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Short Dock

The boat was a beauty. Thirty feet from tip to faultless white tip, an engine that purred like a jungle cat when the key turned (and always on the first try), and leather-covered living quarters nestled smugly in its belly. Tied to the end of the pier, it rocked gently on the water as its owner smoked a cigarette.

John Ramsey was in his late sixties, white-haired and brown-eyed, his body still belted with fitness-club muscle and his face lined with the sort of cool, reluctant contemplation that crops up when hardworking and intelligent men force themselves to slow down and take a look at the world. He was a lawyer who had retired all of two years ago and now lived quietly with his wife back in town.

He took his cigarette out of his mouth and fingered it, listening to the joyous whoops coming from the inside of the boat.

Out popped his neighbor Steve Brown who was nearly thirty years younger than Ramsey himself. He worked for the same law firm to support his wife and two kids. The two hadn't known each other particularly well - occasional chats over coffee were the most memorable - but Ramsey still found himself respecting Steve, who, childlike enthusiasm or not, was still an able and competent man who knew where his priorities were.

That was why Ramsey had knocked on Steve's door that morning and made the offer of the boat at two hundred dollars. Steve had stared at him for a moment, decided he was dead serious, and asked if he could see it immediately.

"It's amazing, Johnny, it really is," he now said. His expression was that of a man both naive enough to believe in dreams coming true and mature enough to worry whether or not he would wake up from them "I mean, boats were never really my field, you know? So I never thought that they could be so big inside."

"Glad you approve, Steve."

"I know you said that the offer wasn't solid and all, but if you do decide to sell it, I promise I'll take good care of it." He beamed at the chrome railings. "My family'll have a vacation every year, maybe more. And I don't think that any of them get seasick."

"They have pills for that, anyway." Ramsey took another drag on his smoke.

"You sure that Marie doesn't mind, or anything?"

Ramsey's wife, whose hair was also going gray but who was still a sweeter, more understanding woman than most men believed they deserved, hadn't had any objections when he had brought the idea up last week. "You do whatever you feel is right, John," she had said with her small, able hands soaking in dishwater. "I've lived with you long enough to know that you don't make decisions without thinking them over first." He had hugged her and said she was right; he had thought over this one long and hard.

"She doesn't mind."

"Mind if I ask a personal question, Johnny?"

Ramsey shrugged. "Go ahead."

"When's the last time you took it out for a ride?"

Ramsey turned his head at that, and saw Steve running his hand over one of the railings with absent, half-lidded worship.

"Five years ago," he said finally, and blew out smoke. "With Roger."

"Your son?" Steve was now testing the cushions on the back deck.

"Yeah."

Roger, now almost as old as Steve, worked two states over in a law firm just like his dad. Ramsey had never pushed him to do such a thing - he had just shown interest in it, and decided to stick with it. Over the years they had spent long and pleasant days on the water, sometimes fishing halfheartedly, but mostly just enjoying the peace and solitude.

If someone had approached Ramsey and asked him what he thought the best times of his life were, he would have answered 'on a boat' before even realizing that the question had been what, not where. But either way it boiled down to the same thing - feeling the salt in his hair and nose, listening to the cry of the gulls overhead and worrying mildly about getting a big old special-delivery package from one of the shameless birds, and seeing his son, who was maybe the only irrefutable evidence of Ramsey and his wife doing something right in their lives - even more so than the money, the house, the boat itself.

And then, five years ago, Roger had just passed away. He hadn't died - save that for the weepy romance novels they both laughed over every now and then - but his letters and calls had ceased. Both he and Marie knew what had happened, of course; as a man got older he became busier, sometimes so busy that other things had to go. They accepted that. They were realists. But Ramsey sometimes saw the far-off looks on his wife's face, and in the two years since he had retired he came down here sometimes, looking at the boat, letting the memories come in and reducing the ache little by little until it was gone. And he sometimes hated himself for it, partly because it did no good.

"Look, Johnny," Steve said, and his voice had lost all of its jocularity now. It had gone to the dry, subtly sympathetic tone he used at work. "If this is about Roger at all..."

"It is," Ramsey replied. "But that's all right."

"John, you know I wouldn't feel right taking this if it was because of that. Even if the price is a steal."

"If you don't, then I'll sell it to someone else." He rolled his cigarette back and forth between his fingers. "Costs money to keep in good condition. No one's going to use it anymore in my family."

Steve sighed and stepped off the boat, standing behind Ramsey. "Is that really your only option? Getting rid of it?"

"I think so," he said. "I tried to use it to make the ache go away, but it didn't work. So maybe it's just where the ache's coming from." He paused. "Melodrama, right?"

"I don't think there's anything shameful in a man speaking his feelings," Steve said. "Believe me, my wife and I go through a lot of that. Kids can hurt you sometimes, even if they're as young as mine."

Ramsey stopped playing with his cigarette, his fingers still. His face hadn"t changed (and even if it had, it wouldn't have mattered with Steve behind him), but an idea had taken unsteady residence in his mind.

"You know that I always respected you, Johnny."

"Why, thank you, Steve," he heard himself say. "The feeling's mutual."

A warm hand squeezed Ramsey's shoulder. "You sure that you need to sell it? Because if the answer's yes, I'll sign a check right here and now. And if not...well, I think patience is a virtue. My family can wait for a vacation, believe me."

Ramsey didn't do anything for a moment, and then threw his cigarette into the water. The ashes crumbled off and scattered amongst the refuse floating free around the pier.

"Give me a week," he said quietly. "I'll tell you then."

"That's fine. You have a good one, John."

Steve's shoes sounded briskly on the wood as he walked away. Over the horizon the sun was just beginning to go down, making the colorless waves sparkle like a king's ransom of diamonds. The water lapped soothingly against the boat, and algae slowly consumed the cigarette's remains.

Ramsey was aware of none of it.

Maybe, he thought, getting rid of the ache wasn't the only way to go. Maybe it was possible to take it, use it, sculpt it in your hands and make it something good. Didn't people do things like that often?

He thought of Marie, and her strange way of understanding the what and the why of his actions before he often did; he thought of her smile and how it had stayed on, sincerely, through all the years they had been together. He thought of the boat and how good it felt to be alone with the ones you loved, when you could believe more than anything that there was love, no matter what the poets said. But most of all he thought of Marie's laugh mingling with the raucous cry of the gulls, of them drinking coffee in the belly of the boat and exchanging books to read; he thought of them drifting away from the land until it got dark, when they would let down the anchor, sleeping together in that leather-and-steel womb and smelling the salt in the air, feeling the steady rock of the waves as the current moved both of them on.