Chapter 4: Ask Me Thursday

I did not answer a single one of the forty messages.

I put the phone in my pocket and went downstairs, and Winnie looked at my face and held out an apron.

"The window opens at ten," she said. "The girl who works it left for her sister's wedding in June and never came back."

"I don't know how to work a window."

"You pour coffee, you say good morning, you make change. I pay nine dollars an hour and all the bad jokes you can stand."

"Is that a real job?"

"It's the only one I've got."

I tied the apron on.

The window faced the ferry slip, and by noon I had sold forty coffees and learned which fishermen took sugar.

One fisherman told me the same joke three times, and I laughed the third time because I meant it.

At the end of the day Winnie counted out my pay in a pile of small bills and told me to keep it somewhere safe.

It was ninety-three dollars.

It was the first money I had ever earned that no one else had planned for me.

I held it in my hand for a while on the dock.

"Is that a bad sign?" Eli said. "Staring at money."

He had come up the slip behind me, wiping his hands on a rag, and he had a smear of grease along his jaw.

"It's my first paycheck here."

"Congratulations. Do you want to see the lighthouse?"

"I've seen it from the window every night."

"Not from the water."

I should have said no.

I said yes before he finished the sentence.

His boat was a small aluminum skiff with an outboard that he started on the second pull.

He handed me a life vest and a wool jacket that smelled of diesel and salt, and I zipped it to my chin.

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