They had a long and heartfelt kiss before Zack headed into the small terminal building. There was no reason for Amanda to hang around – it would be a while before his plane left, and then all she could see would be the plane taking off – so she got a taxi back to the harbor, and got back on the Rag Doll.

Beffy was waiting in the cabin for her. “Meep?” she asked.

“Yes, he’s gone, Beffy,” Amanda said to her loyal little cat who had been through so much with her in the last fifteen months. She had proved to be a great boat cat, one who was content to stay on the boat and not wander, and who had been loving and affectionate to both her and to Zack. Whatever happened with Zack, at least Amanda knew she still had one friend.

Amanda sat down on the settee berth, feeling very lonely to have Zack gone. In six weeks he’d become part of her, and now it seemed like something was missing. Beffy came over, got into Amanda’s lap, and started purring as if to try and ease the pain a little, and perhaps it helped, but Amanda felt very dejected, anyway. What she’d told Zack, to do what was right for him, had been the right thing to tell him but having him gone didn’t hurt any less.

The next few days were boring – there couldn’t be anything less said about them. Amanda checked the weather up to four times a day, but the best it got for almost a week would have to be called unpromising. She got started on some of the chores she’d have to attend to in getting the Rag Doll ready to be taken out for the winter, but there were many that she couldn’t do with the prospect of another trip across the Gulf Stream facing her. There were a few things that would have to be done before starting out another winter, and the best she could do was to make a list of them.

Finally there came a day when the weather report was promising – not perfect, but a lot better than she’d been having. By then she was pretty close to going nuts over waiting out the weather and not having much to do, so she decided to go for it. Early in the morning, she pulled up the Rag Doll’s anchor and started heading westward on the engine before the wind came up for the day.

It finally did come up – and, almost expectedly, not from the direction as forecast. It was right out of the west, which helped keep the waves from building crossing the Gulf Stream too badly, but the Rag Doll had to sail about as close to the wind as it could manage, which meant for a rough and wet ride.

Things kept building as the day went on. While the Rag Doll had an autopilot that let Amanda do other things than steer the boat, she wasn’t sure how far she trusted it in those conditions. That meant she spent much of the day steering, letting the little box of electronics only do the job when she had something else that needed to be done. Beffy, being an intelligent cat, apparently found some soft and stable spot to curl up in and sleep through the madness.

The day wore on, and after a while conditions eased a bit. Before too much longer she could see a square bumpiness on the horizon, and realized it had to be the high-rise beach structures near Ft. Pierce. The chart plotter was telling her the same thing – she was close to finishing the crossing!

The day was winding down as Amanda lowered the sails and let the engine take her through the narrow channel into the protected water behind the outer island. The waves were even large in the channel, and it was a battle for the Rag Doll to make its way through the passage.

She’d made it, and was glad of it. It had been trying – but then, Matt had had much more trying days aboard the smaller Mary Sue before his leukemia caught up with him. It was good to know that both she and the Rag Doll could handle such a passage, short though it was. She had dreams of longer offshore passages in the boat, and there was a good chance she might be doing them by herself. It would be nice, she thought, if she had Zack with her, but she wasn’t very optimistic that it would turn out that way.

It was only a short run up the Intracoastal to the marina where she’d made arrangements to leave the Rag Doll for the summer. She pulled in there, found an empty slip, and decided that it was good to call it a day. She knew she still had several days’ work to get the boat ready to be put up for the summer, but now it seemed like her winter vacation was over with and now all that was left of it was the dirty, dull work of cleaning up the loose ends.

Though she was tired, she fed Beffy, and opened a can and poured the contents in a pan to give herself something to eat. That perked her up; things had been so wild at midday she hadn’t bothered to eat anything, and that may have been part of the problem, anyway. Only after she’d eaten and had a couple of cans of cola from the refrigerator did she wind down enough to think to call Zack to tell him she’d made it across. But his cell phone just rang until it went to the prerecorded offer to leave a message. All she could do was to tell him, “Hi, Zack. I made it across and am all tied up in Ft. Pierce. Give me a call when you can.”

Zack didn’t call back until late. “Sorry, Amanda,” he said. “The battery went dead on my cell phone and I didn’t realize it until just now. How was the trip?”

“Rough, but I made it all right,” she told him. “How are things going with you? Did you talk with Chief Barnes?”

“Things are going OK and I did talk with him,” he told her. “We’ve got things we need to talk about. I have duty tomorrow, but I think I can work things out so I can come down the day after.”

“Did you reach a decision?”

“Yes, at least I think so, but that involves what we have to talk about. I think I can find someone to go down there with me so I can leave your car. Hey, I’ve got to go, this stupid thing is still beeping ‘low battery’ at me. I’ll see you the day . . .” The phone call cut off – apparently his low battery warning didn’t give him much warning.

There wasn’t much Amanda could do the next day but turn to packing up things on the boat, trying to figure out what could safely be left on the Rag Doll over the summer, and what would have to go north with her. It would have been nice to have known what Zack had been able to figure out, but she knew better than to try to bother him on his cell phone while he was out on the harbor patrol boat.

She was making progress on the packing and other chores the next day, but was still hardly done when toward the late morning Zack walked up the dock to where the Rag Doll was moored. “How are you doing?” he asked.

“It’s a mess,” she protested. “There’s still a lot to do. It could be days before I can head back north. So did you get anything decided?”

“Yes, but in a minute. I probably ought to introduce you to Rowley, he drove your car down here.”

Amanda looked up to see a guy a little smaller than Zack. “Hi, Rowley,” she said. “Thanks for helping out.”

“No big deal, I didn’t have anything much to do today,” he said. “That’s quite a boat you have there. Zack told me the two of you had some good times on it.”

“We did,” Amanda grinned. “Some very good times, in fact.”

“Hey, Zack said you two needed a few minutes alone, so I guess I’ll go see if I can find a Coke machine.”

“Come back in a few minutes,” Zack told him.

“Yeah,” Amanda added. “I’m getting a little low on food but I ought to be able to find something for lunch.”

“That or we can go out somewhere,” Zack said as Rowley started walking up the dock.

When he was out of earshot, Amanda asked, “What was it you didn’t want him to hear?”

“Nothing in particular, but I thought it ought to be just you and me. Look, you were right when you told me to go talk to Chief Barnes. In fact, he was a big help and let me know about a few things I hadn’t considered before. It’s just as well that you had to get hung up over in Freeport for a while, because I had to make a fast trip to Cheboygan.”

“Do you think you’re going to get transferred there?”

“The only way I can answer that is to say ‘yes and no.’ It would be a crapshoot to get assigned there if I were to request it.”

“I know,” Amanda sighed. “Ron tried it, and he wound up getting sent to Jacksonville.”

“There is one way I can get assigned there, but the people in Cheboygan had to approve it. Chief Barnes greased the skids for me quite a little, but in June I’ll be transferred there as a part of the Coast Guard Reserve.”

“Reserve?” she said. “I never thought about that. In fact, I didn’t even know much about it.”

“It’s a little different from the reserves in the other services,” he smiled. “But then, there are a lot of things in the Coast Guard like that. The most important thing is that it hedges my bet about getting out.”

“Hedges your bet?”

“If things don’t work out between us, I can go back to active duty without losing any ground,” he smiled. “In fact, I expect to get promoted before I go into the Reserve. The school situation is still up in the air, I’ll have to work it out with the station commander in Cheboygan, but that’s another issue. And, while I was so close, I took the opportunity to swing by and see your dad and mom. They said they’ll be glad to have me as a deckhand next summer, but that I might have to learn how to work the fuel dock. Your mom even said that I may have to learn something about short order cooking.”

Amanda had been standing on the deck of the Rag Doll up till this point, but now she stepped up onto the dock and into Zack’s arms. “Zack,” she smiled, “that’s a solution that never even entered my mind.”

“Mine either, but at least Chief Barnes thought of it,” he said. “Look, it’s not all perfect. I still have to do a duty weekend every month, but the commander up there says we can wiggle it around so I can be free in the winter. The joker in the deck is that if something boils up, like a major terrorist incident or a big oil spill, I can still be called to active duty with almost no warning. But I figure I can take that risk.”

“I can, too, especially if it keeps your finger on things in the Coast Guard.”

“That was pretty much my thinking, too. Look, Amanda. I think things ought to go pretty well between us, but they can be different when we’re up at your home and I’m your deckhand. That’s why I’m glad to have a fall-back plan. I haven’t thought it all the way out, but I can get a retirement if I stay in the Reserve, just not as much or as soon as if I were active. But that’s a question I don’t have to face right now. I have other questions that are more important. Like, how soon are you going to be done with the Rag Doll? I have another day off coming, but it’s five days away. I can come down and help you then.”

“With any kind of luck I ought to be done in five days,” she told him. “I can even drop by and see you on the way home.”

“That would work,” he smiled. “Look, I don’t know how to say this, but I love you, Amanda.”

“I love you too, Zack. That’s not hard to say.”

“True, but what I’m trying to say is that maybe we want to think about what we’re doing, maybe have a little experience living together before we think about getting married.”

“I can do that,” she smiled. “Hell, my folks lived together for a year or more before they got married. In fact, that was in the same motel room I live in up north. I’d be happy to have you share it with me.”

“Then that got worked out a little easier than I expected,” he grinned. “Can I come live with you and be your significant other?”

“Of course you can,” she smiled. “And whenever we’re ready, more than that. At least next winter we’ll have four to five months to go cruising together, not just six weeks.”

“I suppose you have some thoughts about that, too.”

“Well, yes,” she said. “The Caribbean. I’ve heard that Grenada is a good place to leave a boat for the off season. It’s pretty well out of hurricane paths. But there are other things we could do, too.”

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