“Hey, hey,” he said.
I shook my head, pulling the door open.
“I’m sorry, okay? She’s just really stressed right now.”
“No, she’s rude. And I have better things to do than stand here and be insulted.”
“I know.” He reached out, putting a hand on my arm. “Look, just . . . give me five seconds, okay? Please?”
I didn’t say anything. But I didn’t leave either.
“Five seconds,” he repeated, pointing at me. Then he went inside, shutting the door behind him.
Stupid, I thought, as I stood there, watching a family cross the street and start up the public access path to the beach. The kids, two of them, ran ahead, while the parents hung back, holding hands. The sun was just beginning to go down.
My phone beeped. I pulled it out of my purse and glanced at the screen. One missed call, one text, both from Luke. The latter said simply, Eat?
I looked inside at Sand Dollars, all lit up. I still wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing here, and even less certain I could explain it to Luke. Instead I wrote, Still working. Will call soon.
I’d just hit Send when Theo stepped out, now wearing a jacket, a handheld video camera in one hand. He smiled at me. “Ready?”
“That depends. Where are we going?” I asked him, as he went down the stairs ahead of me.
“You’re the local,” he said over his shoulder. “You tell me.”
“I don’t know what you want to see.”
“Colby. And not the tourist spots. The real stuff.”
He was at my passenger door now, waiting to get in. “This isn’t New York,” I warned him. “The grand tour is not exactly . . . grand. We could cover it all in about fifteen minutes.”
“Which is fifteen more than we have so far.” He popped the cap of the camera lens, pointing it at me. A little red light came on, and I felt a bolt of nervousness, unexpected. Then he smiled at me. “Let’s go.”
* * *
I had standard answers when clients or tourists asked me for suggestions for things to do in Colby besides hitting the beach. Walk up the boardwalk. Visit the aquarium and Maritime Museum. Eat the famous onion rings at the Last Chance Café. Rent bikes from Abe’s and follow the sound-side paths that wound past the marshes and tidal pools. As Theo and I waited to turn onto the main road, though, none of my go-to choices felt right.
Real, I repeated to myself, as my turn signal ticked. He was still holding the camera, pointing it out at the traffic passing. When the light changed, I went left, driving a couple of miles, then took a right. Two blocks down a gravel road, the fish house came into view. Just like most nights around this time, the lot was crowded with trucks backed up to the ramp and slips, people moving between them. I pulled into a spot and cut the engine.
“What’s this?” Theo asked.
“You want local. This is about as local as it gets.” I opened my door and got out. He followed, the camera still in his hand. “You might want to put that away, for now. These folks don’t really crave publicity.”
He nodded, slipping it into his jacket pocket, then fell into step behind me as we crossed the lot, the gravel crunching under our feet. We were still about a hundred feet from the first row of trucks when the smell hit.
“Whoa,” I heard him say, right on schedule. “That’s pungent.”
“Fish. You’ll get used to it in a minute.” I cut between two pickups, then down the walkway to the main door. Inside, the smell was even stronger, filling the one small, open room, mostly bare except for a few tables and several garbage cans. A counter along the far wall was lined with coolers, guys moving around them packing that day’s haul and dumping ice from plastic bags. Through the back doors, which opened out into the boatyard, I could see more people at cleaning stations, cutting and scaling.
“That’s red drum,” I said to Theo, pointing at a pile of fish on newspaper on one of the tables. “There’s also usually shrimp this time of year. Sometimes cobia. And . . . that looks like bluefish.”
“Striper,” a tall guy wearing rubber boots, who was loading a cooler, corrected me. He was wearing a Finz Bar and Grill baseball hat, the closest thing to labeling yourself a local. Tourists never went there.
“Striper,” I repeated. To Theo I added, “This is the stuff you’ll be eating at the Reef Room this weekend. And just about everywhere else you order fish.”
“You better hope so, anyway,” a guy on my other side said, shaking some ice into a cooler. “Better than last week’s.”
Theo stuck his hand into his jacket pocket, raising his eyebrows at me. I cleared my throat, then said to the guy in the Finz cap, “Okay if my friend shoots some video? He’s trying to get footage of the ‘real’ Colby.”
As I expected, the guy—and those hearing this around him—immediately looked wary. “Real,” he repeated, narrowing his eyes at Theo. “For what?”
“It’s a documentary,” Theo told them. “By Ivy Mendelson? She did Cooper’s Way?”
They all just looked at him.
“It’s about some New York artist who claims Colby inspires him,” I explained.
This, of course, brought a round of guffaws. “Inspired, huh?” our friend in the Finz hat said. “Hey, I’m inspired, too. Every day, by my mortgage statement.”
“And my power bill,” someone else chimed in.