“My family were fishermen for a hundred years here. I don’t even remember learning.” It seemed fantastical to know something so complicated so intrinsically, but I thought about the hamantaschen my grandmother made every Purim, rolling out the dough, cutting the circles with a drinking glass, adding a dollop of fruit or poppyseed filling, and pinching the corners. I’d have to follow a recipe for the dough and the baking times, but it was still something ingrained in me, something that she had learned from her mother, that I learned from her so young I didn’t remember learning it.
We motored through the harbor, and then Joe opened the sail, positioning it to catch the wind just right, and soon the town grew smaller behind us.
“How do you know where to find a whale?”
“I asked around. And we’ll see how we do.”
“So we just sail around until we do?”
“Basically. We have to go out a ways.”
Once we were in open water, Joe came to join me. “You don’t need to steer?” I asked.
“It has an autopilot. I’ll check it in a bit, but I set a heading, and the wind is steady. We’re good for now. Do you want a drink?”
I glanced at my watch. “Like a drink drink?”
“I meant water or a soda or something, but I’m sure Tony is stocked.”
“Water is great.”
Joe went to the small cabin and returned with two bottles, handed me one, then sat beside me, pulling down the brim of his baseball cap and leaning back. “Good night.”
I elbowed him. “Don’t you dare. I know nothing about boats.”
“Do you want me to teach you?”
“Nah.” I shook my head. “Are you really going to put up that picture of me?”
“It’s already up. I went back last night and hung it.”
I held my hands under my chin, creating a frame. “Hashtag ‘famous.’ Or something.”
He laughed. “You kind of are—my mother wants to meet you.” I recoiled. “Calm down. She said that before I even met you—remember, she knows your mother.”
My shoulders relaxed. “I forgot that part.”
“Will you come to the restaurant tonight? With your grandma, of course.”
“Do we have to bring her? She’s going to make meeting your mom much more awkward.”
“Depends—do you prefer awkward or guilt when you tell her she’s not invited?”
I scrunched up my face. “Neither. We live on the ocean now. We’re voyagers.”
“We’d run out of food pretty quickly. I only brought snacks.”
“What happened to the century of fishermen running through your veins?”
He rolled his eyes with a wry smile. “They didn’t live on their boats.”
I sighed exaggeratedly. “Neither option is good. She’s either going to make inappropriate comments or guilt-trip me for the rest of my life.”
He tilted his head slightly. “Is that why you came to Hereford? Guilt?”
The question caught me off guard and I looked down at my ringless hands.
In the pregnant pause that followed, I realized two things: the truth was complicated, and I didn’t want to lie to Joe.
“Not guilt exactly.” He didn’t respond, and I looked up to see him watching me, his eyes warm, waiting for me to be ready to continue. “I was . . . stuck, I guess. You remember when a CD would start skipping, and you had to kind of bang on the Discman?” He smiled at the reference from our middle school days. “I moved home—to my parents’ house—when my . . . well, when everything fell apart. And I got stuck.”
“And your grandma banged on you?”
“No—well—sort of. She announced she was coming here, and I realized I needed to shake myself out of it, and that this was something new. Different. Even if it was really something old. If that makes sense.”
He leaned back, settling in. “What happened? When things . . . fell apart? You know my sob story. What’s yours?”
I froze, panicked.
“Or not.” He rose to adjust the sail that probably didn’t need adjusting. “Sorry.” He glanced back at me over his shoulder, then went to the helm and checked the autopilot before coming back. “New subject: we have officially entered the area where we could start seeing whales.”
How to explain that I had stopped mattering in the marriage? I didn’t think it had always been like that, and I couldn’t pinpoint when it happened, but a shift occurred at some point. When it stopped being about us and became all Brad, all the time. His job, his preferences, his timing. And fighting changed nothing, so I just went along because what was the alternative? Not that it had mattered in the end. All that silence and swallowing my feelings and sacrificing what I wanted, to keep things on an even keel, ended in the same result I had been trying to avoid.