Finn saw the forecast on Thursday night. I know he saw it because I was sitting right next to him when his phone lit up with the little weather widget — 35 degrees, rain icon, wind icon, the whole miserable parade — and he looked at it, nodded once like a man receiving information he intended to ignore, and said, "Yeah, that'll probably clear up by Saturday."
It did not clear up by Saturday.
I want to be clear that I prepared. I brought a rain jacket with a hood that actually functions. I brought wool socks. I brought the kind of pragmatic enthusiasm that comes from growing up in a place where "cold and wet in April" is not a surprise but rather a genre. When we left the rental on South Madison around nine in the morning, I looked like someone who had read a weather forecast. Finn looked like someone going to a summer barbecue in 1987. Chinos. A flannel. One layer.
"I'll be fine," he said, which is the sentence I am going to have engraved on something someday.
We walked down to the waterfront first because Finn had decided, based on nothing, that the bay would be "nice to see in the morning light." There was no morning light. There was a gray sky sitting approximately twelve feet above the water, and a wind coming off the bay that had opinions. Finn stood at the edge of the pier with his hands in his flannel pockets and stared at the water with the expression of a man recalibrating.
"It's pretty," he said.
"It's forty degrees," I said.
"It's pretty and forty degrees," he said, which I actually respected.
By eleven we were inside the Maritime Museum because Finn's ears had gone pink and he'd stopped being able to fully commit to sentences. He'd start a thought — "we could go check out that—" and then trail off, presumably because the cold had gotten to the part of his brain responsible for finishing things. The museum was warm and interesting and I learned genuinely useful information about the history of Great Lakes shipping while Finn stood next to a ship model and slowly returned to room temperature like a sad croissant.
He bought a hat in the gift shop. One of those knit ones with a little brim. It was green. It was, if I'm being honest, extremely cute on him, and he wore it with the unearned confidence of a man who had planned to wear a hat all along.
Lunch was where things recovered, because Finn, despite being constitutionally incapable of preparing for weather, has an inexplicable gift for finding good soup. I don't know how he does it. He will walk into a town he has never visited, in conditions that suggest we should not be outside at all, and emerge from a fifteen-second scroll on his phone with the location of the best bowl of chowder in the county. He is wrong about nearly everything and right about soup. We ate at a little place near downtown and the chowder was unreasonable in the best way.
By afternoon we'd developed a rhythm — outside for twenty minutes, inside for twenty minutes, repeat. We looked at a bookshop. We looked at a hardware store, which was Finn's idea and which I'm still not fully understanding, but he seemed engaged. At one point I asked if he was cold and he said "no" in a voice that indicated he was extremely cold and had committed to this position legally.
On the way back to the car, it started actually raining in earnest, the kind of rain that doesn't apologize. Finn turned up his collar, which did nothing, and grinned at me with his green hat and his pink nose and rain on his face.
"Good day," he said.
And here's the thing. Here's the actually annoying thing. It was. It was a good day — wet and gray and logistically chaotic, the town feeling like it was waiting for something warmer, all shoulder-season pragmatism and low clouds and the particular coziness that only exists because you are slightly miserable outside first.
I had a great time. I hate that he was right.
He's already looking at the forecast for next weekend. He says it looks "pretty good."
I'm packing two rain jackets. One for me, one for him, because I am a person who learns from experience, and he is a person who is going to tell me he'll be fine.