The Dive Boat Shift

I was twenty-three years old, a second-year elementary school teacher, and on the first Friday of October I locked myself out of my apartment. The entire setup is just that, really. Everything else that happened that night came off the back of one dumb key sitting on the kitchen counter next to my lunch bag.

Let me back up a little, because the Geraldine part needs explaining and I've been putting it off.

I knew exactly one person in that town with a spare couch, and it was Geraldine, who I did not like and who did not like me, and I want to be plain about that history so you understand what a low point calling her was. We'd gone up against each other in a school fundraiser two years back, when I was twenty-one and fresh out of my bachelor's degree and she was twenty-two and working the galley of a dive boat. Her dock kids' sailing club raised money with a bake sale. My class did a car wash. I talked trash. She talked worse trash. Somebody's spreadsheet got deleted, and to this day neither of us will admit who did it, and the whole thing ended with her telling me in front of the gym that I baked like a librarian and dressed like one too. Which stung, partly because it was true about the dressing part, though not for the reason she thought.

That last bit matters. I'll get to it.

So Friday night, I'm standing in the hall of my building in the rain I'd walked home through, pressing my forehead against my own door like an idiot. Landlord out of town until Sunday. Phone at nine percent. And the only number in it that wasn't family or work was Geraldine's, saved from that fundraiser year, never once dialed.

I stood in that hallway a good ten minutes doing the math on sleeping in the stairwell. Then I dialed.

"Whoever this is, I'm working," she said, and her voice was that flat harbor-town voice I remembered, no patience in it at all.

"It's Milo. From the fundraiser thing. The car wash."

A pause long enough that I checked the call hadn't dropped. "The librarian. What do you want."

"I'm locked out. Landlord's away. I don't really have anyone else to call, and I heard from someone at the dock that you've got a couch on that boat of yours." I hated how small my voice went. "One night. That's all."

Another pause. Rain on the stairwell window. Then she said, "The Lopez is moored past the fuel dock, blue hull, you can't miss it. Come now or don't come. And Milo? You say one word about the still and you're swimming back to town."

I didn't know what the still was yet. I said okay anyway.

The walk down took twenty minutes and my socks were wet the whole way. The Lopez sat low in the water under one working dock light, an old dive boat gone grey at the edges, and Geraldine was leaning on the rail like she'd been watching me stumble down the planks the entire time. She was twenty-four then, stocky from hauling coolers, hair cut short like she did it herself with kitchen scissors, which I later learned she did.

"Keys," she said, holding out a hand. I didn't have any keys, that being the entire problem, and I told her so, and she laughed once through her nose and went below.

Down into the galley. It was cramped the way a submarine is cramped, all copper pots hanging and a little stove, and there, tucked behind a false panel she didn't even bother to close properly, sat the still. Copper, gleaming, honest-to-God beautiful, with a coil of tubing running into a glass jug of something the shade of weak tea.

"You're brewing rum on a boat," I said.

"I'm aging rum on a boat. The brewing happens in my cousin's shed and that's all you get to know." She pointed at a bench bolted to the wall. "Sit. Touch nothing. Especially that."

I sat. She poured two short glasses without asking, which surprised me, because I'd built this whole picture of her over two years like someone who asked for nothing and offered less. The rum was warm going down and then suddenly not warm at all, more like a struck match.

"That's good," I said, honestly startled.

"Course it is. I made it." She dealt cards onto the little table without comment, some game I only half knew, and we played. She beat me the first four hands. Somewhere around the fifth hand and the second glass I stopped caring about losing, and somewhere around the third glass I stopped being scared of her, which I think was the rum's actual plan the whole time.

The boat rocked a little. The lantern she'd hung from a hook swung with it and made the copper pots flash. I remember thinking the whole setup was nicer than my apartment, which was a sad thought about my apartment more than a compliment to the boat.

"Okay," she said, laying down a run and raking in the cards. "You called me. Me. Out of everybody in your phone. Either your life is a desert or you wanted something and this was the only door." She poured us both another finger. "Which is it."

"It's not a desert," I said, too fast, which proved her point.

"Twenty-three years old, no ring, no partner, nobody to call on a Friday. That's not a desert, that's just quiet. I know the difference." She wasn't being cruel about it, that's what got me. She was just saying it the way she'd say the tide was coming in. "So. What's the thing you actually called about, under the locked-out thing."

And here is where I blame the rum, though really I'd been carrying this around since I was twenty-one and the dressing comment in the gym had landed like she'd read a page I kept in a drawer. The truth was I'd been curious about dresses and makeup since before that, since long before, buying things online and returning them, one lipstick in a drawer inside a sock, wearing a skirt exactly twice in my own apartment with the blinds down. Geraldine wore canvas trousers and work boots every day of her life, and I was about to confess this to her of all people.

"Your clothes," I said.

"What about them."

"Not your clothes exactly. Clothes like. In general." I turned the glass in my hands. "I've always wondered what it'd be like to wear a dress. And makeup. Like, actually do it, not just wonder. It's been sitting on me for years and I've never told anyone that out loud, ever, and I'm telling you because you're not going to see me again after tonight so it doesn't count."

Geraldine put her cards down. The lantern swung. I braced for the gym voice, the librarian line, the whole two-year-old wound reopened and salted.

Instead she said, "Huh."

"Huh?"

"I was going to say the boat's got a sea chest in the cabin with some of my old stuff in it, but first I want to hear the rest. There's a rest. You've got the face of somebody with a rest."

"The rest is, there isn't much rest. I like the idea of it. I've liked the idea of it since I was twenty-one at least, probably longer, I don't remember exactly when it started. I just never had a reason or a place or a person