Second Wind
The marina at dusk smells of salt and diesel and the particular brackish sweetness of Charleston harbor in summer, which is different from any other harbor smell I have encountered in twenty years of working the water. It is a smell I have loved since I was sixteen years old, scrubbing decks and cleaning salt from stainless-steel rails while my father was at home telling my brother which restaurants to take his friends to using the money I had contributed to the household without being asked.
My name is Avery Cole.
I am thirty-one years old and I own a sixty-two-foot motor yacht registered in my name at the National Vessel Documentation Center, insured under my company’s policy, maintained by my staff, docked at a slip for which I pay dockage fees twelve months a year whether anyone has used the boat that month or not.
On a Saturday in June, I sat in my car at that marina and watched eighty people in summer dresses and linen jackets board my boat for my brother’s engagement party, to which I had not been invited.
I did not argue.
I did not beg.
I said: enjoy the cruise.
And then I opened my phone.
I want to tell you how we got there.
My mother, June Cole, died when I was fifteen. She died the way some people die, suddenly and completely, in a way that reorganized everything about the family that survived her. The night after the funeral, I was in my room and I heard my father in the kitchen with my brother Weston, who was eighteen at the time, and my father said: from now on it’s just us two men.
Weston asked about me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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