I do my stretching before work because once the day starts it doesn't stop. I looked the man over. Tall, grey going on white at the temples, good shoulders under a windbreaker. Something about the way he stood with his weight back on his heels rang a bell I couldn't place.

"You can come out," I said. "The platform holds four trucks. It can hold you."

He laughed and came out on the boards. Up close it hit me all at once, the conference in St. John's, twenty-four years ago. I was twenty-eight, newly in charge of the co-op's books, and there was a visiting engineer, single, funny in a dry way, who sat next to me through three days of sessions on cold-chain logistics. Leo. We talked at every coffee break and once nearly missed a session because the conversation was better than the session.

"Leo," I said, before I could stop myself. "Leo from the conference. The one who explained brine tanks to me twice."

He stopped mid-step and stared at me. "Marcy. Marcy from the co-op. You remembered the brine tanks."

"Nobody else ever explained them to me at all. I'd have been lost."

We did the whole thing then, the laughing at the coincidence, the asking how long, the where are you living now. He was fifty-four, he said, and renting a room in a house up over the ferry dock for three months while he worked remote for a Toronto firm. Liquidity stress tests for banks, which sounded like a punishment. I told him I managed the co-op and he said he'd read about us in a trade journal, which was either flattery or true, and I decided I didn't care which.

We spread our mats with a polite gap between them and did our stretches. I'll admit I spent more of that hour watching him in the corner of my eye than watching the sunrise. He was stiff in the hamstrings and honest about it, groaning into a forward fold and saying the desk had won. It was comfortable, is the thing. Twenty-four years and a whole life each in between, and it was comfortable inside of ten minutes.

Afterward we stood at the rail while the fog burned off the water. The ferry was tied up at the dock, the little one that runs the crossing, and he nodded at it.

"I've been here two weeks," he said. "I keep meaning to ask somebody about good hiking. The trail up over the headland, is it worth it?"

"It's worth it. Steep at the start and then easy. You get the whole bay from the top."

"I'd hate to get lost on it."

"You won't get lost. There's one trail. It goes up and then it goes down." I hesitated, and then I didn't. "Give me your phone. I'll put my number in and text you the turnoff where the old path leaves the road. Saves you walking past the dump."

He handed it over without any fuss, which I appreciated. Some men your age make a production of it. He typed his number into my phone while I typed mine into his, and we said our good mornings and went our separate ways, him up the hill toward his rental and me toward the co-op and a morning of arguing with a freezer compressor that had been making a noise since August.

* * *

He texted me that evening. Just the turnoff confirmation, thank you very much, see, official business. Then the next morning a photo of a ptarmigan on the trail with the message that it had let him get within six feet, which he took as a personal compliment. I sent back that the ptarmigan had clearly never met a man from Toronto before and was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

It went on like that all week. Morning texts, evening texts, nothing in them you'd raise an eyebrow at if anyone read them over my shoulder, except that I was checking my phone the way I hadn't checked it since I was thirty, and I know he was doing the same because once I texted at nine at night and he replied in under a minute.

Thursday the ferry broke loose. The anchor chain, rusted through where nobody had looked at it in years, parted clean, and the ferry drifted with nobody aboard toward the shipping lane before the coast guard launch got a line on her. Leo was up on the headland finishing his hike when it happened and got a photo of the whole thing, the ferry sitting sideways in the channel with two boats fussing around her like hens.

He sent it to me at noon. "Saw this from the trail. Everyone fine but the chain is at the bottom of the bay. Your ferry's having a worse week than me."

I was at work, so I sent back a photo of the gadget I'd been using all morning, a pyroelectric detector, a little handheld thing we aim at walls to find heat leaks in the cold storage. Black box with a sensor eye and a readout, older than some of my staff.

"This is my sexiest office tool," I typed. "Pyroelectric detector. Finds heat leaks. In certain lights it makes me feel like a spy."

"That's the sexiest office tool you own?"

"It's the only office tool I own that anyone's ever called sexy. I called it that. Just now. You're witnessing history."

"I'm saving the photo. For the detector, obviously."

"Obviously."

I put the phone in my pocket and stood in the cold storage grinning like a fool at a wall of frozen mackerel. Fifty-two years old. I'd been married once, long done, no kids, a quiet life I liked, and here I was grinning at fish because a man I'd known for one week had called my heat detector photogenic.

* * *

We met for coffee at the diner on Saturday. Not a date, we'd both said, just coffee, which is the oldest lie in the book and we both knew it. The diner was half full of people I've known all my life, so we took the booth by the window where nobody lingers, and Deb behind the counter brought two coffees and gave me a look I'll be hearing about later.

We talked about nothing for a while. His work, my work, the ferry sitting at the dock in St. Anthony getting a new chain welded. Then somehow we were back at the conference. The closing party, the hotel bar with the terrible jazz trio, the two of us in the corner by the window talking until the waiters started stacking chairs around us.

"I thought about that night for years," I said, into my coffee more than at him. "I'll say it now since we're old enough to say things. I almost kissed you at that party. Right at the end, when they turned the lights up. I talked myself out of it. You were leaving in the morning and I told myself it was smarter not to."

He set his cup down slow. "Marcy. I've been wishing for twenty-four years that you had."

"That's a ridiculous thing to say."

"It's true anyway. I went home to Toronto and I told a friend of mine about a woman at a conference who laughed at my jokes like she meant them, and I checked the co-op's website maybe twice a year for a decade. My brother thought I'd lost my mind." He turned his cup around on the saucer. "When the contract came through and the map said Forteau Bay, I looked you up before I looked up the rental. Found your name on the co-op page. Told myself it was a coincidence I said yes to the contract."

"Was it?"

"No!"

Well. Deb came around with the pot and topped us up and asked Leo if he was finding everything all right in the Bay, and he said yes ma'am, and we sat quiet a minute after she moved off. Through the window I could see the empty spot at the dock where the ferry should have been.

"The trail," I said. "Did you find the turnoff all right?"

"Found it. You never did say how far up the headland the view starts."

"About forty minutes. There's a bench at the top some volunteer put there. Good spot for looking at a broken ferry, apparently."

"Best view I've had in Newfoundland," he said, and the way he said it, not looking at the window at all but at me, made my ears go hot.

I stirred my coffee even though I hadn't put anything in it. Outside, a gull landed on the ferry dock pilings and screamed at the harbor like it was personally offended by the missing boat.

"Leo," I said. "I'm not twenty-eight anymore. I don't do the talk-myself-out-of-it thing these days. Costs too much time."

"And what would you do instead?"

"I'd say come by the house sometime. I've got a view of the bay and a bottle of red I've been saving for no particular reason."

"That sounds like a date."

"It might be. Are you going to argue?"

"No ma'am," he said, and laughed, and under the table his knee found mine and stayed there until Deb came back and we both sat up like a couple of kids caught passing notes.

The next Thursday the ferry was still laid up in St. Anthony, so the harbor stayed quiet and the water sat flat all evening. I went out to the platform after supper like I do some nights, just to stand in it, and when I got up there Leo was already there, sitting on the edge with his shoes off.

"You're hogging my pier," I said.

"Renting it from you, technically. The co-op owns it." He moved over and I sat down beside him. The sun was going down behind the Quebec side and the water was doing that thing it does, going silver and then