Chapter 4
FOUR
PAUL
There are five children on my dock.
I'm going to say that again because my brain keeps rejecting it like a bad organ transplant.
Five children. On my dock.
Three of them are eight years old and appear to be constructing a device out of rope and a bucket near slip three.
Millie is reading on the edge of slip six with her feet dangling over the water, which is going to stop my heart if I stare at it too long.
Jenna is at the far end of the dock with Dawson and Finch, the three of them sprawled across the bench in a tangle of headphones and bare feet, Dawson's boat keys dangling from his hand like they're about to disappear onto the water at any moment.
Early enough that the water is still flat—that pale, glassy calm before the wind picks up and the charter boats start heading out.
A heron stands on the far piling like it owns the place.
A mullet jumps near slip eight, a soft splash and nothing more.
On a normal morning, this would be the best part of the day. Coffee and quiet water.
Not a normal morning.
I'm in the dock office trying to sketch out the reinforcement plan for slips four and five.
Double up the posts, add cross-bracing, replace the bumpers.
I've done this kind of work a hundred times.
I could do it in my sleep. But every time I settle into the math, footsteps pound past my window, or Emma's voice carries across the dock—I can't make out the words, but whatever she's saying makes Lottie laugh.
The twins have been here less than two hours, and they've already found the bait freezer and attempted to scale the locked gate to the fuel dock. I went out to stop the climbing. Olson looked down at me from the top—which he'd reached with terrifying speed—and said, “Is this yours?”
“Everything here is mine.”
“Cool gate.”
“Get down.”
He got down. Not because I told him to—I could tell by the way he shrugged and wandered off mid-sentence. The gate had lost its appeal. I was irrelevant to the decision.
Justin said no when they asked to ride the shrimp boat. He said it in the Justin way—slow, quiet, almost gentle—and then he stood there watching the twins run off with an expression I couldn't read. I didn't ask about it. We don't ask about expressions in this family.
I'm mid-calculation on the load-bearing capacity of the south post when the rumble reaches me through the open window.
I know that engine. Every marina kid knows their father's boat by sound the way other kids recognize their parent's car in the pickup line.
Dad's center console has a particular rumble—low and steady, well-maintained, because Harold Spencer may have retired from the marina but he did not retire from engine maintenance.
The man can't let go of an oil change schedule.
It's genetic. I got the stubbornness and Justin got the patience, but neither of us got the charm, which Dad reminds us of regularly.
The morning haze is starting to burn off the water, that thin veil of mist that hangs over the marsh grass this time of year.
The sun is angled low enough that everything has a gold edge to it—the dock boards, the faded paint on the boathouse.
Dad is pulling into slip two with the casual ease of forty years on this water.
He's wearing a fishing shirt that's seen better decades and a hat that says Retired: Gone Fishin' that he wears without a trace of irony.
He ties off and steps onto the dock, stretching like retirement is a full-body sport.
The breeze shifts and brings the marsh with it—salt and mud, which means the tide is going out. Diesel from Dad's boat. The faint sweetness of creosote baking in the sun. I grew up on this air. To me it just means home.
And then the kids find him.
Aidan gets there first, because Aidan always gets there first—the child has a sixth sense for adults who might sit still long enough to hear a ten-minute monologue about crabs.
He comes sprinting up the dock at full tilt.
My father opens his arms and catches him mid-collision like this is a drill they've practiced, which, knowing the two of them, it probably is.
“Mr. Harold.” Aidan pulls back, breathing hard, eyes enormous. “Gerald has babies. Four of them. I named them. Gerald Junior, Lady Gerald, Geraldine, and Steve.”
“Steve,” my father repeats, with the gravity of a national security briefing.
“He doesn't look like a Gerald. He looks like a Steve. You have to respect that.”
“Absolutely. Steve knows who he is. I admire that in a crab.”
They've had this kind of rapport since the second week Emma docked the houseboat.
Dad showed up one afternoon to “check on the marina”—which meant check on Emma's kids, who he'd already decided were his—and found Aidan trying to catch Gerald with a pool noodle.
Instead of telling him to stop, Dad sat down on the dock and asked what the plan was.
They've been co-conspirators ever since.
Millie appears next, book tucked under her arm, and wraps her arms around my father without saying a word.
They have their own thing—he loans her paperbacks from a box in his garage.
She returns them with Post-it notes stuck to her favorite pages.
It's the most civilized relationship at this marina.
“What are we reading this week?” Dad asks.
“A Wrinkle in Time.”
“I read that in 1965. Blew my mind wide open. The sequel's good too.”
“There's a sequel?”
“Five books, sweetheart. Come find me later and I'll give you my ranked list.”
Millie drifts back toward her reading spot with the dreamy focus of a kid who's just learned four more books exist in her favorite series.
Jenna waves from the end of the dock, Dawson on one side of her, Finch on the other. “Hey, Mr. Spencer.”
“Jenna.” Dad tips his hat, then looks pointedly at Finch. “Looking sharp today, young man.”
Finch goes completely still. Jenna turns a shade of red I didn't know human skin could produce. Dawson grins and says nothing, because my son knows exactly what his grandfather is doing. Dad doesn't even slow down. The man drops grenades and keeps walking. It's his gift.
Then the twins arrive.
“Who are you?” Olson—I've already learned to tell them apart because Olson is the one who's always wet—plants himself directly in front of my father with the fearless curiosity of a kid who has never met a stranger, only future allies.
“I'm Harold.” Dad squats down—knees popping, seventy-two years of wear on those joints—and extends his hand. “I built this marina.”
“You built it?” Olson looks at the dock with new respect. “The whole thing?”
“Every board. Took me four years. Almost lost a finger twice.” He holds up his left hand and wiggles it. “Almost.”
“That's so cool,” Mitch says. He's the quieter twin, which is like saying one volcano is quieter than the other. “Did you use power tools?”
“Son, I used every tool known to man and a few I invented when the regular ones quit on me.”
“Can you show us?”
“I have a workshop behind the boathouse that would make your eyes pop out of your head. But first—” He looks between the twins. “Can either of you tie a bowline knot?”
“What's a bowline knot?” Olson asks.
“That's a no. We'll fix that today. Anybody who can't tie a bowline can't be trusted with a boat, and anybody I can't trust with a boat is no use to me.”
“Use us for what?”
“I'm taking the boat out this afternoon.
Need a crew. Aidan's my first mate, but a captain needs deckhands.” He straightens up—one hand on his knee, slower than he'd admit—and fixes them with a look of absolute seriousness that I recognize from my own childhood.
The look that made me feel, at eight, like I was being recruited for a mission. “Interested?”
Both twins nod so hard I'm surprised their heads stay attached.
“Good. Knot lesson is at noon. Be at slip two. Don't be late. I don't wait for slow deckhands.” He glances at Aidan, who has appeared at his elbow like he was summoned. “First Mate Aidan, brief your crew on the Gerald situation. I want a full report by departure.”
“Aye aye, Mr. Harold.”
The three of them take off down the dock at full sprint. My father watches them go with a satisfaction that has nothing to do with boats or tides.
My chest does the tightening thing again. The one I get when Dad looks like that—alive, lit up, the version of himself I thought we'd lost after Mom died. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum and turn back to the desk.
Emma appears at the end of the dock with two coffee mugs.
She hands one to my father without asking, which tells me they've done this before—she just hands him coffee and he just takes it, like it's been happening every morning for months, and I didn't notice because I'm apparently blind to everything on my own dock that doesn't involve a post or a line.
“Harold.” She says his name with genuine warmth. Not the weaponized sunshine she aims at me. Real warmth. The way you talk to a person you actually like.
“Morning, sweetheart.” Dad takes a sip. “Your boy just recruited me to inspect a crab nursery.”
“Gerald's got babies. It's been the headline of the week.”
“So I've heard. Steve sounds like a character.”
“Steve is Aidan's favorite because—and I'm quoting here—'Steve has independent energy.'”
“Smart kid.” Dad looks past Emma toward the parking lot where the U-Haul is still sitting, evidence of Lottie's arrival. “Your friend made it.”
“Lottie. She drove through the night. She's inside lying on the houseboat floor because she said she needed to be horizontal for ten minutes.”
“Fair enough. Ten hours with twins. I drove twenty minutes with Paul and Justin at that age and almost left them at a gas station in Beaufort.”
“You wouldn't have.”
“I thought about it. That counts.”