Colby Merchant

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The office is dark except for the one lamp you left on, the way Preston always left it on, because Preston liked the idea of himself working late more than the working. You are standing at the window in his skinny-fat frame, the gray silver hair, the soft gut over the belt, and you hate it tonight in a way you haven't before. Six weeks in this one. Six weeks of standing meetings and a body that gets winded on the stairs to the parking garage. You made him rich decisions today, or he made them, hard to tell anymore, and none of it moved anything in you. That's the thing nobody tells you about wealth on the wheel: it's just weather. You wanted, tonight, to be tired in the good way. The way that means something got done with your own weight. You open the laptop, the site loads the way it always loads, patient, and you spin without really deciding to, the way you light a cigarette you don't smoke.

The wheel gives you cold, and salt, and a smell like diesel and rot and the sea all at once.

Your hand is closed around a fistful of net and it is doing something wrong. You feel it before you understand it — a motion your body has done ten thousand times coming out clumsy, fingers snagging where they should slide, and you correct, slow, deliberate, like a man relearning his own name. The net goes through right. Then again. Then eight more times, checked, watched, on a job that has not needed watching in years. Somewhere behind that a light is going gray to pink over water, and a boat is rocking under you in a rhythm your knees already know better than your mind does.

The overalls are the first thing. Stiff orange leather-oilskin, cold where it hasn't warmed to him yet, straps digging into the shoulders through the thermal — and putting them on this morning comes back all at once, three-something in the dark, apartment quiet, the particular way he hooks the left strap first because the buckle on the right sticks and he's tired of fighting it half-asleep. Coffee he didn't finish. The beanie pulled down over hair he means to get cut and never does. He stood in the bathroom for a second, ran a palm over his scalp under the cap out of habit, not thought, and went out the door into salt air that was already wet before the sun came up.

The net in your hands remembers him too — not this net, all of them, four years of them, the boat before this boat, a man named Delcastillo who taught him to coil line so it never kinks and who is dead now, heart, sudden, nothing to do with the water. Colby had cried once about that, alone, in the truck in the marina lot, and never told anyone, because there wasn't really anyone to tell. A mother upstate he calls on Sundays. No one waiting in the apartment with the pastel balcony and the ocean haze, no woman, nobody's ring, nothing like that — he tried, a couple of times, it never held, and he stopped minding the way you stop minding a bruise. He goes out drinking with the other deckhands sometimes, beer, never more, never smoke, watches them cough over cigarettes and feels, quietly, like the sensible one.

The boots against the wet tile deck are the next key — worn soft in exactly the places his feet are shaped wrong, a small ache in the left arch that's been there two years and that he has simply decided is just how walking feels now. Twenty-one and already something in him creaks. The shoulders are strong in a way that has nothing to do with a gym, everything to do with hauling since seventeen, and there is a tiredness sitting in the low back that is going to be there every single morning for the rest of a life he assumed, without deciding to assume it, would look exactly like this one, forever, one shift after another, money that never quite becomes enough money. Five, ten dollars an hour ahead of broke on a good week. He is not unhappy. He has simply never asked the question.

The beard under your — his — chin when you finally lift a hand to it carries the smell of him, salt-sweat-dryer sheet, and under that the memory of a girl two summers back who liked it, who used to say something about it that he can almost hear and can't quite, gone already, the way all of this will go once you leave it.

Your hands stop moving. You look down at them — broad, calloused, net-burned at two fingers, twenty-one years old and already this permanent — and something in Preston's old chest, which isn't there anymore, would have called this a downgrade. Something in you, standing here in the actual weight of it, the actual ache of it, does not agree.

You lift your eyes off your hands, out toward the haze where the water's going pink, and you say, out loud, to no one on the boat who's listening:

"Okay. Okay — one more."