"And the council's happy?" Maude said.
"Four votes to three, and the three are Kellerman's friends. It's a season's work if the September vote doesn't kill it."
"Stephen." She said the name like a diagnosis. "He's been circling that waterfront since he was twenty-two. Your coming back has put his nose nicely out of joint." She refilled his bowl without asking. "He was married to her, you know. Briefly."
"I know." A trade journal clipping, sixteen years old, folded into a book he no longer owned. "I heard."
"Did you hear they were divorced before Wren was two?" She watched him over the steam. "Did you hear she's run that library like a lighthouse ever since? The whole town goes to Addie Prescott to find out what's true. You'd think that would make a person bitter. It made her load-bearing."
He turned the mug in his hands. "And the judge?"
"Retired. Frail. Still Harlan." She paused, and the pause had weight. "He doesn't come down to the water anymore."
Outside, the harbor bell marked the hour. Sixteen years fell away in layers, like old paint. Elias ate his aunt's chowder in his dead mother's kitchen and did the arithmetic again, because he was a man who checked his measurements twice. Fifteen in April. Sixteen years gone. The summer he was eighteen, and a girl on a dock holding onto a gunwale, laughing and scared, saying: I'm late, Elias. I'm never late.
"Penny for them," Maude said.
"You don't have enough pennies."
"No," she said, almost gently. "I expect I don't. Bed's made up in your old room. The window still sticks." She stood and took his bowl, and at the sink, with her back to him — the only way Maude Thorne ever delivered anything that mattered — she said, "Whatever you're going to ask me this summer, Elias, ask it straight. I am done watching this town talk around the middle of a thing."
He slept badly in his old room and woke before five to the sound of the harbor waking — halyards against masts, gulls beginning their long argument with the day. Through the sticking window he could see the whole of Harbor's End below the hill: the square, the library's slate roof, the boathouse gray and sagging at the water's edge. Sixteen years he had been gone, and everything he had left unfinished was down there within a ten-minute walk.
He got up, made coffee in his mother's kitchen, and went down the hill to work, because work was the one language he had never lost his fluency in — and because the Marigold was waiting in the boathouse, and so, unless every instinct he owned was lying to him, was the girl.
Chapter 2: The Girl at the Boathouse
He was at the boathouse by seven the next morning, because sleep had been a negotiation he lost. The building smelled the way it had when he was fifteen: creosote and salt, turpentine, old rope, the sweet rot of cedar left too long in the damp. Light came through the high windows in gray shafts full of dust. Along the racks stood the fleet — twenty-odd skiffs and dories in various stages of dignified decay — and in the middle bay, on sawhorses under a canvas tarp, the Marigold.
Eleventh skiff of the Harbor's End fleet, built 1928, twelve feet of lapstrake pine. Someone had begun her restoration already: three strakes off, frames exposed like ribs, a coffee can of bronze screws sorted by size, a notebook open to a page of careful penciled measurements in a hand he didn't know.
Then a voice from the shadows by the tool wall said, "You're standing in my light."
Wren Prescott came around the end of the skiff with a heat gun in one hand and a putty knife in the other, apron on, hair tied back with what looked like a strip of sailcloth. Up close she was even more his mother's daughter — no. His. The word went through him like a nail through soft pine. Up close, she was a stranger with his family's face, and she was looking at him with open, unimpressed appraisal.
"You're the restoration guy," she said. "From Seattle. The council's been arguing about you since March."
"Elias Thorne."
"I know. Gran—" She stopped. "People talk. I'm Wren Prescott. This is my boat. I mean — not mine. She's fleet. But I've been on her since last summer and Madam Librarian says if I finish her I can race her at the regatta." A beat. "That's my mom. The librarian. In case people didn't talk about that too."
"They mentioned," Elias said. His mouth was dry. "You've done good work. Your frame spacing — you measured off the original centerlines?"
"Off the builder's marks. They're still on the keel if you know where to look." She crouched and showed him, and for twenty minutes they were simply two people who knew boats: where the garboard had sprung, which frames were dead, how the transom wanted replacing in white oak and not the cheaper pine the town would try to buy. She was quick and she was funny and she had the boat-mad disease so completely it was like talking to himself at fifteen, if himself at fifteen had been braver.
"You ask a lot of questions for a contractor," she said at last, straightening up, wiping her hands on her apron. "Most people who come here just want to know where the bathrooms are and when lunch is."
"Occupational habit. I like knowing what I'm working with."
"Uh-huh." She studied him with a frankness that was pure Adeline — no, it was pure Wren, he corrected himself; he had known her twenty minutes. "So how long are you in town for? Through the regatta?"
"If the building cooperates. Through August, probably."
"August." She said it oddly. Then, casual as weather: "How long since you've been back? People said you grew up here."