Still Water East
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 2
Trevor has made a spreadsheet.
I find this out at seven-fifteen the next morning, when I come out of the small bedroom in search of coffee and discover him at the kitchen counter with a laptop, three highlighters, and a stack of printouts squared into piles like a man preparing for a trial. A map of Broward County is taped to the refrigerator. Several marinas have been circled in red marker. One has been circled twice.
“Sit,” he says, without looking up.
“I want coffee.”
“Sit, and I’ll bring you coffee. This is important.”
I sit. Lena drifts in behind me in a gray T-shirt and bare feet, takes in the refrigerator, and says, “Oh no,” with the weary affection of someone who has seen the same movie many times.
“I’ve color-coded,” Trevor announces.
“I see that.”
“Yellow is waterfront with dock access. Green is waterfront without dock access but within a mile of a marina. Pink is a condo with a slip included. Orange is just a slip. Blue is...” He frowns at a page. “Blue was something. I’ll remember it.”
“You’ve been up since five,” Lena says.
“Four forty.”
“Trevor.”
“I’m just saying, if we buy neighboring properties, there are economies of scale. Shared maintenance, shared dock, one guy to trim the hedges.” He taps a column of numbers. “Evan, you and I could save almost eleven percent.”
“On what?”
“On everything.”
“I haven’t decided to buy next to you.”
“Of course you have,” he says, perfectly sincere. “You just haven’t admitted it.”
Lena sets a mug of coffee in front of me, which is how I know she was listening before I came out. “Before we go anywhere,” she says, “I’d like to point out that we still haven’t decided whether we want a house, a condo, or a boat we live on.”
“It’s a minor administrative issue,” Trevor says.
“It’s the entire question.”
“It’s a sequencing question.” He caps a highlighter with a click like a bolt sliding home. “We look at everything. We see what feels right. That’s called scouting.”
“That’s called not knowing what you want.”
“In baseball,” Trevor says gravely, “they’re the same thing.”
I drink my coffee and say nothing, because he’s not entirely wrong, and because it’s the first morning in months that I’ve woken up with somewhere to be.
The first house is on a canal in Harbor Beach, a white two-story with a red tile roof and a dock the length of a bowling lane. The listing agent, a tan woman named Deb in a blazer the color of a tangerine, greets us in the driveway as if we’ve already signed.
“Gentlemen. Lena. Welcome.” She opens the front door with a little flourish. “You’re going to love the light.”
The light is, in fact, excellent. It pours through the back windows and across a tile floor so clean I can see the ceiling fan in it. The kitchen has two ovens. The primary bathroom has a tub I could sleep in. Beyond the glass doors, the pool is a flat blue rectangle, perfectly still, with a little stone fountain at one end that trickles for no one.
“Four bedrooms,” Deb says. “Boat lift. New seawall. The sellers have relocated for work, so they’re motivated.”
“What are they asking?” I say.
She names a number. It lands in the room like a dropped plate.
I do the math before I can stop myself. Property tax, insurance, flood coverage, hurricane coverage, the seawall assessment, the dock insurance. Then the maintenance, then the pool service, then the taxes again, because Florida in my head is a place where costs keep arriving after you think they’ve stopped. For eight years, I managed a professional salary the way my father managed a farm in a drought: assuming every good year was a loan from a worse one. I never bought the car with the name that sounded like a spell. I never lent money to a cousin I’d met twice. I never forgot that a pitcher’s arm is a rented thing.
It’s a good habit. It’s also a quiet kind of loneliness, a mind that can’t walk through a beautiful house without counting.
“It’s lovely,” I tell Deb.
“It really is.” She smiles. “Would you like to see the dock?”
Trevor is already out there, standing at the end with his hands on his hips, looking down the canal like a man reviewing troops. A neighbor’s boat drifts past, a sleek white thing with a flybridge, and Trevor lifts a hand and says “Morning!” in a voice that carries across the water.
The man at the helm waves back. Trevor turns to us, radiant.
“He waved, ” he says.
“People wave at boats,” Lena says.
“People wave at me.”
We see six more houses that day. Two on the Intracoastal, one on a canal in Rio Vista, two in neighborhoods west of the barrier islands where the lots are bigger and the water is farther away, and one condominium tower on the beach that Lena likes and Trevor refuses to enter on principle. By noon I’ve lost track of the granite. By two, the pools have blurred into a single blue idea. Every house has a different agent and the same smile. Every house has a view somebody paid a great deal for.
What strikes me, house after house, is how finished they are. Not just clean, though they are, but resolved. The kitchens are arranged for entertaining. The living rooms are staged around windows. The bedrooms look out on water, and the closets have lighting. Every room seems designed to convince its owner that the difficult part of life has already been solved, and all that remains is enjoyment.
I don’t believe it. I never have. In my experience, the difficult part of life doesn’t get solved. It just changes uniforms.
“What do you think of this one?” Lena asks in a house in Coral Ridge, standing in a sunroom with her arms crossed and her head tilted.
“It’s nice.”
“That’s what you said about the last one.”
“The last one was nice.”
“Evan.”
“What? It’s all nice.”
“I’m not asking whether it’s nice. I’m asking whether you could see yourself here.”
I look around. A leather chair by the window. A bookshelf with no books on it. A rug the color of oatmeal. Outside, a hibiscus bush is blooming in aggressive red, and a lizard sits on the patio rail, doing push-ups at nothing.
“I could see somebody here,” I say.
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I know.”
She lets it go. It’s a mercy I’m learning to recognize.
Lunch is at a place on Las Olas Boulevard, an outdoor table under a canvas awning with ceiling fans turning slowly overhead. Trevor spreads the map across the table and anchors the corners with salt shakers, a sweating water glass, and my phone.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he says. “We need a base. A home port. We find a place with a slip, we buy a boat, we start small. Thirty-five, forty feet. Maybe forty-five if the right one comes up.”
“Forty-five feet,” Lena says. “Of boat.”
“It’s not that big.”
“I looked it up. It has a bedroom.”
“Two bedrooms,” Trevor says, delighted. “Plus a salon. Plus a galley. We could take it to the Bahamas, Lena. Bimini’s, what, fifty miles? We could do it in an afternoon. We could host people. The guys, the old teammates. We’d have the whole group down for a weekend, and we’d sit on the deck at night and...”
He trails off, hands moving, building a world in the air above the table. His face has the glow it used to have in the clubhouse on a night before a start, when he’d talk about the next outing as if it were a promise.
I know what he’s building. He’s building a clubhouse. A place with a schedule and a roster and a reason to wake up. A boat with a captain’s chair and a deck full of friends, a floating dugout where everyone knows your name. He’s not shopping for a vessel. He’s shopping for a team.
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