"I'm not rushing," Imani said.
"I know," Lino said. "I am talking to myself. Old habit."
She smiled in the dark and went back upstairs to sleep on the office couch for three hours, which was not wisdom and was sometimes survival.
VIII.
Keon Blake learned the marina in layers.
First layer: lines, fenders, where the cleats liked to bite, which docks got slippery after rain, which hose bibs gave strong pressure and which gave a sad trickle. Second layer: which captains nodded to apprentices and which looked through them, which stewards shared food and which guarded galley leftovers like treasure. Third layer: Grant Holbrook, who began saying good morning to Quaywright crew with a regularity that felt at first like surveillance and then like a man forcing a new habit through an old mouth.
Keon told his mother about the pier on a Sunday call. She went quiet for a long time and then said, "Do your work. Come home if the work stops being work." He told her about Destin's crew meeting, about the word seamanship, about Yara stealing him an extra piece of cornbread from a guest leftover tray when the guests had gone ashore. He did not tell her every time Holbrook said good morning. Some things were too small to explain and too large to ignore.
On his day off he took the bus inland to the community college where Quaywright partnered for the navigation module and sat in a fluorescent classroom with eight other apprentices from three different companies. The instructor was a Black woman named Janelle Coles who had skippered freighters and did not care about marina Christmas cards. She made them plot a course that included a fake squall and a fake stubborn guest. Keon failed the first timing and passed the second. After class Janelle said, "Golden Harbor treating you decent?"
Keon shrugged. "Some days."
"Some days is the industry," Janelle said. "Document the bad ones. Don't romanticize the good ones. And if your owner is the woman who signed Infinity Liquid, tell her Janelle says the season packet looked clean from here."
Keon grinned despite himself. "I'll tell her."
He told Imani that evening by text, because saying it face to face still felt like climbing a small hill. She replied: Janelle Coles is why half our charts make sense. Glad you're in her room.