Chapter 5
Slack Tide
They ran the diner for four days like two men sharing custody of a kid they were no longer speaking to.
It was, Rory would have admitted if there'd been anyone to admit it to, an impressive feat of engineering.
The Foghorn opened at six and closed at eight and in between it fed the town, and Rory and Theo built the whole day around never being in the same three feet of it at once.
Theo took the floor; Rory took the line; the pass became a border they slid plates across without eye contact.
Order up. Heard. Table six. Heard. Four days of heard, which was the only word they'd found that didn't have the Blessing in it, or the phone, or the blue light of WADE COLSON lit up eighteen inches from Rory's face in the dark while Rory's hand was halfway to a place it had no business going.
He'd tried, the first morning, to let Theo explain.
For about a second. Theo had come down the stairs with his mouth already open — Rory, about last night, that text, I can explain, I reached out before—and Rory had said "Don't," in the voice that closed the kitchen, and had meant it, and Theo had closed his mouth, and that had been that.
Because here was the truth Rory had gone to bed with and woken up with: it didn't matter what the explanation was.
Even if it was clean. Even if Theo had a good reason.
The point wasn't the text. The point was that Rory had stood in his own dark kitchen high on a day they'd built together and reached for the man's face like a fool, like a kid, like somebody who'd forgotten the one thing he knew for certain, which was that Theo Vann had one foot in Portland and always had and always would, and the phone had just been kind enough to remind him before he did something he couldn't take back.
So. Heard. Four days of it. It was working fine.
It was not working fine. Dee, who had watched Rory build walls his whole life and knew every brick by name, made that clear on the third afternoon, cornering him by the walk-in with a bus tub she didn't need to be carrying.
"You want to tell me what happened at the Blessing," she said, "or you want to keep making that boy carry plates like he ran over your dog."
"Nothing happened at the Blessing."
"Mm. Nothing happened so hard you two invented a new language to not-talk in." She set the tub down. "I knew Eddie forty years. You know what he'd say if he saw you cooking mad like this — punishing the whole room because you got scared of something."
"Don't tell me what Eddie'd say. You don't get to—" Rory stopped. Pressed the heel of a hand to his eye. "It's handled, Dee."
"That's his word," Dee said, gently, terribly.
"Handled. That's Theo's word." And she picked the tub back up and left him with it, which was the worst thing she could have done, because she was right — because somewhere in the last five days Rory had started to talk like the man he was refusing to talk to.
Then Wyatt came in on the fifth morning with his face wrong.
"The Carol's low," he said, no coffee, no sitting.
"Rory. She's low at her mooring. Taking water.
I don't know how long she's been at it, I only clocked her at first light, but she's down at the stern and if it comes on to blow tonight—" He didn't finish.
He didn't have to. Everyone on the harbor knew how that sentence ended. It ended with a boat on the bottom.
Rory put down the spatula.
The Carol was Eddie's. A sixteen-foot wooden skiff older than Rory, lapstrake, the kind of boat nobody built anymore and nobody but a stubborn old man would keep, and Eddie had kept her forty years, bailed her and painted her and cursed her and loved her, and taken Rory out in her a hundred Sunday mornings to pull the two lobster traps Eddie ran purely so he could call himself a fisherman, and she was, Rory realized standing at his own grill, one more thing on the list of Eddie he had not been able to make himself deal with.
She'd been sitting out there on her mooring for four weeks with a dead man's name for her captain, and Rory hadn't rowed out once, and now she was going down.
"I'll go out at slack," Rory said. Low tide slack, when the current quit and you could work a boat without her fighting you. "Bail her, find the leak, get her to the town float."
"You can't do it alone," Wyatt said. "Not bail and row and patch. You need a second."
And there was a silence in the diner then, a specific one, and Rory felt both Wyatt and Dee not look at the man wiping down table four, and Rory understood that the whole harbor had already assigned him his second and was just waiting to see if he'd be stupid about it.
"Theo," Rory said, to the grill. "You know which end of a boat is which."
Theo straightened up from the table. Something crossed his face — surprise, and under it something more careful. "I grew up here," he said. "I know which end of a boat is which."
"Slack's at two. Be at the town float at one-thirty." Rory picked the spatula back up. "Wear something you don't mind ruining."
He went back to the grill. Behind him he heard Theo say something low to Dee, and Dee answer lower, and he didn't turn around.
He'd just volunteered to spend an afternoon alone in a small boat with the man he'd spent five days walling out — which was, by any measure, the stupidest thing he'd done since reaching for that phone-lit face in the dark.
But the Carol was going down. Eddie's boat, Eddie's hands in every plank of her, four weeks of Rory's own cowardice riding out there at her mooring taking on water.
Some things you didn't get to be a coward about twice.
He'd bury the rest of it the way he buried everything, down in the bilge with the ballast, and he'd save the boat, and that would be that.
It was a good plan. It lasted until slack tide.
***
The harbor at slack tide went still the way nothing else in Rory's life ever went still.
That was the thing about it, the thing he'd never had words for and never tried to find them: for twenty minutes, twice a day, the whole moving world of the water just — stopped.
The current quit. The boats swung to rest all pointing the same way, like a held breath.
The chop lay down flat and the surface went to hammered pewter and even the gulls seemed to lose the thread of what they'd been yelling about.
Slack water. The pause between the tide going out and the tide coming in, when the sea couldn't make up its mind which way to pull, and for those twenty minutes a man in a small boat could work in a quiet so complete it felt like the harbor was doing it on purpose, for him, as a kindness.
They rowed out to the mooring in the diner's aluminum tender, Rory on the oars, Theo in the stern with the bailing bucket and the patching kit between his feet, and neither of them said anything, and the oarlocks knocked, and the town fell away behind them until it was just a painting of a town, small and pretty and none of its business what happened out here on the flat gray water.
Theo faced him from the stern, because that was where the passenger sat, which meant Rory had to look at him the whole way out — every stroke, nowhere else to put his eyes.
Theo had dressed down for it, an old gray T-shirt gone soft, jeans, deck shoes, the expensive gloss sanded off him, and he looked, Rory thought and hated thinking, more like a harbor than he had in five weeks.
More like he belonged in the boat than the man rowing it wanted him to.
Neither of them said anything. The oarlocks knocked.
A cormorant surfaced ten feet off, considered them, went back under. The water held its breath.
The Carol was low. Wyatt hadn't exaggerated.
She sat heavy and wrong at her mooring, stern down, a hand's width of freeboard where there should have been two, the harbor lapping greedy at her rail.
And on her transom, in Eddie's own hand, faded but legible, the gold leaf gone chalky the way the specials board had gone chalky:
CAROL.
Rory heard Theo stop breathing.
"He named his boat," Theo said. Not a question.
His voice had gone strange. He was staring at the transom, at his dead mother's name in his dead great-uncle's handwriting on a boat that was four weeks from the bottom, and every ounce of the counter-smile, the charm, the whole shiny frictionless performance Theo Vann carried through the world like a shield — it was just gone, wiped clean off him, and what was underneath was a man Rory had only seen in flashes. Seventeen. Wrecked. Home.
"After your mother," Rory said. "Yeah."
"I named my restaurant Carol's." Theo laughed, but it came out broken in the middle.
"In Portland. The thing I lost. I named it— we both—" He put his hand flat on the Carol's chalky rail, careful, like she might spook.
"He never told me he did this. Fifteen years.
He never once called to say, hey, I named the boat after your mom.
He just— did it, and kept her, and bailed her, and never said. "
"He wasn't a man who said." Rory shipped the oars. Caught the mooring line. "You'd know that if you'd been here."
He hadn't meant it to come out as a knife. It came out as a knife anyway, four weeks of heard and the Blessing and the blue light behind it, and he watched it land, watched Theo take it flush, and braced for whatever Theo would throw back.
Theo didn't throw anything back.
"No," Theo said quietly, hand still on Carol's rail.
"You're right. I'd know a lot of things if I'd been here.
" He looked up, and his eyes were too bright, and he didn't hide it, didn't look away at the fleet, just let Rory see it.
"Let's save his boat, Rory. Can we fight after?
I'll fight with you all night if you want.
I just— can we not let her go down while we do it. "
And that took the knife right out of Rory's hand.
***