Chapter 2 #2
"I know it's low. That's the trouble with it." He set the envelope down on his own knee, careful, like it might spill. "Here's where I tell you I can't make that number this month, and you tell me you're not putting her back in the water full of holes, and we look at each other."
"About the size of it."
"How long a look are we talking?"
Hollis leaned against the workbench and folded his arms and considered the man, who was, he'd decided sometime in the last minute, not going to lie to him about the money, which was rarer than sound frames and cost him more of his goodwill than the man could know.
Down the shore somebody's outboard coughed and caught.
Here in front of him was one thing he could actually put his hands on, and Hollis had spent his whole life reaching for the one thing in the pile he could put his hands on.
"You said you sail deliveries," he said. "That mean you know one end of a boat from the other, or that mean you know how to point a rich man's plastic at Newport and not hit anything?"
The corner of Roan's mouth moved. "First one. I rebuilt a Friendship sloop down in — " He stopped. Rerouted. "I've had my hands in wood. Caulked a seam. Bunged a fastening. I won't be useless and I won't be fast."
"Nobody good is fast." Hollis pushed off the bench.
It was, he understood even as he opened his mouth, a bad idea — the kind of bad idea he was constitutionally prone to, the kind that ended with him doing somebody's work for them and calling it neighborliness.
But the yard needed hands he couldn't pay for, and here was a man who needed a bill he couldn't pay, and Hollis had never met a problem shaped that neatly that he could leave alone.
"You work it off. You're here anyway, living up in her twelve feet off my ground.
You give me your days — sanding, painting, hauling stands, whatever the yard wants — and I'll teach you the plank work on your own boat as we go.
Your labor against the bill. When she floats, you're square, and you sail off to Newport or wherever it is men like you go, and we call it even. "
Roan looked at him for a moment that went on a beat too long.
"Men like me," he said.
"Storm birds," Hollis said. "You told me yesterday. I'm agreeing with you."
That got a real one — not the pleasant thing but an actual short laugh, surprised out of him, and it changed his whole face for the half-second it lasted, took ten years and forty harbors off him, and Hollis registered that he'd caused it and registered that he was pleased to have caused it and put both of those facts down somewhere he wouldn't have to look at them, right next to the letter and the message light.
"That's a lot of days you're offering a man you met yesterday," Roan said. "I could be terrible. I could be a thief."
"You made her fast fore and aft before Ray got a line on you, and you told me the truth about your money when a liar would've had three reasons ready." Hollis picked his chisel back up. "I'll risk it."
***
They worked the afternoon, and it was easier than Hollis had braced for, which was its own kind of problem.
He'd expected to have to manage the man — to hand him sandpaper and a scrap and find him not-too-close work and check it later.
Instead Roan watched him bevel the first sister frame once, asked two questions that were the right two questions, and then did the second one clean enough that Hollis had to look twice to be sure of the seam.
He was quick to hand Hollis the thing before Hollis reached for it.
He drifted around the boat the way somebody drifts around a kitchen they don't own but have cooked in a thousand of, easy and out of the way, and twice he took a job clean off Hollis's list before Hollis had said it out loud — swept the shavings, restacked the stands that had slid, coiled the air hose that Hollis left uncoiled roughly always.
That was the part that got under him. Not the skill. The taking-things-off.
Because the thing about Hollis's days, the load-bearing fact of them that he did not examine because examining it did no good, was that they were all addition.
Everybody in Merritt Harbor brought Hollis a thing.
Gil brought him fifteen boats and a stuffing box.
The town brought him the float that needed re-decking and the piling nobody else would set.
His father had brought him the yard and the debt on it both and then had the poor manners to die and leave the carrying to him, and the harbor had simply carried on the family tradition of handing Hollis Cyr whatever was heavy and calling him by name while they did it.
It was the closest thing to being wanted that he had, being needed, and he'd made his peace with the exchange rate a long time ago.
And here was a stranger, a man passing through, a man who'd be gone before the leaves, taking things off the pile.
Coiling the hose. Not because he needed Hollis to want him — he needed nothing, he'd be in Newport by October — but just because his hands had found the hose uncoiled and set it right, the way a man does in a place he's decided, without deciding, to be careful with.
Hollis found he didn't have a slot for it. He set his own irritation down next to everything else on the bench.
"You could sleep in the loft," he said, around four, not looking up from the seam. "Over the office. Old man kept a cot up there for jobs that ran late. Beats a boat with no water in her."
"I like the boat with no water in her. That's a rare treat, in her case." Roan handed him the caulking iron. "But thank you."
"There's a shower off the office. Hot, mostly.
You'll want it after bottom paint." He heard himself doing it — laying out comforts the man hadn't asked for, provisioning him the way he'd get a stray dog a blanket it didn't ask for either — and could not for the life of him stop.
It was what his hands did when the wanting had nowhere else to go.
"And Dee'll feed you at the Foghorn whether you're hungry or not, so don't fight her on it, it's a losing sail. "
"Noted." A pause, while Hollis tapped cotton into the seam and the man watched him do it, and Hollis was aware of being watched, of the particular weight of being watched by someone who wasn't waiting to hand you anything.
"You looked at that list Gil gave you like it was a bill of its own," Roan said. "Fifteen boats. That all on you?"
"Sixteen now." Hollis kept his eyes on the seam. "There's no other railway that'll pull them. So. Yeah."
"Who pulls yours?"
Hollis stopped tapping. It was a small question and it went in under the plank of him where nobody had put a tool in a long time, and he was glad he was turned to the boat so the man couldn't see it land.
"Nobody's ever asked me that," he said, which wasn't an answer, and was.
"You always take in strays this fast?" Roan said, after a moment, letting him off it, redirecting the way a man does when he's decided the other man's had enough. "Or am I special?"