“Diane,” I began after we were seated by the window, “I don’t know you too well, but I want to talk about my future. I need a little help.”
“Sure Ned,” she said. “I’m so sorry about your brother. Is that what this is about?”
“Yes.”
“Well, be careful,” she said. “Never make decisions in sorrow or in anger.”
“Right.”
“Let me just lay out the situation,” I continued. “Tell me what you think.”
She picked up her coffee which had just arrived, raised it to her lips, and took a small sip, noticing the Willard eagle on the side. When she set the cup back on the small, circular table, I blurted it out: “I may leave the firm.”
She didn’t blink an eye, probably not really caring one way or the other. But she did show the proper concern by asking why.
“The truth is,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to go back to Parkers. I thought it would probably be retirement, to some big mansion on the water.”
“Looking for grandeur?” she asked. “Or recognition as the hometown boy who made good?”
“Both, I guess. Parkers isn’t much of a town, really. Just a few crab houses with bars and not a one of them has tablecloths.”
“Is that your standard of excellence?” she said through a smile.
“Pretty much,” I said. “Even as a kid I wanted tablecloths. Clean and white. I think I went to law school to get away from formica.”
“I thought you were a fisherman,” she asked with a slightly scornful look. “With scales and guts and cutting those slimy fish open on the dock. Now you tell me you want table cloths.”
“This may be part of my problem,” I said, wanting to get the conversation back to my future. “I miss the water, the independence and orneriness of the people. But there’s a Brooks Brother in me that likes the city as well.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“My brother left me his boat. It’s an old wooden thing that my father left him. I have a lot of sentimental memories about it. Dad used it for crabbing for nearly 30 years. My brother was turning it into a charter fishing boat. Taking people out to catch rockfish. I guess the business is changing.”
“You want to run a crab boat?” she said incredulously.
“I used to tell my brother that I wanted to get back on the water. I thought it was romantic when I didn’t actually have to do it. It sounded great knowing that I had a law firm and enough money to buy any crab boat on the bay. So I dreamed of the smell of the saw grass in the morning, when the herons stand frozen in the marshes, or the egrets line the bulkheads, and the water is as still as porcelain. I miss dropping my hand over the side of the boat and letting the water rush through my fingers.”
“Oh brother,” she interrupted. Then she looked in my face and saw the yearning that could not be hidden. “Why not just do it. Buy a boat. Or take your brother’s. And slip out there on Saturday mornings for a little nostalgia.”
“There is a catch to this trotline Diane, that I haven’t mentioned,” I said. “My brother also left me about 75 acres, much of it on the water, probably worth several million dollars if it’s developed right.”
“What’s a trotline?”
“Sorry for the pun. It’s what the crabbers use,” I said, “they go out early in the morning, lay out about a thousand feet of trotline -- that’s what it’s called -- with a piece of bait every few feet. It settles down to the bottom of the bay. The crabs come to the bait for breakfast. The crabber waits a while, then pulls up the trotline, and as each crab comes out of the water, the waterman scoops him with a net and tosses him in a basket. Kids do the same thing when they tie a chicken neck to a string, let the crab take it, then pull him up. Same idea only the trotline makes it a kind of assembly line. Crabs are a hundred and fifty dollars a bushel today so the guy does all right. Pull in ten bushels a day and you live pretty well. Of course, you can’t do that every day. Actually, not many days.”
“Let’s get back to the land and the millions,” Diane said. “What’s the catch there?”
“I have to work the boat for five years to get the land.”
“What!” she exclaimed. “Was your brother a practical joker, or did he hate you? What’d you do to this fellow?”
“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I think he thought he was saving me from myself. He thought I belonged on the water. And this was a way to get me back. He probably also thought he would never die, or he could change the whole thing later if I turned out to be a phony baloney ambulance chaser.”
“What’s 75 acres worth out there?” she asked.
“Probably millions,” I said.
“Ned, for ten million I would leave Simpson, Feldstein and James so fast I couldn’t remember what the building looked like,” Diane said. “Besides, your brother didn’t say you couldn’t practice law. Hang your shingle in Parkers. Fish in the morning. Lawyer in the afternoon.”
“That may be a little much,” I offered. But I fell silent, realizing this was a new idea, worthy of consideration, and maybe a solution to lots of things.
“I may even have a first client for you,” she said, showing some enthusiasm for the project. “Listen Ned, you don’t have a problem. With millions at stake, you only have opportunities.”
This is why I liked Diane. Alone among most of the lawyers I know, she was a woman who could see opportunities. Admittedly she had detractors who saw her creativity as unbridled ambition, but I had never known her to chew anybody up or set a course that benefited her more than the client. Seeing around corners was a good quality for a lawyer, and I wasn’t the best at it. Mostly, I am a goal oriented, slightly lazy, above average intellect who sets a course and sticks to it, except for Saturday evenings at the Willard when I am likely to stroll off into the unknown with the first lady lobbyist who believes my line about becoming a Congressman some day. That’s not a pickup line I use often, but it has worked in some very ambitious circles, and it works amazingly well at the Willard because everyone who goes there expects to become President some day. That’s why the Willard is a very strange setting for discussing a new career as a waterman.
I dropped Diane off at the firm, noticing the warmth that comes from having a strong confident professional woman at your side. And the faint smell of pricy bath soap under starched linen was also nice.
My greatest fear of going back to Parkers was that it had changed. I might have lost my sense of reality about the place, with all that education, travelling around the country, seeing Europe for nearly three months after college. Just yesterday, after the memorial service, Parkers seemed raw and slightly dangerous. In high school I never feared going into a bar in Parkers, or visiting a crab house on Saturday night when you knew fights could occur. I knew everyone and their intentions. Now I was an outsider, under suspicion for my ambitions and perhaps my income. The safety of familiarity was gone. But still, I couldn’t forget the independence of heading your own boat out on the bay, spending six or seven hours in a cradle of waves, and returning home with the evening sun turning bright red. As I said goodbye to Diane, a single line of poetry floated through my mind: red sky at night, sailors delight. I never knew a waterman who could tell you who wrote that line, but they could all recite it, and most set their lives by it. I was doing it too.