Salty Sky Read online

  He missed preseason. But why? Was it the simplicity? The competition? Camaraderie? Did they still give freshmen swirlies? Could he still play? The height, broad-shoulders, narrow hips, and big hands were all still intact. His feet were as big as ever, which was good for balance. He could take an eighteen-year-old version of himself, but maybe not a twenty-two-year-old version.

  No, he’d take the twenty-two-year-old too, just not in a fair fight. Uncle Sam’s training took the fair fight out of him. He’d never wanted to fight, but if he needed to, why make it fair? How had he switched from thinking about playing to thinking about fighting?

  Time waited for no one, and he now ached when it rained and knew this weekend’s hangover would drag until Thursday. Untold hours in the gym and water slowed the atrophy. Twenty straight years selecting hand-to-hand combat training for his continuing education had calibrated his rise, plateau, and slow decline. What a blessing Maggie had gotten pregnant before his junior season—not just because of the twins, but because it forced manhood on him when he wanted more years of boyhood.

  His Augusts had gone through several cycles since his playing days. There were the girls’ cheerleading camp years. Those were his favorite Augusts for some reason. There was the year of night flights in the mountains. A decade of back-to-school shopping. One August, he crossed a border sixty times in thirty days. The hardest August, was as a new widower with daughters in high school. There was fruit wine miraculously growing in the bushes. White-knuckled trips to the gynecologist. An empty nester at thirty-nine—that was the second-hardest August. He had back-to-back father-of-the-bride Augusts. His next cycle of life was as a grandpa. If his grandkids had kids at twenty, he’d be a great-grandpa before he could collect social security, assuming they were still paying out social security at that point.

  Cale grabbed the iPhone to see if his daughters had called. No. This was the part of life’s cycle where he loved them more than they loved him.

  Maggie, Cale thought, I could have used you sticking around. I know, I’ve mentioned this before. I know you’ve mentioned you wanted to. I did my best as a father. I forced their dates to introduce themselves, even in college. I checked for a smile, a firm shake, a direct look in the eyes. Weather permitting, we’d meet in the backyard, me with my shirt off. I’d show whatever project I was working on. Did my power tools and slobbering dog deter the young men’s loins? The girls’ social networking left breadcrumb trails. Well, they survived. C’est la vie. They’ve started families of their own now. Old Gramps can wait for his Christmas cards to arrive and will not complain about it. I know you agree, but sometimes I need reminding.

  6

  WHAT DID MARK Twain say about life on a boat being like jail with a chance of drowning? How would Twain feel if he paid as much for the privilege as Joe had? Slips, refueling, and provisioning were all expensive. When the captain moved the boat without him and sent him a single bill, it was at least one quick slash of the knife rather than death by a thousand pinpricks.

  The boat was really his wife’s. She had passed eighteen months ago, six months after the boat was ordered and two months before it was delivered. He had tried to sell it, but he couldn’t stomach losing a million dollars on something he’d never used. Now his stomach felt differently. Between the cost of owning and operating Framed and entertaining family guests, a million dollars sounded OK.

  Maria had said, “Joe Pascarella, this boat will make your sons and grandkids come visit us.” But in truth, his sons were busy. They had families and careers. They barely had time for Joe to visit them. He saw his daughters-in-law’s hair go gray worrying about their two-year-olds out at sea.

  No, he was trying to put himself in a bad mood. He liked the boat, and he could afford it.

  Joe’s friend Tony Moreno was onboard. As teenagers, they started together as apprentice carpenters. In their twenties, they became foremen together. At forty-two, after twenty-five years, Joe retired from the union to be a developer. Tony’s crews worked his local projects. Retired after forty-seven years in the union, Tony was in good financial shape with a nice pension and benefits for life.

  On this trip, Joe’s nephew and two friends—all three professional fitness trainers—were along as a favor to his sister. He paid to have them flown from Islip to Miami. They were accompanying Tony, the captain, and Joe up the East Coast to Sag Harbor. For the first half of the trip, they hadn’t been much help. Then again, the ship hadn’t been attacked by pirates, so maybe their waxed chests deterred high crimes at sea.

  Joe couldn’t get straight what to think of guys whose job was to get stay-at-home moms to do push-ups and sit-ups and who then did the same thing themselves in their free time. Joe had loved baseball as a kid, and his arms showed that he’d swung a hammer for the next twenty-five years. But his gut showed that he didn’t buy into the exercise-for-appearances phenomenon.

  The trip started with flat seas up to Jacksonville. For dinner Joe, Tony, and the captain went to Hooters and watched the Yankees while they ate. The trainers saw a Jaguars preseason game. The next day, they left early and arrived late in Charleston. They ate Low Country food heavy with butter. The trainers explored town while Tony and Joe retired to the flybridge and pinochle.

  THE THREE GIRLS met two months ago, when they’d moved to Charleston as traveling nurses. They shared an apartment their agency paid for, and they worked the ER, moving between triage stations and assisting general practitioners with minor cut-and-sew operations or setting bones. Occasionally, they took shifts in the surgical center, where surgeons with IQs of 140, coke-bottle glasses, and fish-belly skin dropped f-bombs like drill sergeants. Anesthesiologists, who enjoyed themselves more than other specialties in med school, calmed the patients’ nerves as they put them to sleep. The nurses stayed observant, made sure everything went smoothly. They made sure no instruments were left in a belly and no shortage of catgut.

  After work, they hit the gym, watched a DVD, and got takeout. On their days off, they lived the traveling part of their titles. In four trips, they’d been to every beach in South Carolina and Georgia they’d heard of. They had closed down The Salty Dog in Hilton Head and stumbled through the pine trees to the Marriott. They had eaten twenty types of seafood at Bernie’s in Myrtle Beach. They had drunk Natural Lights with lime at Ocean Annie’s, near Kingston’s Plantation. They had paddled around alligators at St. Simon. They had been stung by jellyfish at Tybee Beach.

  This weekend, they’d planned to drive into North Carolina. The bags were already in the trunk when the big guy had a personal collision with Ashley’s car. Now, instead, she awoke to the sound of big diesel boat engines. She felt them more than heard them. The boat left its slip slowly in reverse, then went forward, then reverse again, and finally steadily forward. Without getting out of bed, she pulled back the porthole’s curtain and watched the sky behind the sailboat masts that they passed.

  “How does the weather look, Ash?” asked one of her roommates.

  “Sunny,” Ashley said. “Do we have any sunscreen?”

  “Sure, here you go.”

  The cabin was as private as a boat got. It was the only one you didn’t go through the main salon to get to. You entered a slow-opening, shock-pressure-assisted door. It opened vertically, and the cabin was down several steep stairs. The only window was an inoperable porthole. The cabin had a small built-in dresser, a really small bathroom, and a queen-size bed. It abutted the engine room—normally crew quarters.

  The girls dressed for a day on a boat: bikinis under a layer of light clothing for the morning breeze. Ashley was the first to come out of the hatch.

  LEAVING CHARLESTON, JOE looked back at the city, a special place in the early dawn light. When the first stowaway climbed out of the aft stateroom, Joe spilled Folgers on his Docksiders. She wore a thin hooded sweatshirt and board shorts, and a bikini strap was visible inside her baggy collar.

  Seeing Joe, she sang out, “What a beautiful morning. Hi, my name’s Ashley Wa
lker. Are you Mr. Pascarella?”

  Blonde hair, West Texas smile, Southern California wardrobe. Joe rubbed the pendant on his necklace and smiled.

  “Ashley, I never knew how much St. Christopher liked me until this moment.” Where did that came from? It was almost smooth. Well, if she knew St. Christopher was the patron saint of travelers, then it was smooth. Either way, it was flattering. They locked eyes. Joe noticed that a brightness rose in her cheeks.

  Ashley’s friends bumped her from behind as they tried to leave the cabin. Joe found a towel to clean up the coffee. Ashley made the introductions, but Joe missed the other girls’ names.

  After the shock, he learned that Ashley and her friends were traveling nurses. They were stationed in Charleston for the year, working a seven days on, seven days off schedule. They were starting their seven off. He loved the youthful looseness in their plan to get a rental car and drive home from wherever this cruise ended.

  A traveling nurse was a new concept to Joe. Apparently, they were well paid and served in the country’s most troubled hospitals, like secular missionaries, often in the country’s most exciting cities. They worked twelve-month contracts and then picked a new place to go.

  The three nurses had been parked in front of Rainbow Row’s brightly colored homes. One of the trainers had physically stumbled into Ashley’s car, leaving a dangling mirror and oversized knee imprint in the side panel. Of course, the stumbler was Gino, Joe’s nephew. The negotiation over the incident ended with the trainers offering the girls a trip up the coast on Gino’s uncle’s yacht and an agreement that $1,000 would cover the damage. None of the trainers had the money on them. Joe figured, What’s another $1,000, given the upgrade in company now onboard?

  THE BOAT SPLIT the buoys—red on the left and green on the right. They made it to open water and turned north. The captain promised good traveling conditions this morning. He pushed the throttle down to a cruising speed of twenty-five knots. This was different from a booze cruise.

  Joe and Tony’s accents were different from the younger guys’. They said their accents were different because there were not as many first-generation Italians and Irishmen in the city or on Long Island now; most of the first generations now were Pakistani or Caribbean. Ashley wasn’t sure they believed this was the reason, but she could tell that’s what they felt was wrong with their old neighborhood. They didn’t use racial slurs or towelhead jokes, but she knew they missed the old neighborhood’s communal feel. Maybe it did take a village.

  Ashley joined her friends to sunbathe on the deck. They listened to music through their iPhone earbuds. She felt restless and sat on the bowsprit to watch the water below, trying to guess which wave would splash the boat hard enough to spray her. For some reason, that never grew old.

  Tony came to ask about lunch. “Girls, what can I make you for lunch?”

  “Tony, show us the kitchen, and I’ll fix lunch for y’all.”

  “On a boat it’s the galley, and youse are our guests. Besides, I can’t have you Southern girls frying chicken while we’re motoring out here. You’d spill so much grease you’d burn us down. The coast guard couldn’t get here quick enough. I will make lunch.”

  “We’re more like stowaways, and I promise not to use the deep fryer. How about you and I fix it together for everybody?”

  “Everybody but the Fabios. They have chemicals they eat to get the chemicals out of their bodies. We don’t want to get the chemistry wrong and give them pimples; they wouldn’t come out of their room for a week.”

  Tony used plates with a rubbery ring around the bottom to keep them from sliding. He threw potato chips on the six plates, while Ashley ripped apart a rotisserie chicken and mixed the meat with mayonnaise, grapes, and onion to make chicken salad. She scooped it onto the rye bread Tony gave her, peppered it, and sliced the sandwiches diagonally.

  The captain skippered the boat from the salon’s controls. Joe read a book in the covered lounge outside the main level. The boat had so many spaces that it was hard for Ashley to know what to call each one. She delivered the plates and sat with Joe to eat, while Tony dropped into a chair and picked up the ESPN college football preview issue.

  “Joe, how do you become a good negotiator?”

  She saw that the question caught Joe off guard.

  “Why do you think I’m a good negotiator? How could someone who owns this money pit be a good negotiator?”

  “Well, you’re successful. I don’t think you’re in the Mafia. So you must have negotiated a lot.”

  “I guess. Maybe I’m a good business negotiator but a bad personal negotiator. Do you want business or personal negotiating advice?”

  “Let’s start with business.”

  “Good, business is easy. The best way to negotiate is to know that you don’t care if you get what you’re negotiating for.”

  “But aren’t there times when I will care?”

  “Not really. You only think you care. Give me any business worry, and I can make you see you don’t care.”

  “Big picture,” she said. “I want to start a staffing company that provides nurses. It’s what I know, and hospitals always need good suppliers of contract nurses. But I want the nurses to work three ten-hour shifts in a hospital and one ten-hour shift in a shelter for homeless or abused women and children each week. A lot of nurses would love this. Helping people is why they became nurses to begin with, even if, somewhere along the way, they forgot that. But how do I negotiate with the hospitals to get them to pay for the shifts at the shelter? I have ten friends who’d join me tomorrow if we could get a contract!”

  “So what do you think your concern is?”

  “I need the hospitals to pay for the shift at the shelter. I’ve tried to sell them the idea by saying that they’d be helping the community and that they’d get good press from it. They said they couldn’t afford to pay for it. I showed them all the information about how when they see these patients in the ER, they lose more money than if they paid someone to treat them before they came to the ER. They still said they couldn’t afford it.”

  “Ashley, I think you got the focus of what you care about scrambled up. I don’t think what you care about is getting the hospital to pay for the shift at the shelter. I think what you care about is (a) getting nurses into more rewarding work without giving up money and (b) helping some people in trouble stop their small problems before they become big problems. A stitch in time saves nine. Right?”

  “That sounds right, but what’s the difference?”

  “So now you know you don’t care about getting the hospital to pay for the shift. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Once you know that, instead of ‘guess’ you do, then you don’t have to keep trying to sell them on paying for that shift. You can change your pitch and say the girls—and boys, sorry—will be happier, give better care, stay in their jobs longer, whatever argument you want to use if they get this day at the shelter. You can change it from one day a week to one week a month. Again, whatever argument you can use is great. But now that you know that you don’t care if the hospital pays for the shift, what you negotiate changes.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “What you care about is the outcome, not how it’s paid for. Why not ask for 25 percent more per hour and use that to pay for it? Take less profit from running the company. Sell it to doctor offices instead of hospitals. I don’t know the answer, but I know if we noodle it around for an hour, day, week, or month, we’d come up with a lot of ways to swing it. It helps in a negotiation not to be pressured to make something happen.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There are a thousand ways to skin a cat. You think about it. I’ll think about it with my eyes closed for the next half hour.” He smiled, got up, and climbed the steps to the flybridge.

  Lesson over, Ashley thought. She grabbed the magazine Tony had been reading.

  JOE KNEW THE trainers’ plan didn’t include the girls staying in their own stat
eroom. Who could resist the primate grunts that passed for their discourse? He grinned at their disappointment from the first night.

  Joe reflected on a good day. During the ride to North Carolina, he spent a lot of time with the nurses, and the trainers kept to themselves. As they headed to port, the sky was sunny, but the waves grew larger. The captain said the first hurricane of the season was six hundred miles to the east. Joe kept wondering what about being around a beautiful woman made the air a little clearer and the sun a little brighter.

  THAT AFTERNOON, WHEN the boat had docked, the girls changed into shorts, sports bras, and running shoes. They found a jogging path around an elementary school on the island near some marshes and did a couple of loops. The path was busy with joggers and dog walkers. A field hosted folks tossing Frisbees. On a concrete basketball court, men played five versus five, with extra players waiting for the next game.

  They stopped at a public boat ramp in the shadow of a drawbridge connecting the island to the mainland. It was two hundred yards and several socioeconomic levels from the marina. There were kids crabbing in knee-deep water. Old black men sat on five-gallon buckets, fishing with cut bait. Flat-bottomed metal boats and fiberglass ski boats queued up to get out of the water. Men backed trailers attached to pickup trucks onto the ramp and snapped at their wives as they tried to load the boats onto the trailers. The men from every boat without children dumped empty beer cans into the open-top trash cans in the parking lot.

  IN THE EVENING, Joe and Tony walked across the bridge. They found two stools at a busy oyster bar with seven-foot-high ceilings and ordered two pounds of steamed shrimp, cornbread, and longnecks. The place did good business. After dinner, they bought a pack of Winstons and another round. They tipped out and went to the front porch to watch the busy two-lane street and sidewalk.