The Surf Coach's Secret

You'd think a woman who teaches surfing for a living would never feel stale. You'd be wrong!

I'm Bella, twenty-four years old, married two years to a perfectly decent man, and some mornings I stand on the beach at Whakatane watching the gulls and think, is this it? Is this the whole show? The same eight beginner clients, the same waxed boards, the same coffee from the same van, and Chet driving off to the test center at half past seven with a kiss on the cheek that lasts exactly one second.

Don't get me wrong, I love the man. We met at uni when we were both twenty-one, and he was the first guy who ever asked what I thought instead of telling me. He proposed on the dunes with a ring box full of sand because he'd lost the receipt for a proper box, which honestly I found charming. Two years later I still find it charming.

But charming is not the same as electric. Somewhere between the wedding and now, we'd turned into a pair of people who discuss the dishwasher. Our sex life hadn't died, exactly, but it had started taking the bus instead of running. You know how it is. Same night, same order of operations, same groan at the end like a kettle finishing.

And the thing is, I'm twenty-four! Twenty-four is supposed to be the electric years!

So when the annual food truck rally rolled around on the Saturday, I announced at breakfast that I was going alone.

"Alone?" Chet looked up from his toast, genuinely puzzled. "You always drag me to that thing."

"Well this year I'm not dragging you, I'm flying solo. I'm going to eat terrible food and listen to a bad covers band and not explain myself to anybody!"

He grinned at me, which I didn't expect. "Good. You've been a bit wound up lately. Go be a person."

So off I went, feeling weirdly light about it, which should have been my first clue.

* * *

The rally was everything it always is. Forty trucks crammed along the beachfront, the smell of a hundred cuisines all fighting each other, a band mangling some song from the nineties, half the town wearing sunglasses they didn't need. I bought a churro, ate it in four bites, regretted nothing, and then I smelled smoke and lime and turned around and there was a truck I didn't recognize. Blue paint. Hand-lettered sign. FISH TACOS, it said, THE ONLY REASON YOU CAME.

And behind the little window, hair tied back with what appeared to be a shoelace, was Laci. Laci from my college course, who I hadn't seen since we were twenty-one and both broke and both trying to write essays about coastal management at the last possible minute.

"Laci!?"

She looked up, squinted, and then her whole face exploded. "Bella! No way! No way no way."

We were hugging over the counter before either of us had decided to, both of us shouting over each other. She's twenty-four now, she told me, owns the truck herself, saved up for three years while working a kitchen job she hated. I told her I married the guy from uni and taught surf lessons.

"Married." She leaned on the counter. "You? Married at twenty-two? God, I still think of you as the girl who fell asleep in the library and set off the fire alarm with her snoring."

"That was ONE time!"

"It was twice, actually. Sit down. You're getting tacos and you're going to tell me everything."

So I sat at the little bench beside her truck and ate the best fish tacos I have ever had in my life, and I told her everything, more or less. The marriage, the routine, the feeling of being thirty-five in a twenty-four-year-old body. She listened while chopping, serving, chatting to customers, and every so often she'd stop, put both hands flat on the counter, and just look at me.

"That feeling," she said at one point, "is exactly why I bought a truck. I was twenty-two and I could see the next forty years laid out flat. So I set fire to the plan."

"You set fire to nothing, you quit a job."

"Emotionally? Total inferno."

And we laughed like we used to, that awful honking laugh you only do with old friends, and somewhere in the middle of laughing I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd laughed like that. Not with Chet. Not with anyone. The afternoon got long and golden and I stopped checking my phone, which is not something I do.

* * *

Here's where it gets strange, or lovely, or both.

"Have you met Paco?" she asked, wiping her hands.

"Who's Paco?"

"He's my business partner. Sort of." She stuck her head through the little back door of the truck and made a clicking noise with her tongue. Out of what I thought was a storage cupboard came a parrot. A big green parrot with a grumpy face, who waddled straight across the counter like he owned the whole beachfront.

"You keep a parrot in your taco truck?"

"Health inspector loves him, it's fine. He was on a roof in a storm two years ago, half starved, and I couldn't just leave him. Now he swears at tourists. Say hello, Paco."

"Hello, Paco," said Paco, in a voice that was unsettlingly like Laci's own.

I held out my arm and he stepped onto it, which apparently means a parrot likes you, and I felt absurdly pleased about it. Laci came around the counter to stand next to me and showed me how to offer him a bit of capsicum, and her hand was steadying my wrist and Paco was muttering something rude, and I looked up and she was already looking at me.

Not a glance. A look. The kind you can't pretend is accidental.

"You still do that thing," she said quietly.

"What thing?"

"When you're happy you go quiet. Loud Bella is the one everyone gets. Quiet Bella is the real one and almost nobody meets her." Her hand was still on my wrist. Paco chewed his capsicum like a tiny feathered referee.

My heart did something complicated. "You remembered that?"

"I remember everything about you, Bella. Annoyingly. I've tried not to."

The band was playing badly, the queue at her window had gone, the light was doing that thing it does here at six where everything looks like a photograph of itself. And I stood there with a parrot on my arm and my pulse in my ears and absolutely no idea what I was going to say next, which for me is basically unheard of.

"You could come back tomorrow," she said. "Before the rally packs up. I'll close early. I make the crew tacos at the end of the day, the ugly ones, the ones that taste better than the pretty ones. You could help me eat them."

"Is that a business offer or...?"

"It's a whatever-you-want-it-to-be offer." She smiled, and took Paco gently off my arm. "I'm not asking you for anything you don't want to give. You're married, I know that, I've got eyes. But I've thought about you on and off for two years and it felt stupid to let you walk away twice."

Well! What do you say to that!

What I said was, "Tomorrow. I'll come tomorrow," and my voice came out about half its usual size.

She nodded like I'd answered a much bigger question. "Bring the surfboard energy," she said. "Whatever that means. You'll know."

I walked home along the beach because I couldn't face the car park yet, and the whole way I had an argument with myself that went nowhere. This is just an old friend, I told myself. Except old friends don't look at you like that, and you don't spend a whole walk rehearsing what you'll wear. I got home after dark. Chet was on the couch with his laptop, doing roster stuff for the test center, and he asked if I'd had a good time.

"Yeah," I said, kicking off my sandals. "I really did. Ran into Laci, you remember her, from my course."

"The taco girl?"

"She's a taco girl now, actually. She owns the truck."

"Nice. Tell her the one at the corner does better churros," he said, joking, and went back to his laptop, and I stood in the hallway holding my keys and thinking, he doesn't even see it. Not because he's blind. Because he trusts me, completely, the way you trust a door to be a door.

And I went to bed and lay there listening to him breathe and thinking about a hand on my wrist and a parrot who swears at tourists and a tomorrow I was already terrified of and already counting down to.

I didn't sleep much. I'm not sure I wanted to.

Sunday morning I taught my eight beginners like a robot. Lovely people, all of them. Two of them nearly drowned in knee-deep water and I barely noticed. I kept checking my phone, which is a thing I never do, because the ocean is supposed to be my phone-free zone and also my whole personality.

"Coach Bella, you're weird today," said Clark, forty-eight, who has been afraid of the water for three months and stood in it anyway.

"I'm fine. Great session, everyone."

I was not fine. I was counting hours.

* * *

By four o'clock the rally was half packed up. The band had stopped, thank God, and the beachfront had that sad post-party look, chip packets doing little dances in the wind. Laci's truck was one of the last ones standing, and she was leaning in the serving window like she'd been posing there all day, which she absolutely had.

"You came," she said.

"Of course I came."

"You were coming at four or you were coming at four-fifteen. There's a difference."

"I have a job, Laci."

"You have a job where you watch people fall off boards and call it teaching. Come