Chapter 2
Declan
Working with Josie Reeves is an exercise in controlled torture, and I want to be precise about which words in that sentence are doing the work, because for the first two weeks I lie to myself about all of them.
Controlled, because I am a controlled man. Torture, because she's good.
That's the lie. That's the version I tell myself while I'm telling it: she's good, and watching someone be good at the thing you're good at is a particular kind of suffering for a man who's used to being the best in the room.
That's all it is. Professional aggravation.
The barometer in my bones is just weather. I've been wrong about weather before.
I have not been wrong about weather before. But I tell myself I have.
She is, in fact, good. That part's true and there's no lying it away.
By the end of the first week I've watched her diagnose a rough-running gas inboard by ear from across the bay — that's a vacuum leak, listen, it smooths out when you cover the carb — and she was right, and Rhett, who'd been chasing it for an hour, looked like he'd been slapped.
I've watched her torque a head in a sequence and to a spec she pulled from memory, and I checked it against the book because I check everything, and she was dead on.
She's got hands that listen. You can't teach that.
You can teach a person every spec in every manual and they'll still be a parts-changer, swapping until the problem goes away, never understanding what they fixed.
Josie understands. She puts her hand on a running engine and it tells her things.
It matches my own intuition so closely it's unnerving.
We diagnose the same problem the same way, arriving from opposite ends of the yard, and meet in the middle already agreeing.
Twice now we've said the same word at the same moment — injector, galvanic — and both times she's grinned at me, this quick bright thing, before she remembers she's not supposed to grin at the man who tested her on a seized Yanmar her first morning, and the grin closes up like a clam, and I tell myself I'm relieved when it does.
That's where the lying gets harder. Because the thing I notice is not just that she's good.
I notice that she tucks her hair up under her cap with both hands, fast, a little impatient ritual she does whenever she's about to focus, and I have started — God help me, a forty-four-year-old man — to know that the cap means she's about to do something difficult, and to want to watch her do it.
I notice that her laugh carries clear across the yard, over the compressors and the radio Toby plays too loud, a laugh too big for her body, and that the brothers have started saying funny things just to hear it, and that I've started resenting the brothers for it.
I notice that she gets a smudge of oil on her left cheekbone, always the left, every single day, like clockwork, and that I have caught myself half a dozen times with the impulse to reach over and wipe it away with my thumb, an impulse I crush so hard and so fast it leaves a mark.
I'm forty-four years old. She's twenty-six.
She works for me.
There are at least three reasons this cannot happen, and I have them numbered, and I recite them like a man saying his rosary, because a man my age does not get to be stupid about this, a man my age who is stupid about this becomes a story people tell, a punchline, a cautionary thing.
Did you hear about old Declan and the girl from the yard.
I would rather lose the use of my right arm than be that sentence.
Reason one: the eighteen years. I was patching into a club before she could read.
There's a whole life I lived that she has only heard about secondhand.
I know what an eighteen-year gap costs, what it asks a younger person to carry, the future where she's fifty and I'm sixty-eight and a different conversation entirely.
Reason two: she works for me. I sign her checks. There is no version of a thing between us that isn't shadowed by that, no way to be sure the power didn't tilt the floor, and I will not be a man who tilts the floor.
Reason three is the one I won't number out loud even to myself, so I'll just say it here: I built a life I could keep.
I built it small and tended it close and I did it on purpose after Miranda, and the reason I won't reach over and wipe the oil off her cheek is not the eighteen years and not the checks.
It's that the wanting is so big it scares me, and a thing that size could take the whole house down, and I have only just got the house quiet.
So I compensate the only way a controlled man knows how. I get harder on her.
I make her redo a perfectly clean fuel filter swap because I claim I want it cleaner.
I assign her the filthy jobs — the bilge that smells like a dead thing, the bottom job in August heat — and I tell myself it's because she earned the right to do real work, and that's even partly true, and the rest of it is that I need her covered in muck and miserable and not laughing across my yard with her hair coming down.
When she does something right I say nothing.
When she does something wrong — which is rare, but it happens, she's twenty-six, everyone's wrong at twenty-six — I am on it like a foreman from a worse decade, sharp and cold, and she takes it, and that's almost worse, because she doesn't flinch, she just fixes it and files it and watches me with those steady eyes like she's running her own diagnostic on the man giving her grief and finding the actual fault.
She finds it in week two.
It's late afternoon, the yard thinning out, gold light again. I've just made her recheck a torque she got right the first time, and I watch her wrench come up to the same number it already hit, and she sets the tool down and turns around and faces me square.
"You're harder on me than the guys," she says.
She says it flat. Not whining, not pleading. The way you'd state a finding. The bore is scored. You ran it dry. You're harder on me than the guys.
And here is where a smarter man, a safer man, lies. Here's where I say I'm hard on everybody or you're new, you've got to earn it — the foreman's deflection, the door staying shut. I've got the lie loaded. It's right there.
What comes out instead is the truth, and it comes out before I can stop it, the way the truth does when you've been holding too many other things shut and it finds the one seam you forgot to seal.
"You're better than the guys," I say. "I expect more."
The yard goes quiet. Even Toby's radio seems to hush.
Josie blinks — actually blinks, this woman who didn't flinch when I rode her about the bilge, blinks like I've reached over and done the thing with the oil on her cheek.
She wasn't expecting it. I can see her recalculating, the steady eyes going wide for just a second before she gets them back under control, and I understand that I have just handed her something, that you're better than the guys, I expect more is not a foreman's line, it's almost the opposite, it's a confession dressed up as a standard.
Neither of us was expecting it. That's the part that undoes me — that I surprised myself, that the truth got out, that for the first time in twelve careful years a seam let go without my permission.
She recovers first. Of course she does. She's twenty-six and quick and she doesn't carry the weight I carry. She picks up the torque wrench and turns back to the engine and says, over her shoulder, light as anything, "Then stop making me do clean filters twice. It's insulting to both of us."
And I laugh.
I laugh — a short, surprised, ugly bark of a thing, rusty from disuse, and across the yard Rhett's head comes up like a deer hearing a branch snap, because nobody has heard me laugh in the yard in living memory, and I clamp it off fast but it's too late, she heard it, she's grinning into the engine where she thinks I can't see, and I can see, I can always see, that's the whole problem.
I go home that night and I pour the bourbon and I don't drink it.
I sit in my quiet house with the quiet I built and I run the diagnostic on myself the way she runs it on an engine, by ear, listening for the rough note. You're better than the guys, I expect more. Why did that get out. Where's the vacuum leak. Cover the carb and find the smooth.
And the answer is the one I've been refusing for two weeks, the answer my bones gave me at sunset the night Dominic handed me the résumé, the answer I'm too old and too honest to keep underwater much longer.
It's not professional aggravation. It was never professional aggravation.
I am in serious trouble, and I am the only one to blame for it, and the worst part — the part I sit with while the bourbon goes warm and untouched — is that I'm not entirely sure I want out of it.
I pour the bourbon back into the bottle. I go to bed. And I lie there in the dark of the small life I built, and for the first time in twelve years it doesn't feel like enough.
It feels like a bay with one tired light, when somewhere out there is a fixture that would flood the whole place white.