The Lobster Pot

The suitcase comes around the carousel for the third time and I just stand there watching it.

There's a slit down the whole side of it. Clean cut, like someone ran a blade along the fabric in one pass. And it's hanging wrong, sagging on one end, because there's nothing inside it.

"That's mine," I tell the guy at the desk, for the fourth time.

He nods. He's seen me four times already. "You are sure nothing was inside?"

"My whole life was inside. Clothes, charger, passport copy, two hundred euros cash." I'm twenty-four and I got divorced last year and apparently I travel like an idiot, keeping cash in a checked bag. "Someone took everything and zipped... no, they didn't even zip it. They just cut it and left it."

He shrugs the shrug of a man who has heard this eleven times today. "You can file the report in town. Mokro Polje, ten kilometers. There is a bus... no, the bus is finished today. A taxi, maybe."

"Maybe."

"Maybe," he agrees, and looks past me at the next suitcase.

So that's how I end up walking out of a tiny Croatian airport at four in the afternoon with a slashed empty suitcase, the phone in my pocket at nine percent, and the clothes I stand in, which are airplane clothes, which means I already hate them.

I walk the road toward town because what else is there. The light goes long and orange over the water. Mokro Polje turns out to be a handful of white houses, a church, one bar with its door open, and then past all of it, on the edge of things, a long low shed with nets hanging out front as if the whole building is wearing them.

There's a light on inside. I knock on the doorframe because there's no actual door closed, just a big opening.

"Hello?"

A man looks up from a workbench. He's got sawdust on his forearms and glasses pushed up on his forehead and he's maybe twenty-eight, young but not my kind of young, older in the hands somehow. He's holding a small saw with a very thin blade.

"Hi. Sorry. Is there a hostel here? Or anywhere?"

"In the town?" He sets the saw down. "No hostel. Pansion Maretic, by the church, but Kelli Maretic went to Split until Friday and her son does not answer the door."

"Of course he doesn't."

"It is a known problem," he says, dead serious, and I laugh before I can stop myself.

"Sorry. I'm having a day. My suitcase got cut open at the airport. Everything's gone. Cash, clothes, all of it."

"Thieves on the Split carousel," he says, like he's naming weather. "Come in, sit, I have beer and it is too hot to be standing in the road being robbed twice."

"I'm Marlene."

"Jed." He wipes his hand on his thigh, which does nothing, and shakes mine anyway. "I file fret saws. For ornamental turning. There is a workshop, an old man in Vodice, I do the blades for him and for anyone who orders."

"Filing saws. Like, sharpening?"

"Setting the teeth, one at a time, with a small anvil. It takes forever and nobody else wants to do it. I moved here at twenty-two for it." He pulls two beers from a shelf near the bench, opens both on the edge of the table, hands me one. "Sit on the pot."

"The pot."

He points. There's a wicker lobster pot on a low table, big, round, like a fat basket. "It is strong. Fishermen sit on it all season. I am repairing it."

I sit on the lobster pot. This is my life now. The beer is cold and good and the shed smells like pine and salt and sawdust, and nets hang from hooks in rows above our heads, and I feel, for the first time since the carousel, not exactly okay but distracted, which is close.

"What happened to the net?" I ask, nodding at a huge torn thing spread over a frame.

"Trawl haul caught on rocks. Two meter tear. The boat owner pays me by the hour so I am slow and careful, which is a good arrangement for everyone."

"You like it here?"

"I love it here." He says it simply, no performance in it. "It is quiet. The work makes sense. A saw either cuts or it doesn't. You know what's wrong with it and you fix it and it's fixed."

"God, that sounds nice!"

"You do not have that?"

"I write code. Freelance. Nothing is ever fixed, it's just... less broken temporarily." I take a drink. "And I got married at twenty-one and divorced at twenty-three, so there's that."

He winces politely. "I am sorry."

"Don't be, everyone is. Two years, no kids, he liked someone else by the end, it's not a mystery, it's just a thing that happened. Since then I've worked and slept and worked. I took this trip because I thought, go somewhere, feel something real. Then the universe cut my suitcase open." I laugh at myself. "Which, fine. Very funny."

Jed turns his beer slowly on the bench top. "What does real mean, for you?"

"God!" I look at the nets hanging there. "I don't know. I've been careful my whole adult life. Careful at twenty-one, married careful, divorced careful. Even the divorce was careful, we did it politely, we split the plates like adults. I want one thing that isn't careful."

The shed is quiet. Somewhere outside a boat engine coughs and stops.

"I should tell you," Jed says, "I have never had a woman in this shed. Not once in six years. It is not that kind of place, usually."

"What kind of place is it usually?"

"Mine. And the nets."

"Okay," I say. My heart is doing something but I keep my voice level. "Then I'm the first, and that's kind of real already."

He looks at me properly then. Not staring, just looking, like he's filing my teeth one at a time, checking each one.

"Marlene. You are sure you know what you are asking? Because you are upset about the bag, and upset is a bad..."

"I'm not upset about the bag." I set the beer down. "Okay, I am, but that's not this. I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm twenty-four, I'm divorced, I'm sober on one and a half beers, and I'm asking on purpose." I reach over and touch his arm. Sawdust, warm skin under it. "Have you ever been with someone who didn't know what she wanted?"

"No," he says. "I don't think so."

"Right. Well. I want to learn what I want. With someone who'll tell me the truth. You seem like a truth person. You file things for a living."

"That is not the same kind of filing," he says, and I laugh, and something eases in his shoulders when I laugh, like he'd been holding them.

"Come here," I say, "if you want to. I'm asking. You can say no, I'll drink my beer and go bother Kelli Maretic's son."

"I want to," he says. No pause, no hedge. He stands and crosses the two steps and takes my face in both hands, careful hands, the hands of a man who works small, and kisses me. Slow. Deliberate. Like he's setting each tooth. His mouth is warm and he tastes like beer and I put my hand flat on his chest and feel him breathing and I make a decision I don't overthink.

When we stop I'm holding his shirt in a fist and he hasn't rushed anything, not one thing.

"Okay," I say. "Wow. Okay!"

"Okay?" He smiles a little.

"That's the most unhurried kiss of my life. Don't stop being that person."

"I have one rule," he says. He steps back and goes to the bench, opens a drawer, and comes back with a small flat tin and a squeeze