The Anniversary Dive

The dive boat was supposed to be my treat to myself. Ten days in Greece, alone on purpose, and I had talked myself into believing that was a fine way to turn fifty-two. I am a chef, and chefs do not get vacations, so when I finally got one I booked the first boat that promised water and silence. The Triton Marina was not much to look at, a strip of cracked concrete and a row of fishing boats, but the sea was blue enough to make a person forgive anything.

I climbed aboard with my gear bag over my shoulder and the familiar little ache in my chest that shows up when I travel. I have been single by choice for a decade now. I ended things with a fellow chef when I was forty-two and it was friendly and quiet, like closing a restaurant at the end of a slow night. Since then I have told everybody, including myself, that I am fine. Most days I am. Some days, standing on a boat deck in a wet suit I still had not zipped all the way, I am less fine than I let on.

"Cheri? Cheri from the Copper Line?"

I turned around and there was a man I half knew, squinting at me in the sun. Callum. He had done sound on some project my friend Marta worked on, and we had all drinks two years ago at a bar in a part of town I never go to anymore. He was forty-five now, I figured, and his hair had gone more gray at the temples, but he had the same easy slouch.

"Callum, right? Sound guy?"

"The same." He laughed and shook my hand. "Marta said you had a restaurant. I have been eating sad hotel food for a month and thinking about that, honestly."

"It's still there. Still small, still loud." I zipped the wet suit up to my ribs and gave up on the rest. "What are you doing here? Working?"

"There's a film shooting up the coast. Sound mixer days are long, so I talked the boat office into giving me a day off and put me on this thing." He looked out at the water. "First day off in six weeks. I feel like a dog let out of a fence."

We did that awkward thing where two people who met once talk like they might be friends. He asked about the restaurant and I told him about the new menu and the walk-in freezer that dies every August. I asked about his work and he talked about boom poles and wind covers and a director who whispered all his lines so the actors could not hear them. I laughed more than I expected to. But under the laughing there was that other thing, the lonely thing, and I kept noticing it like a pan heating up on a back burner.

The crew called the safety briefing and we all shuffled toward the bow. That was when a woman came up the gangway hauling two dive bags, one in each hand, and a man followed her carrying nothing at all except a bouquet of wrapped flowers from a gas station.

"Two more for the morning dive?" the deckhand asked, and the woman nodded.

They came and stood near us. The woman looked to be in her mid thirties, sunburned across the nose, with the kind of smile that gets switched on for strangers and switched right back off. The man was younger by a couple years maybe, tall, holding the flowers out in front of him as if offering peace to nobody.

"Anniversary," the woman said, to nobody in particular, rolling her eyes in a way that was half joke and half something else.

"Congratulations," I said.

"We're Corinne and Jim." She stuck out her hand. Her grip was firm. "This year Jim decided to surprise me."

"I flew in two days early," Jim said, and I noticed right away that he said it too loudly, like he was still explaining it to her. "Booked the dinner at that place in the marina. Candles, everything. She found out this morning instead of tonight."

"You told the restaurant my name and they told the dive office and the dive office told me," Corinne said. "That's not a surprise, that's a leak."

"I wanted it to be good."

"It would have been good if it had been a surprise."

They stood there in the small terrible silence that married couples can make and single people only get to witness. Callum looked at me sideways. I looked at the flowers. Gas station flowers, carnations and one sad blue thing.

"Cheri's a chef," Callum offered, into the silence, like a man tossing a rope to two drowning people. "Real one. Owns a restaurant."

That worked, a little. Jim's face lifted. "Really? We never get to talk to an actual chef. Corinne, didn't you used to cook?"

"Before you burnt the one pan we owned," she said, and then she caught herself and smiled the stranger smile again. "Sorry. We're having a weird week."

"It happens," I said. "You want a weird week story? My freezer compressor died during a heat wave and I served three days of everything braised because I refused to throw out a single lamb shoulder."

Corinne laughed, a real laugh this time, quick and surprised out of her. "That's terrible."

"That's August," I said.

The briefing ended and the crew started checking tanks. I noticed Jim kept trying to hand Corinne the flowers and she kept not taking them, and I noticed how she finally set them down on the bench next to her bag with a gentleness that did not match anything she had said. I noticed it because I have spent thirty years watching people in dining rooms, couples on dates, couples on anniversaries, and you learn to read the space between two chairs.

The first dive was fine. Fish, rocks, a wreck with an eel in it, the usual. My ears cleared easy and for forty minutes there was nothing in the world except water and my own breathing, and I want to tell you, that is the closest thing I know to being unmarried and happy about it. Callum turned out to be a decent diver, flailing a little at the start and then settling in. Corinne swam like she had grown up in a pool, all shoulders and speed. Jim stayed near her the whole time, close enough to grab her fin if she looked back, and she did not look back once.

We came up and ate sandwiches on the aft deck that tasted like sunscreen, which is correct, that is how boat sandwiches should taste. Then we motored out for the second site and that was when the engine made a sound no engine should ever make. A clang, then a grind, then nothing but water slapping the hull.

The crew went below. We sat in the sun drifting. An hour went by. Then two. The captain came up wiping his hands with a rag and told us the transfer was done and the second dive was off and they were calling a tow, and by the way, the tow was busy.

"So we just sit here?" Jim asked.

"We go back on the ferry boat when it comes, or we wait," the captain said. "Company will sort out lodging if it's late. Not the first time."

"Unbelievable," Corinne said, but she said it quietly, almost to herself, and she was looking at the water and not at Jim.

The ferry came at six and dropped us at a dock a mile from where we started, near a motel with a faded sign that said The Triton, letters missing, the T flickering. The dive company had a block of rooms held for exactly this kind of disaster, and exactly this kind of disaster had drained the block down to one room with two double beds and a pullout couch, because there was some fishing tournament in town and every other roof on the coast was taken.

"We can split up," Callum said in the parking lot, low, just to me. "There's probably a room in the next town, I could walk."

"There's nothing in the next town, I looked at the map on the boat." I shrugged. "It's one night. I've slept in worse. I slept in a walk-in freezer once during a renovation, but that's a long story."

"Cheri slept in a cooler," Callum told the other two, and Jim laughed and Corinne almost did.

There was a vending machine humming by the office and it sold beer, warm beer, and we bought all of it. We carried the bottles up the outdoor stairs to the room. The room smelled like salt and old carpet, two double beds with bedspreads the color of mustard, a pullout couch that looked as if it held judgments about who slept on it. The window looked out on the marina, and the light was going gold and pink over the water, and I remember thinking that the day had gone wrong in every way a day could go wrong and it was somehow the best evening I had had in a long time.

Jim got the flowers out of his bag, and they had wilted in the heat, and he put them in the ice bucket with water in it anyway.

"To ruined plans," Corinne said, raising her warm beer.

"To ruined plans," we all said, and drank, and nobody said the next thing out loud, but everybody was thinking some version of it.

We drank the warm beer on the pullout couch because nobody wanted to claim a bed yet. Callum sat on my left and Jim and Corinne took the other end, and at some point Jim pulled the bottle of ouzo out of his bag, the one he had been carrying around for the anniversary dinner that never happened.

"I was going to toast my wife with this at a restaurant with tablecloths," he said, and held it up to the light. "Instead we're toasting it in a motel that shares a name with a sunken boat."

"Put it out of its misery," Corinne said, and held out her glass.

It was strong and sweet and it went down warm. Corinne got up at some point to find the bathroom and came back ten minutes later with a story instead.

"There's a storage closet down the hall and it's open," she said. "And there is a bowling ball in it."

"A bowling ball," Jim said.

"A bowling ball, in a bag, with a name etched on it. Ariadne. Somebody brought a bowling ball to Greece and left it at the Triton."

"Maybe she lost it overboard," Jim said, dead serious, and we all laughed harder than it deserved, the way you do when the day has been that long. Corinne did an impression of the ball rolling down the motel hallway and knocked twice on the door to show what it would sound like, and even Callum, who had been quiet all day, laughed until he had to wipe his eyes.

"That's going in my next film," he said. "Nobody will believe