A bottle of beer comes sliding across the table, and she looks up to see Ben sitting down across from her again. “You okay?” he asks with a frown, and she nods as she slips her phone back into her jacket pocket.
“Fine.” Behind her, a group of men are talking about the day’s kayaking adventure, roaring with laughter as they recount how one of them managed to flip over three times. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she says to Ben, “but you seem like the kind of guy who would’ve had something planned for today.”
“Why would I take that the wrong way?”
“I don’t know. You seem sort of…”
“Boring?” he says. “Normal?”
Greta shakes her head. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to,” he says. “Look, maybe I don’t play in a band or go to cool parties or smoke a lot of marijuana.” He pronounces this last word so deliberately that it’s a struggle for Greta to keep a straight face. “I’m a dad, you know? And a professor. I like to read. I nerd out over history, and I collect random facts the way most dudes collect—I don’t know, beer cans? Sports memorabilia? I don’t even know what most dudes collect. And I actually like doing laundry. I’ve got a whole system to color-code my calendar, and I set an alarm clock even on mornings when I don’t have to work…” He trails off with a frown. “And I don’t really know why I’m telling you all this except that you make me feel kind of insecure.”
“Why?” she asks.
“Because I think I might be one of those normal guys with normal lives that you were talking about, and sometimes I wish I weren’t. And because you’re so much cooler than me. Which, I realize, makes me sound like I’m in high school, but that’s sort of how you make me feel. Like I’m the yearbook editor and you’re the girl in the grunge band that plays all the parties I never get invited to.”
Greta laughs. “Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah.”
“I set an alarm clock too.”
He raises his eyebrows. “You do?”
“Otherwise I’d never get anything done.”
He takes a sip of his beer, but she can see the edges of a smile around it. “I did have plans, you know. I was supposed to go fishing today. I signed up months ago.”
“You did?”
He nods. “As soon as I booked the cruise. The salmon are just starting to run this time of year, and I wanted to make sure I had a spot.”
Greta stares at him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because,” he says with a shrug, “I decided I’d rather see a glacier with you.”
She smiles at him, and he smiles back at her, and she can’t help feeling a little unmoored, sitting here in this far-flung bar on the edge of Alaska, a million miles away from whatever she’d normally be doing at five o’clock on a Monday in New York City. In the opposite corner, three old men in flannel shirts have picked up a couple of banjos and a tambourine and begun to play, and it’s intoxicating, all of it, the bright sound of the instruments and the quivering light from the fire, the smells of mud and hops and the laughter and voices all around them. Greta sits back and closes her eyes as she listens, and when she opens them again, Ben is watching her with a more serious expression. Something about it makes her feel dizzy.
When they finally leave—their table cluttered with empty bottles and plates greasy from the fish and chips they’d ordered—the air outside feels almost medicinal. All that had been fuzzy goes suddenly sharp, and they stand beneath the old wooden sign like two divers who have just made their way to the surface.
It’s after eight, but dusk is only just beginning to push in at the edges of the sky. The streets are still busy, filled with tourists carrying plastic bags of souvenirs, hurrying in the direction of the ships. A few local kids are smoking cigarettes on a bench, and a man locks the door to a wooden crab shack.
Greta and Ben make their way along the pier, not quite walking in a straight line.
He looks at her sideways. “That was fun.”
“It was,” she agrees.
“Like, really fun.” He stops and scratches at his chin. He looks handsome right then, even with his ridiculously practical hiking boots and the still-soggy guidebook sticking out of the pocket of his rain jacket. “The most fun I’ve had in a while. Which must sound pathetic.”
She smiles. “I had a good time too.”