North Carolina Miscellany
Dawn Shine, 2021 (acrylic in panel, 18x18) by Nat Dickinson
Petey Peterson and Frank Brockelmeyer were at the lunch counter. It seemed to Alex that once spring came and the marina opened, they lived there. Petey said, “Look what the tide brought in.” Petey had started to shrink and curl in recent years but still kept a few lobster pots near shore. Frank cocked his head. His eyes were slits among lines. Alex’s father had called them “the old guys.” They had outlived him, but she could feel them drifting away, and she was onshore holding the rope to them, but she shouldn’t try to pull them in, because the rope would go slack and come back empty. The four of them had lunch here every year during what Frank called “the great float event.” Five years ago, after eating, they’d stood at the cash register near the front, each paying separately, and Frank, uncharacteristically, fumbled putting his change in his pocket, so that the others were outside by the time he and Alex finished paying. On the way out, in the doorway, he had turned and said, “You’re too good for him.” She’d never satisfied Michael. In the end, she didn’t know why he’d chosen her. He was a painter, somebody to watch for a while, and he liked his
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late nights drinking and talking about art in bars. He wanted to pry something loose from beneath Alex’s cool surface, but he failed. She wondered what it was he wanted. She thought had she not been vaguely pretty, the straight blond hair tucked behind ears and the boyish body, he would not have bothered. That stayed with her. When Frank spoke, she was grateful. Alex took her seat and listened. Petey asked Henry, “How many fingers you smashed this morning?” Henry said, “A dozen. Lend me yours for the afternoon?” “Arithmetic was always your strong point, wasn’t it?” Frank grinned at Alex as if to say, “Listen to these old guys.” Two years before, as they’d stood at the register, Frank again had managed to build space between him and Alex and the others. On the way out he patted her on the shoulder. Clara had left her, Clara who had rescued her after Michael. In the end, Clara had left her for the same reason Michael had. When it was time to leave this day, Petey said, “Alex, you gonna make sure this old guy doesn’t fall in the cove and drown himself in two feet of water?” Alex realized she’d been daydreaming. That was all right. They expected it. “I’ve got my eye on him,” she said. She ate her last fry and swiveled on her stool. She drove the Whaler again, and Henry sat at the bow. When they tied to the floats, he walked to a far corner and kneeled over a loose chain brace with a ratchet. Alex built a sawhorse from the decking they’d torn up. She measured and cut the new wood, laying the pieces near their destinations, ready for priming. The power convertor was solar and quiet, but the saw wailed and drowned out all other sound. The goggles made the world opaque. She enjoyed the world’s shrinking; it was part of the work. When she’d finished cutting enough wood for repairs on two floats she set the saw down, careful so that the guard closed, pulled the goggles down so they hung around her neck, and brushed sawdust from her shirt and hair.