Chapter 4
Declan
The brothers notice, because of course they do. A motorcycle club is a brotherhood, which is a generous word for a group of men who know exactly when you've started looking at someone and will not let you forget it.
Rhett goes first, because Rhett has no governor on his mouth.
We're at The Crow's Nest after a haul-out, and he sets a beer in front of me and says, all innocence, "So the new mechanic.
Josie. She seeing anybody?" and watches my face over the rim of his glass like a man waiting for a fish to take the hook.
I drink my beer and say I wouldn't know and don't ask, and Rhett grins like I've confessed to a crime, which, in a way, I have.
Maddox doesn't say anything. Maddox just raises an eyebrow at me across the bay one afternoon when Josie's laugh carries over, one slow eyebrow, the most articulate eyebrow in the state of South Carolina, and goes back to work, having said everything.
Even Dominic, who stays out of personal matters the way other men stay out of traffic, comes by the yard, watches the two of us work the vintage project for ten minutes, and says, on his way out, "She's good for the yard.
" Just that. She's good for the yard. And the subtext is so thick you could caulk a hull with it, and we both know he didn't mean the yard.
I ignore all of it.
I ignore it the way I ignore a small leak I'm not ready to chase — I note it, I file it, I keep working, and I double down on the only thing that's ever saved me, which is professionalism.
If I cannot stop wanting the woman, I can at least conduct myself like a man who isn't a fool about it.
So I keep the floor level. I keep my hands to myself.
And I do the thing a smart foreman does with a talent like hers, the thing that is both the most professional move available to me and, I will admit in the privacy of my own skull, the most dangerous: I give her a project worthy of her.
There's a boat. A vintage fishing vessel, a thirty-two-foot wooden Bertram-style sportfish from the early sixties, that's been sitting on stands at the back of the yard under a tarp for as long as I've owned the place.
The owner died. The estate stopped paying.
By rights I should have cut her up for the lien years ago, but I couldn't do it — she's beautiful under the rot, planked mahogany, a hull shape they don't draw anymore — and so she's sat there shaming me, a thing I couldn't save and couldn't kill.
I assign her to Josie.
"Rebuild," I say. "Engine, systems, whatever the hull needs. Top to bottom. I want her in the water by summer."
Josie pulls the tarp back and stands looking up at the old girl for a long time, and I watch her face do the thing my face does, the on-the-record thing, the this matters now thing, and she says, quiet, "Who'd let this happen to her," and I know I've handed the boat to the right person, and I know I've handed myself a problem, because the vintage project means late nights, and late nights mean the two of us alone in the yard after everyone's gone home, and I knew that when I made the assignment and I made it anyway.
A smarter man would call that a mistake. I call it a mistake. I make it anyway. There's only so long a man can hold a hatch shut against his own weather.
The nights are the undoing of me.
The yard at night is a different country.
The brothers gone, the gate chained, the harbor lights laying gold ropes across the black water, the only sounds the tick of cooling metal and the slap of the tide on the pilings and the soft profane music of Josie talking to a sixty-year-old engine like it owes her money.
We work close under the work lights with the dark pressing in at the edges, and out there in the dark, with no audience, the professionalism I wear all day gets heavy, and I start setting it down, piece by piece, without quite deciding to.
We talk.
I haven't talked — really talked, said the true things instead of the foreman things — in twelve years.
But the boat draws it out of us. There's something about two people with their hands inside the same engine in the middle of the night that loosens the seams. She tells me about her mother first, the charter business in the Keys, a single mom running a thirty-six-foot Hatteras and a kid at the same time, teaching Josie to splice a line before she could spell her own name.
She tells me about being eight years old handing wrenches up to her mother in the bilge, about the captains who wouldn't book a woman, about the long apprenticeship of being right and being doubted in the same breath, over and over, up the whole coast, until she got so used to proving herself that she forgot it was supposed to be exhausting.
"I just want to be taken seriously," she says one night, not looking at me, her voice gone smaller than I've ever heard it, scraping carbon off a valve.
"That's the whole thing. That's all I've ever wanted in a yard.
For somebody to look at my work before they look at me. "
And I want to tell her that I did. That the first morning, on the seized Yanmar, before I knew the shape of her laugh or the smudge on her cheek, I looked at her work, and her work was better than mine was at twice my training, and that's the truth no matter what else is true.
But I don't say it, because saying it would tip the floor, and instead I just hand her the next tool before she asks, and she looks at me, and I think she hears it anyway.
I talk too. That's the part that frightens me, after, driving home.
I tell her about the early club, Dominic's uncle's garage, the misfits we were.
I tell her about my father and the apartment over Harte Marine and learning the trade as something closer to a religion.
And one night, late, the work light buzzing and the tide out, I tell her about Miranda — not the bitter version I keep for myself, but the true one, the one where it was nobody's villainy, just a woman who wanted a life with edges I couldn't give her, and a man who got cheaper and smaller and quieter until there was nothing left for her to stay for.
"I built a life I could keep," I tell the engine, because I can't tell her face.
"Small. Easy to defend. And I told myself it was enough for about twelve years.
" I don't finish the sentence. I don't say and then you fixed your own roof.
But it hangs there in the work light, the unfinished thing, and Josie goes very still beside me, and neither of us touches it, and neither of us moves away.
Then comes the night the engine turns over.
We've been on the old girl for weeks. New rings, new bearings, every gasket, every line, fuel system rebuilt, electrical run clean.
And it's past eleven, and we've buttoned her up, and Josie's at the helm and I'm standing over the engine box with my hand on the block the way you do, and she hits the starter, and the old sixty-year-old V-drive cranks, and cranks, and catches—
—and runs.
It runs. Sixty years and a dead owner and a tarp and a lien, and the old girl coughs once and settles into an idle so smooth and so right that I feel it come up through my palm and into my chest, and I make a sound I have not made in front of another human being in a decade.
I cheer.
I do. Hands up, head back, a full-throated yes that bounces off the corrugated roof, and Josie's out of the helm seat and we're both — we're both whooping like kids over an engine we brought back from the dead together, and I'm laughing, really laughing, the rusty thing fully unrusted now, and she's laughing too, that big laugh too big for her body, and for one second under the work lights, over an idling engine that two people willed back to life with their four hands, there is no eighteen years and no checks and no level floor.
There's just the two of us and the thing we made.
The cheering dies down. The engine idles on, sweet.
And we're standing close — too close, I don't know who closed the gap — and the laughter's gone soft, and her face is turned up to mine in the work light with a smudge of grease on her left cheekbone, always the left, and I am so far past the edge of my own carefulness that I can't even see the edge behind me.
"You're the best mechanic I've ever worked with," I say. And I mean it as the whole truth and I know as I say it that it's a coward's fraction of what I want to say.
She looks up at me. The engine idles. The tide slaps the pilings.
"You're the best man I've ever met," she says.
And the silence that comes down after that is not empty.
It's the fullest silence I've ever stood inside.
It's loaded with every word neither of us is saying, with eighteen years and a level floor and a roof I had no business fixing without a note, with two seconds of contact over a tool extension that I have not forgotten and never will, with I just want to be taken seriously and I built a life I could keep and the old engine idling between us like a heartbeat.
I don't kiss her.
God help me, I don't, not that night, because I'm forty-four and a coward and the floor is still tilted and a better man holds the line.
I reach up — slow, the way I checked her fingers under the winch, the gentlest I know how to be — and I wipe the grease off her left cheekbone with my thumb, the thing I've wanted to do for weeks, and her breath catches, I hear it catch, and I take my hand back and I say, rough, "Shut her down before we flood the slip," and I turn away.
But I'm not fooling either of us anymore.
The hatch is off the hinges. The seam's let go. I drive home through the empty town with my thumb still warm from her cheek and I don't pour the bourbon at all, I just sit in the dark of the small life I built, and I understand that it's over, the smallness, the keeping, the careful defended quiet.
The only question left is who breaks first.