Chapter 5 #2
They found the leak forward, a sprung garboard seam where the plank met the keel, working every time she rolled, and they went at her together in the flat slack quiet — Theo bailing steady and hard, no complaining, his expensive city softness nowhere in evidence as he moved a boat's worth of harbor out over the side one bucket at a time, and Rory down on his knees in the bilge with the patching kit, packing the seam, driving the caulking cotton home with the old iron the way Eddie had shown him, the way Eddie had shown him everything.
It was hard, filthy, cold work, and Theo did it without one word of complaint, which surprised Rory more than it should have.
He'd built a version of Theo who'd whine about his hands, his shoes, the reek of the bilge — the soft city version, the one who left.
That Theo wasn't in the boat. This one bailed like his life hung on it, stripped to the wet T-shirt now, arms working, salt drying white on his forearms, and when Rory needed the iron he passed it down without being asked, and when Rory needed light he leaned and angled his body to spend Rory his shadow's worth of sun.
Down in the bilge of a dead man's boat they found the wordless choreography again — the midnight-chowder rhythm, two bodies that had stopped being able to help working well together no matter how badly the men inside them were getting along.
"He taught you this too," Theo said. Not a question. Watching Rory's hands drive the cotton home. "The boat. Same as the kitchen."
"Everything I know how to do with my hands, Eddie put there.
" Rory set another length of cotton. "You want to know the worst part?
I still reach for the phone to ask him things.
Middle of service, something goes sideways, my hand's already going for the phone to call him before I remember there's nobody to—" He drove the iron harder than the seam needed. "Anyway."
The water came in slower. Then slower. Then it was just a weep, and the bilge started, finally, to lose ground to Theo's bucket, and the Carol came up an inch on her lines, then another, riding easier, saved, at least for tonight, at least from the bottom.
They sat back, both of them soaked to the elbow, salt-stung, the boat rocking gentle under them in the last of the slack, and for a minute nobody said anything and it wasn't heard, it was the other kind of quiet, the midnight-chowder kind, and Rory felt the thing he'd been holding off for five days come and sit down next to him in the boat like it owned the seat.
"My father left when I was twelve," Rory heard himself say.
He didn't know he was going to say it. It was the slack water, maybe. The stillness. The way out here there was no town to see his mouth move.
"Just—left. Not the water, nothing like that, nothing you could put a name to.
He got in his truck one October and drove off and didn't stop.
Found out later he was three states over inside a week with somebody else's life on.
Didn't want ours. My mother lasted two more winters and then she followed the warm south like a bird and I didn't— we don't." He was looking at the Carol's chalky transom, not at Theo.
"So it was me and a town full of people who felt sorry for me, which I couldn't stand, and then it was Eddie.
Who didn't feel sorry for me. Eddie stuck a knife in my hand and gave me the four a.m. and told me I could either learn to break down a fish or keep breaking windows.
And I learned to break down a fish." He wiped his face with the back of a wet wrist. "And I stayed.
That's the whole story of me, if you want it.
Everybody left and I'm the one who stayed.
I stayed so hard I made it my whole— I built my entire self out of being the one who doesn't leave.
And your uncle knew that. And he still—"
He stopped.
"He still handed half of it to the one who does," Theo finished, soft. "To me."
"Yeah."
Theo was quiet a moment, bucket idle in his hands.
"You know why I really left," he said. "It wasn't the ambition.
That's the story I tell, the shiny one — small-town kid makes good.
The truth is I left because after Mom died this whole town looked at me like I was made of glass, and I couldn't stand it.
Couldn't stand one more casserole. One more hand on my shoulder.
One more poor Carol's boy. So I ran somewhere nobody knew to feel sorry for me, and I got very, very good at making sure nobody ever would again.
Nine years of it. Never let anybody close enough to see me drop the—" He gestured at his own face, the place the smile lived.
"And then I come back here, and the second person I meet is a man who looked at me day one like he'd rather I'd drowned.
And I have never in my life been so relieved by anything.
You have no idea. You not feeling sorry for me is the kindest thing that's happened to me in fifteen years — and you were trying to be cruel when you did it. "
"I wasn't trying to be kind," Rory said.
"I know. That's why it worked."
The Carol rocked. The foghorn sounded out at the point, once, far, and the tide had made up its mind now, Rory could feel it, the slack was ending, the water starting to slide back in under them the way it always did, the world starting to move again.
"I reached out to Colson before I knew you," Theo said.
Into the quiet. Carefully, like packing a seam.
"That text. It came from— I got here with a plan, Rory, and the plan was ugly and I'm not going to pretend it wasn't, because you saw the phone and you're not stupid.
But I need you to hear one true thing even if you don't believe the rest of it.
" He waited until Rory looked at him. "I don't want to sell his boat.
Or his diner. Or his town. I did when I got here.
I don't now. Somewhere in the last three weeks it stopped being an asset and started being—" His voice caught.
"The only place anybody ever named a boat after my mother.
I don't want to sell it. Whatever else is true. That one's true."
It wasn't everything. Rory knew that, even then, even soaked and cracked open in a saved boat at the turn of the tide — knew there was more Theo wasn't saying, a whole shape of it under the water, the why of the plan and the how bad of it.
But it was a true thing, offered plain, from a man with his shield down, and it was the first time in five days Rory had let himself look full at Theo Vann's actual face instead of the wall he'd built to keep it out.
And that was the mistake. Looking.
Because up close, wet and salt-stung and undone, with his dead mother's name between them and the slack water ending, Theo Vann was not the enemy Rory had built.
He was just a man. Tired and brave and lying by pieces and telling the truth in others, home for the first time in fifteen years and terrified of it, and Rory looked at his mouth, and Rory wanted, and the wanting came up through him fast and total the way the flood tide was coming up under the boat, and there was no talking himself out of it because for once in his life he wasn't thinking in tasks or weather, he wasn't thinking at all—
Rory kissed him.