The Second Bay

Nate arrived at the meeting with a revised forecast and no coffee for me.

I noticed the absence, hated myself for noticing it, and opened my own flask.

Jonah appeared on the screen from a bare room in Denver. There was a cardboard box behind him marked KITCHEN, though it seemed to contain a shoe.

“Right,” he said. “Show me.”

We spent forty minutes on the numbers. I didn’t use Nate’s confession about wanting an address. I didn’t mention the night we’d spent together or how often he stayed late in the workshop. I talked about cash, lease length, the work actually booked and the amount of optimism required to fill the gap.

Nate argued back. He knew the winter repair market better than I did. He explained the jobs he had already turned away, the value of keeping a boat indoors between stages, the money lost when one slow…