Chapter 4: Not a Shelter

I choked on the whiskey.

Walter patted my back with great dignity while I coughed.

"Your building manager," I wheezed, "reports to you about trash cans?"

"He reports to me about everything. He's been bored since 1994." He sat back. "So. Remington."

"I didn't know he was the one."

"Clearly. Or you'd have snapped him instead of the card."

"Grandpa."

"I'm not angry. I'm delighted. Five years I tried to get you two in a room."

"We weren't in a room for talking."

He put his hands over his ears. "I am seventy-nine years old."

I laughed until I cried, and then I just cried, and he held my hand across the table and let me.

On the last ferry home I pulled out my phone.

Sister-in-law isn't a name.

I didn't answer.

He didn't text again.

I checked my phone a dozen times before I fell asleep.

Dina landed Sunday night and came straight from the airport with her suitcase still in the cab.

Dina Radcliffe was twenty-seven, a cloud of dark curls, a leather jacket, red lipstick even after a ten-hour flight.

She wrote the society column for the meanest gossip site in Seattle.

She hugged me hard enough to crack something.

"I brought you Italian cookies," she said. "And a list of ways to ruin a man."

"I already hit him with a bottle."

"That's chapter one. I've got twelve."

We went to the Halyard, the oyster bar on the waterfront.

It had been booked out for three months.

I'd never needed a reservation there.

When I was twenty-two I put the money my mother left me into a fifth of it, under the name Lane.

The manager knew me as a part-owner who drove a ferry and tipped too much.

He gave us the window table without a word.

Dina ordered for both of us and then leaned in.

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