The Pasta Cutter

I still think about that doorbell. It's the first thing I tell people when they ask about that week in Noia, and I know how that sounds, a grown man, forty-two years old, going on about a doorbell. But it wasn't a normal doorbell. It was one of those cheap wired ones that had gotten damp from the sea air, and the wiring had gone bad in a way nobody ever fixed, so it buzzed whenever the air turned wet. Which, on that coast, was most of the time. Some kind of tide rhythm to it, Martina said. It buzzed low when the tide was coming in and gave this broken double buzz when it went out. I never verified that with an actual tide chart, but I liked her version better, so I stuck with it.

Anyway. I was standing outside the gate that first morning with a folder under my arm, and the bell buzzed twice, that broken double sound, and I remember thinking, well, that's a bad omen, a doorbell that lies about whether anybody's home.

I was in Spain for six days on a thing my firm barely approved. I'm a paralegal, and I know that sounds like the least romantic job on earth, and honestly it mostly is. But a client had a boat for sale off the Galician coast, and somebody had to go look at it in person and meet the broker, and somehow that somebody was me. The broker, a guy named Serafin, had told me to meet him at his storage yard, where he kept crab pots, because he was always there in the mornings. He gave me directions that ended with "the yard with the orange buoys, you cannot miss it." I missed it twice.

When the gate opened I stepped into this lot that was nothing but crab traps. Stacked traps, dozens of them, going up eight and ten high in metal frames, and nets draped over some, and buoys everywhere, orange and white and one weird teal one, all of it smelling like salt and old rope and fish. There was a small workshop shed at the back with the door propped open. I remember thinking, this is where my week is going to be spent, negotiating a boat purchase in a pile of crab equipment. Fine. Beats the office.

A woman came out of the workshop wiping her hands on a rag. She was thirty-four, dark hair tied back, wearing rubber work gloves and coveralls with the sleeves cut off, and she had that look of somebody who was mid-project and did not appreciate interruptions.

"Excuse me," I said. "I'm looking for Serafin. Jonas, I'm the one calling about the boat?"

She looked at me a second, and I did what I always do when I'm nervous, which is fill the silence.

"You must be his assistant, right? He mentioned he had help here at the yard."

Now, I've gone over this a hundred times since. She paused. Just for a beat, but I caught it later, replayed it a hundred times. She looked at the rag in her hand, then back at me, and said, "Something like that. Come on, I'll show you around until he shows up."

And that was that. She let it stand. I assumed she was the broker's assistant, she never said she was, she never said she wasn't, and I walked around a crab pot yard for twenty minutes believing I was talking to somebody's hired help.

She was good at showing me around, I'll give her that. She walked me between the stacks of traps and explained the whole system, how the pots get stacked in the off season, how the fishermen rent space in the yard, how the whole lot floods an inch during spring tides and they just hose everything down after.

"You get used to the smell?" I asked her, stepping over a coil of rope.

"You get to like it," she said. "That's the trap. First it's awful, then one day you're inland somewhere and you miss it. That's how they get you."

I laughed, and she glanced at me like she was surprised I laughed, which stung a little, honestly. I'm not that boring. I don't think.

Then we got to the buoys, and this is the part I keep coming back to. Along one wall of the yard there was a long workbench, and on it were these little metal fixtures, bracket shaped things, and a crate of small radar reflectors. Not the big tube ones you see on masts. Little compact ones, corner-shaped, the size of a coffee can.

"Those are for the buoys?" I asked.

"For the gear markers, yes. And some for the small boats." She picked one up and turned it in her hand. "Serafin thinks I'm crazy, putting reflectors on pot buoys. But a fog comes in here like you would not believe, and a buoy with a reflector shows up on a boat's radar at a distance where a bare buoy just doesn't. Fewer snagged lines. Fewer lost pots. Fewer arguments at the bar at night." She smiled at that, the first smile she'd given me. "The arguments are half the fun, though."

She showed me how she mounted them. There's a bracket, and she'd worked out a way to rivet it to the top of the buoy so it sat above the water line and didn't catch the nets. She did it right there, in front of me, without hurrying. Clamped the buoy to the bench, positioned the bracket, drilled, two rivets, done. Maybe ninety seconds. And I stood there, an idiot watching her hands.

I don't know how to explain it without sounding strange. Her hands were smaller than mine but surer, and there was this little habit she had, where after the second rivet she'd tap the reflector with her knuckle, twice, like knocking on a door to see if anybody was home. Every single one. Tap tap. And the sound it made, this dull little metallic note, I can still hear it.

"You always do that?" I asked.

"Always. If it rings solid, it's seated right. If it buzzes, the rivet's loose." She looked up at me. "Everything in this job is about listening. Bells, taps, the wind. Half the equipment talks if you shut up long enough to hear it."

I did not shut up long enough, apparently, because the next thing I said was something dumb like, "That's really impressive, honestly," and she gave me a look that was half amused and half something else.

"What do you do, exactly?" she asked. "You don't talk like a boat buyer."

"Paralegal," I admitted. "Contract side. I'm supposed to check the paperwork on the boat before my client commits."

"So you read things for a living."

"That's about the size of it."

"Hm." She set the finished buoy aside and pulled another one onto the bench. "And they send you all the way from wherever to look at one boat?"

"Philadelphia. And they didn't send me, exactly. Nobody else wanted a week in Galicia in November." I shrugged. "I volunteered. I'd never been."

"First time on this coast?"

"First time in Spain at all, believe it or not."

She shook her head, drilling again. "Americans. You fly six thousand kilometers and spend it in a crab pot yard." But she was grinning while she said it, tap tap on the reflector, and something in my chest did a thing I didn't have a name for yet.

We must have talked for half an hour out there. She asked about Philadelphia, and I asked about the yard, and she told me she'd left an office job at twenty-six to work on the water, and I told her I'd thought about leaving my office job roughly every Monday since I was thirty, and neither of us made a big deal out of the parallel but we both noticed it. I remember that. We both noticed it and let it sit there.

Somewhere in there Serafin never showed. She checked her phone once, said something vague about him being "at the marina, probably," and offered to keep showing me around, and I, fool that I was, kept saying yes please.

The bell buzzed then, that low single tone, tide coming in. She cocked her head at it like she was checking a clock.

"There's the water," she said. "It always does that around now. Serafin says he'll fix it. He's been saying that since before I started here."

"How long's that been?"

"Eight years." She wiped her hands again, slow, and looked at me with those eyes. "You want to see the workshop? There's coffee. It's terrible coffee, but it's hot."

I said yes. Of course I said yes. At that point I still thought she worked for Serafin, still thought this was all some broker's assistant killing time for her boss, and every friendly thing she did I filed under professional courtesy. That's how far gone I was. A man who reads contracts for a living, and I didn't notice the one thing right in front of me, which was that she never once said she worked for anybody.

Two days later I went back. I'd like to tell you I had a good reason, but the truth is I wrote down three questions about the boat's mooring permit on a hotel notepad and then didn't look at the notepad once the whole way there. The questions were an excuse. I knew they were an excuse while I was writing them, and I wrote them anyway.

I missed the yard again. Same as the first day, walked right past the fence line before I figured out that the road forks and the fork goes the way you don't expect. By the time I came through the gate she was already at the bench, coveralls with the sleeves cut off, rubber gloves hanging off a nail like she'd known I was coming and had taken them off in advance. It was November and cold enough that my breath showed, and she was working with her forearms bare like it was nothing.

"Back so soon?" she said, without turning around. She'd heard the gate. Of course she'd heard the gate.

"I had questions about the permit paperwork," I said, and she turned then and gave me a look that said she knew exactly how thin that was, and let me keep it anyway.