Everybody cared. That was the thing about Harbor's End he had forgotten in Seattle, where a man's past was his own property: here, it was a public utility, metered and discussed, and his had just been switched back on.
He reached the boathouse and stood in the cool dark of it, looking at the Marigold on her sawhorses, her ribs open to the light. Sixteen years ago someone had arranged for Adeline to stop expecting him, and arranged, with the same tidy hand, for him to stop expecting her. He had no proof. He had something older than proof: he had a craftsman's sense of a joint that had been cut by hand and made to look like weather.
All right, he thought. September, then. And he picked up his plane and began, very carefully, to find out what in this building was rotten, and what had only been made to look that way.
Chapter 6: Working Beside Her
By the second week of June, the boathouse had settled into a rhythm, and Elias had learned to work inside it the way a man learns to sleep in a strange house — carefully at first, then all at once. The crew came in at six, when the harbor was still the color of pewter. The coffee urn went on. Somebody's radio muttered the marine forecast. And at half past seven, when school let out for the summer and then not even then, because she came before the crew some mornings, Wren Prescott arrived with her toolbox and her opinions and went straight to the Marigold.
She had claimed the skiff the way a cat claims a chair: completely, and with an air of having been there first, which, Elias conceded, she had.
"You can't steam-bend white oak that's already checked," she told him on the third morning, not looking up from the rib she was fitting. "It'll split along the check the second it takes the curve. My grandfather—" She stopped. Recalibrated. "Old Mr. Abernathy at the yard told me."
"I wasn't going to," Elias said mildly. "That's green stock there for the ribs. The checked board is for blocking."
"I know what blocking is."
"I can see that."
It was like working beside a wasp with excellent technique. But her hands were good — better than good. She faired a plank by eye and by palm, the way he'd been taught by his own father in this same shed, in this same light, before everything. She caulked a seam with a patience most apprentices never learned. She kept her tools oiled and her bench swept and her measurements written in a small waterproof notebook with a carpenter's pencil she sharpened with a knife.
"You waste a lot of time writing things down," he said once, because some devil in him wanted to see what she'd do.
"I waste none," she said. "You're thinking of people who write things down wrong."
Maude had warned him Wren was blunt. Maude had not warned him that Wren was funny, and that the funniness would keep arriving sideways, when he wasn't braced for it, while he was holding something heavy.
They fell, over those weeks, into a working truce that had its own geography. The Marigold was hers. The big restoration — the boathouse roof trusses, the Shepard launch up on the ways, the fleet of town skiffs — was his. But the Marigold's stem was rotted at the waterline, and that was a two-person job, and so, without either of them deciding anything, the boundary quietly dissolved.
"Hold that," Wren said, on the afternoon it happened, and handed him the end of a steaming rib, and for a moment they were both bent over the hull with their shoulders nearly touching, easing the hot wood down into its curve, and she was breathing hard from the effort and so was he, and his hands knew the work so well that his mind was free to wander where it should not.
She had his mother's hair. He'd told himself that on the dock the first day and had been telling himself to stop noticing it ever since, the way a man tells himself to stop pressing a bruise. It wasn't evidence. Half of Harbor's End had dark hair. His mother's people had been dark for four generations of Thornes, but the Prescotts were fair and Wren was fair-skinned — and yet the hair, the exact black-brown of it, falling out of its knot while she worked, and the way she squinted at a seam one-eyed to judge it, which was a thing his mother had done, which was a thing he did —
"You're staring," Wren said.
"I'm supervising."
"Supervise the rib. It's lifting."
He pressed it down. She clamped it with a speed that suggested she'd been waiting for him to stop daydreaming and do his job, and he laughed before he could help it, and she looked startled, and then, unwillingly, she laughed too.
It was the humming that undid him.
She did it when she sanded, under her breath, without knowing she was doing it, the way people hum in kitchens and cars. A tune in a rolling six-eight, salt-weathered, the kind of tune that is not so much sung as handed down. He heard it first on a Thursday, halfway, and his hand stopped on the plank he was fairing and would not move again.
He knew that tune the way he knew his own name. It was a Thorne song. His grandmother had sung it caulking seams in this shed; his mother had sung it hanging washing; it had verses about a gull and a gale and a girl with a lamp on Gull Rock, and a third verse that the family never sang in company because it was rude about a revenue cutter. Nobody outside the family knew it. It had never been written down, never recorded, never taught in any school or choir. It lived in Thorne mouths or it did not live at all.
Wren sanded on, humming the turn into the second verse, note-perfect, including the little catch before the refrain where his grandmother used to laugh.
"Where'd you learn that?" he asked, and was proud of how ordinary his voice sounded.
"This?" She shrugged, not stopping. "Mom hums it. Dishes, mostly. She doesn't even know the words past the first verse. She says she learned it off somebody before I was born and can't remember who, which is obviously a lie, because people remember things like that."
"Do they."