MARCH 1-3
1429 Words
Russell shook any errant sawdust off the paper towel and wrapped it around his sandwich. He grabbed a beer from the cooler and a box of crackers. He set his lunch on the table he’d just finished making. Once more he lifted the top to admire the chart drawer built right into the tabletop. Room for four around the settee or drop the table down level with the benches and it could sleep two. Especially if they were feeling cuddly.
He pulled out his laptop and set it beside his dinner just as Nutcase crawled out from behind a pile of books. He plugged in a mouse and booted the machine while she ambled over to check out his roast beef sandwich. When he flapped a hand at her, she just moved to the other side of his beer and plopped her butt down on the table. Then she started on the impossible task of bringing order to her fur.
Russell took a bite of the sandwich and shoved a Springsteen CD into the car stereo mounted in its little cubby. He flicked a switch to turn off the speakers in the cockpit so that he didn’t disturb anyone else in the marina.
Once the laptop was up, he wiped the mustard from his fingers, and plugged in the chip from his camera. It started transferring the pictures automatically. Almost three hundred. s**t! He hadn’t done this in a while.
While the copy bar chugged along, he started sorting them out. Lighthouses. Boat remodel. Nutcase. Angelo. More Nutcase. Melanie. Flying. Melanie.
Then one stopped him. It was a shot of just Melanie’s face—her watching him as she lounged in the rooftop hot tub with the steam rising into the chill Valentine’s Night. A vase of a dozen long-stem roses floated nearly rim deep beside her. A glass of wine perched on the edge of the tub behind her. But it was her eyes he couldn’t get away from.
She was right.
There was something he didn’t get.
The computer dinged that it was done and he went back to his filing. The last was a series of shots he’d taken of Angelo cooking, plating, greeting customers, visiting tables. And close-ups of many of his dishes.
That’s when the idea caught up with him. He did a quick Internet search—there it was. The Bite of Seattle. Twenty-five years old, now one of the major trademark festivals of the city. A Seattle institution. It was perfect.
He popped up his layout software and began tinkering. The first ad came together so fast it worried him a bit, but the first draft was good. It had sharpness. It had edge. He’d have to run the comps past Angelo, but it was the right answer. Seattle, Tuscany, great food, all in one pitch. Angelo’s –a bite of Tuscany.
No, not homey enough. Angleo’s remodel had turned his Pike Place Market address from the American cliché of a modern Italian restaurant into a cozy Tuscan family room.
When Russell was there the worries of the world felt far away. It was safe…comfortable. He tried to picture a lady just beside him. He’d be content. As if sitting with his feet stretched toward—
Angelo’s Tuscan Hearth.
Bloody perfect! Damn he was good.
He e-mailed it off to a print shop to run a full-size for Angelo.
Another bite of his sandwich and he cranked up the Bruce a bit before turning back to sorting the images, an action almost automatic with the years of practice. Contact sheets were a thing of the past, which he didn’t miss at all, but he did miss the darkroom work. Now it was all load ‘em up and crank ‘em out.
Nutcase’s folder grew faster than he expected. The kitten afraid to leave its box that first night. The kitten discovering that there were things worse than crawling into the bilge, like being washed with soap afterward to remove the muck. Sleeping on the boom was her latest trick. Russell had almost catapulted her overboard when he came about one day. Now he knew to check the boom and Nutcase had learned to dive for the deck when he shouted, “Helms a-lee!”
Nutcase was about halfway through her preening. He reached over and mussed her fur as thoroughly as he could until the cat batted at his hand, rolled over on her back and started to wrestle.
He recovered his hand with only a few scratches and knocked back the rest of his beer.
He created subfolders for each lighthouse. There. That was the shot he’d print out to give to Angelo’s mom. Lighthouse blurry with its distance off the stern. Angelo sitting with the tiller in one hand and a stainless-steel travel mug of cocoa in the other. Rain hood blown back off his dark, curly hair, a smile of sheer bliss on his Mediterranean-dark face.
Russell started marking the best images for printing. He’d ship them to Arnie in New York. No one else could do what she did with digital-to-paper; the woman was a magician.
West Point lighthouse was easy. His favorite shot of the Alki light had a red blemish in one corner. It distracted the eye from the lighthouse and ruined the balance of steadfast lighthouse and transitory, upscale homes clustered about it.
Maybe he should check his camera.
The next image had the same red mark. But it wasn’t in the same spot in the frame. He flipped through half a dozen before he found one where the mark was a different shape.
He zoomed in. The mark wasn’t a blemish, it was a person. They wore a bright red coat, but he didn’t have enough resolution. The blemish might have brown hair, or maybe red, or maybe neither. A head made up of three pixels wasn’t enough information for any detail.
“Well, man or woman, you’re messing up my picture.”
Nutcase stuck her nose around the corner of the screen to peer at it intently. As Russell pulled the mouse to select the more recent Lime Kiln lighthouse photos, she pounced on the mouse’s wire. He almost picked up the camera, but he already must have a dozen shots of her doing just this.
He opened everything in the Lime Kiln folder. Not many shots of the lighthouse, about as many as of the whale. There were far more of the stupid cat.
He reached for his beer, but his hand never made it there.
“Red coat.”
Nutcase ignored him, watching the mouse intently and waiting for movement.
Again no close-ups, though better than Alki, brown hair, rich russet-brown and long. This was not a guy and a guy wouldn’t wear a calf-length red coat.
The hair.
Long enough to reach well past her shoulders if it weren’t being blown about. He zoomed in, but her face was just a tiny cluster of tan pixels in a sea of russet.
Lime Kiln in March and Alki lighthouse in February.
He pulled the mouse back from Nutcase’s grasp and pulled up the West Point photos from January.
No red coat. No one at the lighthouse. That would be too much of a coincidence. He pulled up the spoiled images from the trashcan.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Then the one where he’d misjudged a wave and snapped more of the north shore than he intended. He’d discarded the shot because mostly he’d caught the wastewater treatment plant.
Huddled among the lee-side rocks there was a banner of dusky red hair caught in the wind. She wore a tan coat and black pants, but it was definitely the same hair. And she was very slender.
Someone had the same calendar he did. He double-checked the file dates; the first of every month which proved he wasn’t losing what little remained of his mind.
He pulled Angelo’s calendar off the bulkhead and flipped to April. Slip Point lay out on the Olympic Peninsula, and most of the way down the straits of San Juan de Fuca. Treacherous water there, but it would be good practice, especially if he was going to go deep sea by year end.
He buzzed through the calendar and looked at the last lighthouse. He dug around until he found a pen and put a note on December first.
Wow! He was really going to do this. He was going to unplug from society and sail into the dream that his thirteen-year-old brain had painted across a New York City bedroom ceiling. Russell reached for the beer, but it was empty.
He’d go to each lighthouse first—by then both he and the boat would be ready. It was taking longer than he’d expected. But there was no real hurry anyway and he wanted to be around until Angelo was really up and rolling. Then who knew where his next port of call would be.
He checked the December note once more before he closed the calendar.
“Leave.”
- Writer
