"Eleven minutes she said it took." Finn looked back then, and in the last of the light his face was his grandfather's and his mother's and, unmistakably, his father's own. "It looks longer, on the refrigerator. It looks like it weighs more than the tide chart."
"It does," Adrian said.
"Good," said Finn, and went up the hill to supper, and the sign dried above the doors in the dark, white and green and gold, readable β as it had been designed to be β in any fog.
Chapter 18: Tommy's Skiff
The skiff had been at the back of the loft for fourteen years, under a tarp, under a film of dust and gull droppings that came through a broken vent, and it was the last boat Tommy Ellison had ever owned outright.
It wasn't much of a boat, which was exactly the point of it. Sixteen feet of cedar-planked, lapstrake work skiff, built by Adrian's father in the winter of 1998 for two boys who would not leave his yard alone until he built it. Tommy had been fifteen. Adrian had been fourteen. They had fished it, raced it, capsized it twice in water cold enough to teach them religion, and painted its name board themselves in letters Marisol Vega had publicly described as "a crime scene."
Tommy kept it after he grew into bigger boats. After the accident β after Tommy β Harold had the skiff hauled up into the Cole loft by men who didn't ask questions, because Ruth Cole asked him to, in the one conversation the two of them ever had after the funeral that wasn't about loans. There it sat through fourteen winters of the shuttered yard, until the week the sign went back up, when Petey Hanson mentioned it to Finn over a bait bucket with the delicate subtlety of a man tossing a match into a stove.
"Your uncle's boat's still up in your dad's loft," he said. "Shame, a boat like that out of the water this long. Cedar doesn't forget, but it doesn't forgive either."
Finn appeared in the boatyard office that afternoon with the expression Adrian had come to recognize: a decision already made, presented as a question to see what the adults would do with it.
"Petey says Uncle Tommy's skiff is in the loft."
"It is."
"Whose is it? Legally. Mom's? Grandpa's?"
Adrian considered giving the lawyer's answer and then didn't. "It was your uncle's. Your mom's the closest thing it has to family on the Ellison side. It's in my building. So I'd say it's waiting on the three of us to agree it's yours."
Finn absorbed this. "I want to fix it."
"Then we'll fix it. It's a winter of Sundays, Finn, cedar that old. It's not a weekend."
"I've got Sundays," Finn said, "till I'm about ninety, the way school's going," and that was the beginning of it.
They worked the way Finn insisted work be done, which was the way the dock had taught him: no shortcuts announced as wisdom, no job praised until it held water. They got the skiff down out of the loft on rollers and set her on stands in the main bay, and the first day they did nothing but walk around her with a mallet and a screwdriver, sounding the planks, marking the soft spots with chalk β Finn's marks, mostly, because his ear was better and he had no mercy for either of them on the subject. Three planks to replace. Seams to re-caulk. A transom knee cracked clean through. The little Johnson outboard, seized solid as a fence post.
The seams taught them humility first. Cedar that has sat dry for fourteen years opens up like a hand unclenching, and they spent one whole cold morning driving cotton and oakum into the garboards with caulking irons, Finn ringing the mallet in the short, patient rhythm Marisol's father had beaten into half the harbor, Adrian holding the iron and learning β at thirty-eight, with his father's trade in his bones and a Seattle design office on his rΓ©sumΓ© β how much he had forgotten in his hands that his son had never been allowed to forget in his. "You're rushing it," Finn said, not unkindly. "It seals or it doesn't. It doesn't care about your schedule." "Whose schedule do you think I'm on?" Adrian said, and Finn, after a moment, allowed that this was fair, and slowed his own mallet down to prove he hadn't meant anything by it.
The engine defeated them for two full Sundays.
It was a 1987 two-stroke that Tommy had sworn by and Maren had sworn at, and it had sat dry since before Finn was born. They soaked the cylinders. They worked the flywheel a quarter inch, a half inch. They applied heat, patience, penetrating oil, and language that Finn reported home selectively. On the second Sunday, with the tide bell gone and the light going, Adrian put the wrench on the flywheel nut and Finn put both hands over his father's on the handle β not for strength, exactly; the boy was wiry but he was thirteen β and said, "On three. Grandpa Cole's rule. Mom says you told her: a bolt that won't move is just a conversation you haven't finished."
"Your mother remembers everything I ever said," Adrian said. "It's a terrible quality in a woman."
"On three," said Finn, and counted, and they leaned together, and the seized heart of Tommy Ellison's engine gave way all at once with a crack like a shot and spun free.
Finn whooped. Actually whooped β a sound Adrian had never heard from him, unguarded and young, echoing off the loft beams β and then caught himself, and grinned, and did not un-grin.
It became the ritual after that, the two of them and the boat, and somewhere in the rhythm of it β sanding, steaming a plank to the bend, bedding seams β Finn began to ask the questions he had not asked in the hearing's glare or at the kitchen table. Not about the lie. About Tommy.
"What was he like? Not the β not the town version. Not the picture in the school hall."
Adrian planed a long curl off the new plank before answering. "He was the funniest person I've ever known, and the bravest, and he'd want me to say the first one louder. He could imitate anyone on the harbor. He did your grandfather at a town picnic once β the posture, the voice, everything β with your grandfather standing ten feet away. Harold laughed so hard he had to sit down on a cooler. People forget that. That they used to laugh."
"He laughed?" Finn said. "Grandpa?"
"Your uncle could make a stone laugh. He was at the helm that night because he insisted, Finn. I want that in the true column too: I argued, and he was the captain and twenty years old and it was his boat. It wasn't his fault either. It was weather and a dark sea and a boat doing what boats do. The inquiry said the rest. I've stopped needing a villain. Mostly. Your uncle's the one I still talk to when a job's going wrong."
Finn sanded for a while. "Mom doesn't talk about him. Not really. There's the picture, and the plaque, and then β nothing. Like a room with the door shut."
"She lost him twice," Adrian said. "Once in the water and once to the story. Give her the boat, Finn. People open doors for boats they won't open for people. I don't know why. It's the truest thing I know about this harbor."
It was on the last Sunday of the engine work, with the Johnson coughing blue smoke and then settling β incredibly, triumphantly β into its old two-stroke snarl, that Maren came down to the yard to call them to supper and stopped in the doorway of the main bay and did not come in.
Finn was up on the stand with a timing light, shouting instructions down over the engine noise, and Adrian was at the throttle doing exactly what he was told, and something in the boy β some joke at his father's expense, some thirteen-year-old's crack about old men and old motors β went wrong on him all at once and became pure laughter, and Adrian, grease to the elbows, laughed up at him with his whole face, and Finn laughed harder at that, and the two of them stood in the racket of Tommy's engine helpless with it, father and son, for the first time in fourteen years of waiting.
Maren heard it from the doorway. She had imagined this moment, in the dark years, in every possible key β imagined it angry, imagined it tearful, imagined it never arriving at all. She had never imagined it would arrive as noise: as a two-stroke engine and two idiots laughing in a boatyard with the doors open.