Low Tide, Sweetheart

The first time I saw Nell, she was walking the strand below the bait shop with a man’s raincoat hanging past her knees and no shoes on. October had turned the marsh grass the color of old pennies. I stood at the back window counting nightcrawlers into styrofoam cups, and the count went wrong twice before I set the cup down and just watched her. She stopped where the eelgrass gave way to wet sand and bent to pick up something I couldn’t see. The coat swung open. Under it she wore a gray sweater and jeans rolled to the ankle. Her feet left prints that filled with water and held.

She came into the shop an hour later. The bell over the door stuck the way it always did, half a note and then a rattle. I was behind the counter pricing sinkers with a grease pencil that kept slipping.

“You’re open,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but she said it like she wanted me to confirm anyway.

“Open enough.” I set the grease pencil down. “What do you need.”

She asked for two dozen bloodworms and a pack of 4/0 circle hooks. Her voice had sand in it, or maybe that was just the register of it, low and a little rough at the edges. I bagged the worms and set the hooks on the counter between us. She picked up a three-ounce sinker from the display and rolled it in her palm.

“How long have you lived on this road?”

The question came without preamble, the way she’d said the other things. I looked at her hands. Short nails, a thin white scar across the base of her thumb. No rings.

“Most of my life,” I said. “The house past the marsh. The gray one with the bad gutter.”

“I know the one.” She set the sinker back in the tray, but not in the slot she’d taken it from. It sat crooked against the others. “I’m in the cottage next door. Moved in end of August.”

I nodded. I’d seen the truck in the driveway, a green F-150 with Maine plates that didn’t match the registration sticker. I’d noticed because I notice vehicles on Route 6, the same way I notice when a regular is a day late buying fuel line or when the tide turns without the wind shifting.

“You’re Caleb,” she said.

“I am.”

“The lobsterman.”

“Was.” I wiped my hands on the towel under the register. “Now I sell bait to people who still bother.”

She didn’t smile, but something moved in her face, a loosening around the mouth. “The worms look healthy.”

“They are.”

She paid in cash, folded the receipt twice, and left it on the counter. The bell stuck again as the door closed. I stood there a moment before I picked up the receipt and dropped it in the trash. Outside, the wind had picked up. Her coat flapped at the hem as she crossed the road, and I noticed she still wasn’t wearing shoes.

That night I did the books at the kitchen table. The shop had cleared two hundred and eleven dollars for the week, most of it from coffee and nightcrawlers. The lobster gear sat stacked in the yard under a tarp, the traps rusting through in places I didn’t look at anymore. My brothers had sold their shares after Dad drowned. I’d bought them out with money I didn’t have, because the alternative meant watching someone else’s truck in the driveway and someone else’s name on the license.

The house creaked in the wind. I poured a second cup of coffee and didn’t drink it. Through the kitchen window I could see the light in the cottage next door, a yellow square behind uncurtained glass. At some point the light went off, and I went to bed.

Sleep came in pieces. I woke at three with the dog growling low in the hallway.

Bones was a black lab mix, twelve years old, arthritic in the hips but still sharp at night. He stood at the front door with his hackers up, not barking, just a sound in his chest like a motor that wouldn’t catch. I called him. He didn’t move.

I got up and checked the lock. Through the narrow window beside the door I could see the cottage, dark now, and the marsh beyond it, and the water past the marsh, a flat black line under a sky without stars. Nothing moved. I put my hand on the dog’s head and felt the vibration there.

“Easy,” I said.

He didn’t settle until I went back to bed. I lay awake a long time after that, listening to the wind and the sound of my own breathing, and when I finally slept I