The Tides We Keep

I unlocked the control room door at six forty-five. The stairs up were cold, and the metal rail bit through my gloves. November in Richlands does that. Whole town goes quiet after the boats quit running for the season.

The bridge over the Clinch is mine all night. Container lift, port property, big gray tower with windows on all four sides. From up here the river looks like a scar. Drought took most of it this year. What used to be a fat brown river is a skinny trickle with cracked mud shoulders. Sad looking. I know the water level to the inch and it's the lowest I've seen since I took this job.

I'm Pat. I'm twenty-four. I run this bridge for the Port of Richlands, nights, mostly alone in the off-season. Before that I was a deckhand, one summer, back when I thought this town was temporary.

Funny how a person ends up somewhere.

I'd just settled into the operator's chair when I saw the pie.

There's a little sill below the south window. Somebody put a woven rush mat on it years ago, nobody remembers who. People leave stuff there sometimes. A thermos. A note. Tonight it was a pie, sitting on a cooling rack, steam still coming off the crust.

I stood there like an idiot for a good ten seconds.

I knew whose pie it was. I didn't want to know, but I knew.

Sloan.

She's twenty-four now. She runs the applause timing at the old Lyric Theatre downtown. That's a real job, believe it or not. When a show hits the encore, she's the one who cues the curtain call lights so the cast comes out at the right beat. She's got an ear for it. She always did. She can feel a room's applause like other people feel weather.

We were classmates at Sienna Community College, couple years back. And at a party once, when we were both twenty-one, we shared one kiss. One. On a porch with somebody's bad music going. Then she got an internship and I got the port and the matter ended there.

Except the pie said that wasn't that.

Because three hours ago, before my shift, I'd been walking past the Lyric. Off-season, the theater does weekend shows only, and Sloan was sitting on the stairwell landing by the stage door, eating an apple out of a paper bag. I hadn't talked to her in two years. She looked up and said my name like it was easy.

"Pat. Hey. You still driving that big elevator in the sky?"

"It's a bridge," I said. "Technically."

She laughed. We talked maybe six minutes. It was the best six minutes I'd had in a while, and I walked away like a coward with a job to get to. No number. Nothing. Stupid.

And now here was her pie, warm, on my sill. Which meant sometime after I'd walked past the theater, she'd been up here. She knew my shift. She knew where I'd be. And instead of saying anything in the stairwell she'd left me a pie like some kind of quiet apology or hello or who knows what.

I cut a slice with the plastic knife from my lunch bag. Still warm. Still good. Apple, heavy on the cinnamon, crust done right. I ate it standing at the window looking at the dead river and thought about my ex-wife, which is a thing I do too much.

I got married at twenty-two. Quick wedding, courthouse, her idea, mine too honestly. We'd been dating four months and I thought that was enough. Moved back to Richlands for the port job and the whole thing came apart inside a year. She hated the town. I loved it. She wanted the city, the noise, the climbing. I wanted a river and a night shift and quiet. There wasn't a villain in it. Just two people who married fast and found out slow. The divorce papers came on a Tuesday and I signed them at this very desk, right on top of the shipping manifest, because I had nowhere else flat.

So yeah. I'm twenty-four and divorced and alone in a tower. Some resume.

But the pie was good. I had two slices.

Around nine I was halfway through a crossword when my phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then again. That pattern meant one thing in Richlands. The co-op group text.

It was Ron, the co-op manager. I read it twice.

"Well pump at the shared well is down. Dead. No water tonight. Repair guy comes in the morning. Fill what you can. Sorry folks."

I sat there doing the math. Drought all fall, water table low, pump working overtime. That's how it goes. The whole town runs on one shared well out past the grain elevator, and when that pump quits, everybody quits. No showers. No sinks. Nothing until a repair guy shows up sometime tomorrow.

My phone started blowing up. The group chat was a mess in about ninety seconds.

"Is anyone going to check the breaker box?" "Already checked it, Ron." "Weather okay for a morning repair? It might rain." "It's not rain, Karen, it's mist."

I filled everything I had. Coffee pot, stock pot, the big jug I keep for the radiator. Didn't matter much. Bridge has its own holding tank for the restroom, thank god for small favors. But the town was dry until morning, and everybody knew it.

Then a text came through that wasn't the group chat.

Unknown number. I almost deleted it.

"Pat? It's Sloan. Got your number from the port office, hope that's okay. Pump died at my place too. I filled a bathtub before it quit so I'm rich compared to everyone else, ha. Anyway. There's leftover pie on the sill if you found it. That was me. It was supposed to be a note with the pie but I chickened out on the note part."

I stared at my phone for a solid minute.

Then I typed back. Deleted it. Typed again.

"Found it. Two slices gone already. It's the best thing to happen to me tonight and the well pump quit, so."

Three dots right away.

"Ha. Okay that made me laugh. Sorry about the chicken part. We hadn't talked in two years and I didn't want to do the whole catch-up summary in a stairwell with stagehands walking past."

"Fair," I sent. "Come do the catch-up up here. I've got heat, a view of a river that's barely a river, and half a pie."

I watched the three dots come and go twice. Then stop. Then come back.

"Is the door locked? I'm already across the river. I was going to knock on the tower door like a weirdo."

I was up and moving before I finished reading it. Crossed the catwalk in the wind, took the stairs down two at a time, and there she was. Coat buttoned wrong by one. Hair doing whatever November wind wanted it to do. Holding a paper bag like it was evidence.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said. "Your doorbell's broken, so I brought you a pie."

"No, your pie was for the lock situation," she said, and laughed, and I stepped back and let her in.

She took the stairs slow, reading the old painted signs on the wall. Capacity ratings. Year stamps. At the top she stopped in the doorway of the control room and looked around.

"This is smaller than I pictured."

"Cozy," I said. "It's a divorce apartment that comes with a job."

She laughed again and sat in the second chair, the visitor's chair, the one nobody ever uses. I got her a slice of the pie, her own pie, which felt dumb, and she took it anyway.

"So," she said. "Catch-up summary. Go."

So we did it. Slow. Halting at first, then not. Her job, my job, her apartment over the hardware store, my divorce. I told her about the papers on the manifest and she didn't make a face about it, which mattered more than I expected.

"You married fast," she said.

"I did. Learned a lot."

"Like?"

"Like don't marry someone at twenty-two because the wedding got cheap at the courthouse that month."

She laughed so hard she had to set the pie down.

Then the walkie on the desk crackled. Port security, doing rounds, just checking in. I answered, gave the all clear. When I turned back she was looking out the south window at the trickle of the Clinch.

"You know why I really left the pie?" she said, not turning around.

I didn't say anything. My chest did something on its own.

"Because I've been wanting to call you for two years and I kept finding reasons not to. And a pie felt safer than a phone call. A pie can't hang up on you."

The radio crackled again with some routine traffic and I turned it down without looking at it.

"Sloan," I said.

"Water's out all over town," she said, turning in the chair to face me. "Whole night's off. Nobody's got anywhere to be. So I'm going to say the thing the note was too scared to say, and then you can do whatever with that. I've thought about that porch kiss a lot. More than a person should admit to a bridge operator at ten p.m. with no running water."

I sat down across from her. The heater hummed. The river did its sad little trickle below us.

"You want coffee?" I said. "It's bad coffee but I have heat and a whole night."

"Yeah," she said. "I want coffee."

We drank the bad coffee and the talk got easy after that. The kind of easy it never was back at Sienna Community College, when we were both twenty-one and dumb in the regular ways.

"So the pie," I said. "You drove it across the river in the dark."

"I did."

"With a wrong-buttoned coat."

"Wind," she said. "Wind buttoned it."

"Sure."

She looked at the rush mat on the sill, where the pie sat under foil with two slices missing. Her pie. Still faintly warm when I'd found it at seven.

"I bought the pan special," she said. "Lattice and everything. I looked up a video. The edges are supposed to be crimped and mine are just... pushed."

"They're good edges."

"They're pushed edges, Pat."

"They're the best thing anybody's left on that sill since I've worked here. Which, to be fair, is a list of one."

She laughed into her cup. Then went quiet.

"I got nervous," she said. "That you'd eat it and think, huh, weird pie, and never once think it was from