Chapter 1 #2
"I'll keep this simple," Marsh said, which is what lawyers say right before they do the opposite.
He had reading glasses down his nose and a folder squared off in front of him like it might try to leave.
"Eddie was a simple man about most things.
This was not one of them, and I told him so, and he told me to mind my own business and pour him a drink.
So." He turned a page. "You understand the diner isn't just the diner.
There's the building, the apartment above it, the liquor license, the equipment, and the land it sits on — which, given where it sits, is worth considerably more than the diner ever made. You follow?"
"It sits on the harbor," Rory said. "I know where it sits. I've stood in it since I was fifteen."
"I know you have." Marsh looked at him over the glasses, and for a second he wasn't a lawyer, he was just an old man who'd known Rory a long time and was about to do something he didn't enjoy.
"That's rather the point of what I'm about to read you.
Eddie was clear that you should hear it in his words, not mine.
He wrote a piece of this himself." He cleared his throat.
Found the line. "'Rory. If Marsh is reading you this, then I finally lost an argument with my own heart, which took long enough. '"
Rory's grip went still on the cap.
"'You gave this place nineteen years and I gave you a knife and a bad temper and never once said the thing I should've said, so I'm saying it in front of a lawyer, which is the only way you'll believe I meant it.
You are the best thing I ever made in that kitchen.
Better than the chowder. Don't tell Dee I said that about the chowder. '"
Somewhere below them a delivery truck backed up, beeping, ordinary, the world not knowing or caring.
"'So here's what I did,'" Marsh read, "'and here's why, and you're going to be angry, and you get to be angry, and then you're going to do it anyway, because it's the last thing I'm ever going to ask you and you were never any good at telling me no.'"
"Marsh." Rory's voice came out flat and level and not at all like the inside of him. "What did he do."
Marsh set the personal page aside and picked up the legal one, and his voice changed back into the reading voice, careful and neutral, the voice you use to hand somebody something heavy.
"The Foghorn — building, land, license, and all appurtenances — passes in equal shares. Fifty percent to you, Rory Nash. And fifty percent to Eddie's great-nephew. Theodore Vann."
The name landed in the room like something dropped off a shelf.
Rory hadn't heard it spoken in — years. It didn't belong here.
It belonged to a kid, a skinny loud kid who'd left when he was seventeen and swore up and down the harbor he'd never come back, who'd made good on it too, fifteen years of never coming back, not for the summers, not for the storms, not when Eddie's heart first went sideways two winters ago, not for a single one of the days Rory had stood at that grill while Eddie got smaller.
Theo Vann was a name Eddie used to say at the end of a long night with a certain look, a look Rory had learned not to ask about.
"No," Rory said.
"There's a condition," Marsh went on, gently, like Rory hadn't spoken.
"The estate holds title in trust for one year from today.
During that year, the two of you are to operate The Foghorn together as a going concern — open, staffed, serving.
If at the end of the year it's still running, title passes to you both, clear, to do with as you agree.
If either of you walks away, or if the business closes its doors—" He turned the page over, though he clearly knew the rest by heart.
"It's sold. The proceeds split. And there's a standing offer on file, Rory, that I'm obligated to tell you about, from a development concern that's been sniffing at that parcel for two years.
Colson Marine. Their number's real and it's large. "
"He can't." The cap had stopped turning.
Rory's hands had done something with it he'd have to fix later; the brim was bent.
"He can't just — hand half of it to somebody who left.
To a — Theo doesn't know a walk-in from a well.
He's never worked a Saturday in his life, he was gone before he was old enough to—"
"You can't buy him out," Marsh said. "I want you to hear that part clearly, because it's the part everyone tries to get around first. There's no buyout clause.
Eddie killed it on purpose. You can't buy Theo's half and Theo can't buy yours.
For one year, it's both of you or it's neither of you or it's Colson. Those are the doors."
Rory sat back down. He hadn't noticed standing; now he noticed sitting, the leather cool through his kitchen pants, his own breathing too loud in the paper-and-cough-drop quiet.
He kept trying to make the math come out different.
That was the kitchen in him — a bad number was a bad number, but usually you could find where you'd gone wrong.
A mislabeled invoice. A transposed digit.
There was no fixing this. Eddie had done it on purpose and done it airtight and handed it to Marsh two winters ago, which meant — Rory did that math too, and hated it — Eddie had written Theo Vann into the will right around the time his heart first went sideways.
Right around the time Rory had started staying nights, sleeping on the office cot so the old man wouldn't be alone if it happened again.
All those nights. And upstairs, in a lawyer's drawer, Eddie had already made room for the one who wasn't there.
"He never called him," Rory said. "In two years. The kid never once—"
"I don't know what passed between them," Marsh said. "I don't think anyone does. That's rather what June's for."
"I don't want June." Rory heard how it sounded and didn't care.
"I want to know why the man I—" He stopped.
The word sat there, too big for the room.
Loved. The word he'd never said to Eddie's face, because Eddie would've told him to quit being soft and go check the fryer.
"Why he'd set it up so I spend a year watching the door for the day that kid walks out of it.
Because he will. That's the one thing this whole town knows about Theo Vann. He leaves."
Marsh didn't argue. That was the worst part. He just looked at Rory with those old kind eyes and let the true thing be true.
The foghorn sounded, out at the point. You couldn't hear it in Marsh's office, not really, but Rory heard it anyway, the way you hear a clock you've lived with your whole life. Long, low, two counts. There's weather coming. There was always weather coming.
"Why," Rory said. It came out smaller than he wanted. "Why would he do this to me."
Marsh took his glasses off. Folded them. And for the second time that morning he stopped being a lawyer.
"I asked him the same thing," he said. "In this office.
In that chair you're sitting in. And he said—" Marsh stopped, and something moved over his old face, something private.
"He said you'd both need to hear the why from someone who isn't me.
He said June would know when it was time.
" He put the glasses in his shirt pocket.
"That's all I've got for you, son. That's the whole hand. "
Rory stood up. He didn't remember deciding to. His body just did it, the way it did things at the grill, ahead of him.
"When," he said.
"When what?"
"When's he get here. Theo."
Marsh checked his watch, and there was something almost apologetic in it. "He flew into Portland last night," he said. "He should be pulling into the harbor right about—"
—now, as it turned out.
***
Rory came down the pharmacy stairs and out onto Water Street into the flat bright noon light, the fog burned off, the whole harbor laid out hard and glittering and unforgiving, and there was a car parked crooked in front of The Foghorn that did not belong to anyone in Merritt Harbor.
A rental. City-clean, one of those anonymous gray crossovers, still wearing its Portland lot sticker in the window.
The driver's door was open. And a man was standing in the middle of Water Street with his back to Rory, looking up at the diner's crooked sign, the peeling gull, the whole tired weathered face of the only home Rory had, and he was standing the way you stand when you're bracing for something.
Rory stopped on the bottom step.
He'd built a picture, over the years, out of the little Eddie let slip and the little the town remembered.
The picture was a kid. Loud, skinny, gone.
The man in the street was none of those things and all of them at once, and Rory's first clear thought — before the anger, ahead of it, the way his body was always ahead of him — was: of course.
Of course he moved like that. Loose, quick, all his weight forward on his toes, a man ready to be somewhere else.
Of course the hair fell right, that careless expensive way that costs money to look like it cost nothing.
Of course, when the car's warning chime started dinging because he'd left the door open and the key in it — because who leaves a key in a car, who's that easy with the world — of course he reached back and shut it without looking, one hand, still gazing up at the sign, like the whole physical world would just arrange itself for him if he waited.
Then he turned around.