Wait List

Jody H. Lehrer

WAIT LIST

It was the salty smell that Lilly noticed first. There was a whiff of sea spray she’d come to love as a child, when her father would take her out on his small wooden motor-boat every Sunday morning to go fishing. Before venturing out, she and her father would buy two donuts from a corner store near their home and Lilly‘s father would also buy himself a cup of coffee and Lilly some apple juice. After picking up what was to serve as their breakfast, the two would eagerly make their way to the boat.

The boat was old, but solid, and its wood gleamed, a testament to her father’s loving dedication and handiwork. Also noticeable to Lilly, but to a lesser degree, was the earthy scent of raw linseed oil that her father would regularly and fervently massage into entire surface area of his boat. Lilly loved the smell of linseed oil. Sadly, the cherished boat had burned in a fire years earlier.

Almost imperceptibly Lilly peered out from under the yellow bucket hat that she’d thrown on in the morning before leaving her apartment to walk to the bus stop. There, sitting just across from her, was an old man, the only passenger besides herself and a couple of noisy teenage boys jostling each other in the rear of the bus.

This stranger so resembled Lilly’s father that Lilly shifted slightly forward in her seat to peruse the man more closely. Could she be more obvious? It was as if Lilly were trying either to determine whether she was actually awake or to force herself to notice any physical differences between the two men. Feeling a sense of relief, Lilly observed several noticeable physical differences between this man and her father. Thankfully, the teenagers on the bus did not seem to notice the vigor with which Lilly studied the old man. For perhaps a few seconds, the boys glanced mindlessly at Lilly and then at the old man, before resuming their shenanigans.

The strange man was missing her father’s more heavily creased jowls and had substantially paler skin. Additionally, the man’s hair was slightly wavy while her fathers was straight, but both men had the same iridescent silver hair that Lilly had always marveled at as a girl.

The man was hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees, head down, fighting sleep as the bus jerked along the poorly paved road. He had on a pair of brown and tan two-toned Top Siders, badly stained with white flaky residue that Lilly knew instinctively was caused by the constant splashing of the surf. But it was the man’s oversized faded blue jeans that attracted her attention above all else.

She didn’t know whether to smile or cry, recalling how her father, much to her unrelenting embarrassment, had always insisted on wearing jeans at least a full size too large. He’d constantly hoist them up because he stubbornly rebuffed the idea of a belt. He would say to her, with a wink, “just think of me as a rap star and you’ll come to think of me as cool.” She would just shake her head. While she’d thought of her father as many things - big-hearted, funny, thoughtful, affable - no one had ever accused him of being cool.

Just when the bus came to a jittery stop, the man lifted his head revealing intense blue eyes just like her own, that dissolved into two slits when he smiled at her. When he got off the bus, she followed him, uncertain why, but knowing before he disembarked that she would. Lilly noticed uneasily that the man walked with her father’s gait: oddly smooth like a skater on the ice.

She lagged several paces behind him, ducking occasionally behind other pedestrians as he turned down a street marked “Olde Fisherman’s Pier.” She hesitated as the old man walked down the pier to its very end. The 10 boats she passed along the way were gleaming, new, ostentatious specimens with names like “Daddy’s Pride,” “Blue Rhapsody,” and “Wherefore Art Thou.”

She stopped abruptly just after Wherefore Art Thou and stared at the final boat slip: it was the old solid wooden motorboat she’d grown up with! But how could it be? The sight of this humble wooden motorboat, heavily weathered, but lovingly cared for, made her breath catch. She swore she could even smell the Lynn seed oil from where she stood on the pier. The old man hoisted up his sagging dungarees and carefully straddled the side rail on the boat and stepped into it.

She stood back behind the jumble of signs that lined the pier, just out of his sight had he chosen to look. She heard him start the boat’s motor and saw him pull out into the harbor shrouded with a low lying mist. Within minutes, the smaller modest boat disappeared amongst the many boats navigating through the water.

She hurried over to the manager’s booth at the end of the pier with a sense of urgency or, more accurately, desperation. She rapped her knuckles on the small flimsy door of the booth. It was nothing more than a thin weathered piece of plywood barely clinging to what passed as a door frame. There were no windows in the door or the remainder of the booth that was only slightly bigger than a phone booth.

Hanging from a rudimentary door knob was a broken padlock. Hesitantly, Lilly pushed the door open. The room was barren and had been empty for a long time. There was no furniture. There was no counter space or computer or office chair. In fact, there was nothing at all in the room, except for a single sheet of laminated paper lying on the floor. Lilly noticed the paper only because a thin stream of natural light highlighted the once white page.

Lilly knelt down to pick up the page. It read: “Only 10 Slips: Get on our Wait List.”