To her right was a seat with a table surrounded by more radios and navigation gear than she’d ever imagined. The table was like those old school desks with the lift-up lid. She peeked and it held logbooks and charts, presumably if the equipment broke down. In a drawer she found a steel sextant. That made her feel a little safer, though she had no idea how to use one. An instruction book was tucked in beside it and Vonda vowed to learn that skill before they reached Seattle.

  As she moved forward, there were big comfortable bench seats to either side, long enough to stretch out on, and a folded-up table in the middle of the aisle. With the flaps raised, it could seat at least six or seven comfortably.

  Beyond that was a grand master suite—at least grand in a very small-space way. A bed big enough for two on the left. Closet and dresser on the right. Straight ahead a shower and sink, and a toilet with enough levers to run a spaceship. She’d definitely need lessons on that. There was a big round metal pole by the door that she finally realized was the bottom of the mast that passed through the floor as well.

  But this couldn’t be right. Rose and Myles must sleep here, yet there were no clothes or personal stuff.

  She set her pack down on the deck and returned aft to ask what she was missing.

  As she returned, she saw what it was for herself.

  Because she’d been facing forward, she’d missed that to either side of the ladder descending from the cockpit, toward the rear, were two more suites. Each had a bed as big as the one up forward. Oddly, there was gear stowed in both of those rather than all in one.

  She also found a second bathroom behind a closed door. Well, maybe the forward suite actually was hers, far more luxury than she’d expected. Vonda had imagined a bigger version of Margo’s plastic-coated bench seats in a cramped cabin.

  This boat she could happily move aboard and never leave.

  “Here, catch!” A male voice called. She turned barely in time to catch a bag with three big loaves of fresh-baked bread.

  That was how she met Myles Lauer.

  7

  “Are we racing?” Vonda asked in breathy excitement.

  Somewhere around the time they graduated from cradles to cribs, Myles had learned to trust Rose’s judgement of people. So, he wasn’t worried about Vonda Decosta, but he didn’t know quite what to make of her either.

  She was cute, pleasant, and her arms and legs were about as big around as pencils. But a joy radiated from the woman that made the sun shine brighter off the tropical water and the greens of Maui hillsides beckon deeper and richer.

  He always spent too much time worrying, and Vonda brought none of that. She appeared to be a carefree sprite on the verge of hyperventilating with her passion. And she was being damned cute in the process.

  “Not real racing,” Rose answered before he could. “A lot of the return boats depart at the same time. Think of it as a casual race but mostly it’s safety in numbers if anyone gets in trouble. We’ll spread out over time, but probably never more than a day or so apart. Though we could well be in the lead most of the way, Maybelline is the largest and one of the fastest boats this year.”

  Myles tried to remember the last time Rose had said as many words in a row. He couldn’t.

  As he had the helm at the moment, Rose led Vonda around the boat, preparing for departure. They were anchored offshore in the Lahaina Roads, but the boat had been wrapped up tight during the week since its arrival.

  Rose demonstrated how to prep the lines and then the two of them began unwrapping the sails. When they were ready, he raised the main and heaved it in close. That kept Maybelline’s bow into the wind.

  Then they set the big forward genoa, but left it to slap in the breeze.

  Rose made quick work of heaving the anchor aboard, securing it, and making sure all of the rode, both chain and line, were fed cleanly into the chain locker.

  He could see that Vonda was game, but she was even weaker than her thin limbs made her look. Oh well, she could still help with chores and cooking. Keep a soul company on those long silent watches.

  At least she wasn’t a chatterer.

  While they secured the anchor, he spun the wheel to starboard. Maybelline drifted backward and twisted as she came off the anchor and the sails took the wind. They lost less than a boat length before there were moving forward. He spun the wheel to center, hauled in on the gennie sheet, and they were eased ahead smoothly.

  A casual glance around showed he wasn’t first off the anchor…but he was close. And because the others were to the south, he was first on the northern tack up the Roads, the channel between Maui and Molokai.

  He didn’t much care, but Barry had been at the dock to see him off. Give ’em hell, Myles. He’d bet that Barry was watching from the shore and grinning as they pulled away first. The man was competitive in ways Myles would never understand.

  His body remembered as much as he did himself. As the sails drew, the boat began to put on way, he was already coiling lines properly to set for the next tack—though with these perfect winds, that could be hundreds of miles ahead.

  As he worked in the cockpit while Rose and Vonda finished on the deck, he felt the music of the waves wash over him. It had been far too long since he’d sailed. Barry had missed last year’s race with a fractured keel, and it had been too late to arrange a ride with anyone else.

  Once they were cleaned up and solidly underway, he made a strumming motion to signal Rose to grab his guitar. Maybelline had settled into her course like a prime mare out for a lazy canter, loping over the waves with little tending needed. He set the autopilot and watched for a minute to make sure it was behaving.

  He took the small travel guitar, plugged in a book-sized powered-speaker, and gave it a strum to check the tuning as he rested a foot on one of the lower wheel spokes so that he could keep track of what the autopilot was up to.

  Myles fooled around with a few minor chords, but it wasn’t a minor chord sort of day. C? No, the slightly deeper G, they were on an ocean, not a lake.

  Vonda dropped an iced tea in the holder by the wheel for him, and then stretched out on a cockpit seat as if she’d never been anywhere else. That smile of purest joy was plastered on her face.

  He futzed around with a few chords, but decided to keep it simple. It was that sort of a ride on the waves today.

  “Sailing it’s…” he started out then spotted the look of bliss on Vonda’s face, “Such a joy.” He tried the line a few times with different cord progressions. Nope, keep it simple: G, C.

  “Sailing it’s such a joy…” he repeated it a few times. First with a folk strum, then he tried picking some of the notes, and finally settled on an upbeat sea chanty strum.

  “Sailing it’s such a joy.” The autopilot briefly lifted, then lowered his foot on the wheel spoke. Like he was playing in a bathtub. “Sailboat just a big kid’s toy.” Barry was definitely a big kid when it came to the subject of his sailboat.

  Myles tweaked the autopilot heading as they cleared the Lahaina Roads and headed north into the open sea. Rose ran out the main and gennie for best draw on the new heading.

  “Sailing along that reach,” a glance behind, “Anchor right off the big gold beach.”

  He backtracked through the two lines as Rose brought out her bass and a small speaker of her own. He was running G, C, D, G…but that felt like a verse, not a chorus.

  Rose thumped out a G, C, G, D. Rocking the chords with the rhythm of the boat. Absolutely right.

  Sippin' wine with the settin' sun,

  Stars coming out, look I see first one!

  (He always loved the first night at sea.)

  Sailing’s just right for me.

  I'm just a natural born sailor, can't you see!

  He rocked the melody back and forth a few times as Rose came in under him to set it solid and ocean deep.

  A verse. Hmm… He eyed Vonda. Clearly a neophyte.

  First time I ever sailed a boat,

  Could hardly believe I was afloat,

  Sailed upon a little lake,

  (Rose had told him about her sole experience on Lake Washington.)

  Oops! Watch that sail, feel the sun bake.

  Was a time of so much joy,

  Back when I was jes’ a little-bitty (girl didn’t fit, so he put in himself) boy.

  All morning they fooled with verses. He sang a sailor’s lifetime of verses. Spinning out different versions until they merged and blurred.

  When finally his fingers were sore and his stomach was growling, he put aside the guitar.

  “Damn I wish I’d recorded some of that.”

  Vonda handed him a notebook and a pen with a well-chewed end.

  And there it was.

  Three verses and a tight chorus. The first verse hadn’t changed much, all about the joy of sailing. The second verse of adventures. Good lines that Vonda had mixed and matched. He’d never put them together this way, but there the adventures were: dolphins off the bow, the small port towns, and the new friends that always floated there.

  The third verse was years later. Not some romantic ending, which he typically shied away from. Nor old age looking back, one of his most common endings. It was still wrapped up in the joy of living:

  I sailed some years upon the seven seas,

  One fine day while reachin' on a breeze.

  Saw something big way up ahead, (dramatic pause)

  School o' whales just a-gettin' out of bed.

  The last couplet didn’t work, nor could he find one he liked in the three pages of notes and scratchings. But when he played it through, the full circle came out and had Vonda scrabbling to take the notebook back and write it down.

  They seemed so free and full of joy,

  Reminded me of that little-bitty boy!

  Full circle. It wasn’t big, deep, or important. It was pure fluff, but rife with emotion, the emotion of joy from a life spent sailing.

  He looked up at Vonda, “You’re hired.”

  Her smile was radiant.

  8

  Vonda felt as if she’d been drugged with far more than a turkey sandwich on fresh-baked sourdough and too much sugar in her iced tea.

  She hadn’t dared sing along, of course.

  Couldn’t believe she’d handed over the verses at all. But she hadn’t been thinking as she’d scribed and rearranged what Myles had spilled out so effortlessly. Then he’d asked for his own words so she’d handed her notes over before she could stop herself.

  It was like Woodie Guthrie, one of the greatest folk singers of all time. He’d spent his entire life spinning out tunes. Hundreds had been collected, but thousands more had probably been played once and lost in the winds atop a train or in front of a campfire as he hoboed around the country for so much of his life. They might all have been lost if Alan Lomax hadn’t discovered him and recorded so many of them.

  Myles would have been willing to let his words spill out over the ocean and be lost.

  Yet he’d so captured how she was feeling.

  Last night, when she’d called home, Mom had been all worried. Dad had simply said, Sounds like fun, honey. Do it.

  And here she was on the first day of her first big sailing adventure—and there was a song about it. That was crazy, wild, and wonderful.

  The next few days were wet, not stormy, but the rain was steady enough that there was no music on deck.

  Rose and Myles had slowly trained her to handle the big wheel, and then the sails. The autopilot did the work most of the time, but they turned it off to teach her. Even with the autopilot, she never stood a watch alone, but she was helping.

  Not being helped, instead helping.

  And the power of steering the big boat was a visceral thrill as if her heart had come alive for the first time in a year.

  “You’re getting the hang of it,” Rose said. It was the six-to-midnight watch. The rain had been left behind and the first stars were peeking through holes in the clouds, seeing if it was safe to come out.

  “Thanks.” Vonda could be casual around Rose. Myles was still up on a pedestal: musical, funny, handsome, and kind. All except one thing, “Can I ask a personal question?”

  And there it lay like a dead fish on the deck with no way for her to pretend she wasn’t the one who’d tossed it there.

  Rose shrugged a yes, only visible in the darkness because of the phosphorescent wake their passagewas churning up in the ocean.

  “Don’t you two get along? I mean you’re not breaking up, are you?” It came out as a whisper in the night. She could feel Myles sleeping in his bed directly below where they both sat in the cockpit, only feet away.

  She could feel Rose’s attention but couldn’t see her expression or read her silence.

  “I mean, you looked so close when I saw you play that night. And you look like an incredible couple from the outside. But you sleep apart. I haven’t even seen you touch except to steady each other. I—” Vonda finally managed to get control of her mouth. But it was so wrong.

  It’s not what she’d been dreaming of when she’d gotten engaged to Greg. It was what she’d feared would never be for her as she lost hair, energy, and the will to do more than survive.

  Rose let the night be her answer for a long time before speaking. “Twins.”

  “What about twins?”

  “Us. Myles and me. We’re twins. Eleven minutes apart.”

  Vonda wondered if Rose could see how wide her eyes were. “You… But… No, I saw you two play together. How you were together. How…”

  Again, Rose’s silence seemed to fill the night for a long while before she spoke. “We’ve always been really close, twins after all. Whole family is. The music maybe makes that closer because we both love it so much. And when we perform, we’ve found it useful to let people think we’re a couple. Keeps the assertive groupies at bay. We used to play the field after each gig, but that gets old fast. Better to let folks assume whatever it is they want to assume while we’re on stage. Off stage, out of sight, is when we each find someone to be with.”

  “And have you found somebody?”

  “No.” Vonda could hear the wistful sadness. And much later, when Vonda was almost asleep in her seat, lulled by the roll of the waves and the soft green glow fading behind them, “Neither has Myles.”

  9

  Myles hadn’t woken the girls for the six-a.m. changeover because the sunrise had been too lovely to miss. At the nine-a.m. radio check-in, the next nearest boat was six hours and forty miles behind. Maybelline was riding the big rollers of the North Pacific like the champion she was. The autopilot had it down. The nights were growing cooler, it wouldn’t be shorts and t-shirt at night much longer.

  He tiptoed down to fetch his guitar and plugged in a set of headphones. Because he was fingerpicking, the strings were quieter than the creak of the sails. He wouldn’t disturb anyone.

  Playing through the sailing song, it was impossible not to smile at the morning because it was such a cheery tune. Something was missing, though he wasn’t sure quite what. It wasn’t Rose’s bass line and her rich alto harmony; he could hear those as clearly in his head as if it was his own voice. There was…something more. But try as he could, it eluded him.

  Do something else and maybe it would come to him.

  He fooled around with some chords, found a pleasant rhythm. It was more ballad and less dance. Their money was in the dance music, but out here in the middle of the ocean, who cared.

  You never believe it could happen to you,

  I don’t believe it could happen to me.

  Just got together, can’t you see?

  Two of us just walking along.

  Again the chords were ridiculously simple, but they fit the song.

  He tinkered together a couple of verses, but it was the refrain that kept shifting. Not that the first chorus was wrong, but that the chorus evolved, revealing the emotions, as the verses told the surface story. The changing refrain that he’d discovered with the mystery dancer at The Dirty Monkey.

  Two of us just sailing along.

  (as the ride smoothed out)

  …

  Two of us just livin’ along.

  (as a relationship became a life)

  …

  Two of us just lovin’ along

  (that clear soprano he’d been missing before sounded clear on the morning air and—)

  “Whoa!” He snapped back into the moment, realized he’d been singing aloud, and stared at Vonda sitting across the cockpit from him with her notepad in her hand. “Do that again.”

  “I—” she blushed fiercely. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to.” She clenched the notepad in her fist, dropped her pen, reached for it, left it, and scrambled for the ladder to go below.

  “No. Wait!”

  “What’s up?” Rose was half up the ladder, still blinking with sleep.

  Vonda, with her escape blocked, turned at bay.

  Myles started the chorus again.

  He watched Vonda as she stared down at the deck, her jaw clenched. Her grace and balance were shot. He could see that her knees were locked as tightly as her fists but he didn’t understand why.

  He tried nudging her pen toward her.

  She didn’t bend down to reach for it. It rolled back and forth with the boat’s motion until it bumped against her toe. That jolted her to life as if she’d been electrocuted.

  She scooped it up, then stumbled on the next wave and crash landed on one of the cockpit seats. Pushing herself upright, she closed her notepad, fruitlessly trying to flatten out the pages she’d crumpled, but still she didn’t sing.

  Rose had been nodding her head to the tune. She took a deep breath, and opened her mouth.

  Myles stopped her joining in with the least shake of his head, and began to repeat the chorus. Still playing the chords that no one but he could hear.