Chapter 2 #3
Hollis thought about the honest answer — that he took in every stray that came around the point, dogs and boats and broke men, always had, because a man who'd never once been chosen learned early to be the one who did the choosing, to be the harbor other things ran to, since running-to was the only shape the traffic ever went.
He thought about all of that in the space of one breath.
"Boat's worth saving," he said. "That's all."
He didn't look up when he said it, and so he didn't see whether it landed, and he told himself he didn't care whether it landed, and he tapped the next foot of cotton home.
***
The phone rang at ten to five, and Hollis knew before he got to the office who it was, because there was exactly one person left in his life who called the yard line instead of his cell, and did it on purpose, so the call would go on the record of the business they both owned.
He wiped his hands, which didn't clean them, and picked up.
"Cyr's."
"It's me." Marc's voice, and under it a bar or a television, some room with other people's noise in it. His brother had been calling from rooms with other people's noise in them for eight years, ever since he'd left, as if he needed the witnesses. "You get the letter?"
Hollis looked across the shed, through the open office door, to the workbench, to the coffee can, to the corner of the envelope under it he'd been not-reading since yesterday. Out in the shed, at the boat, the stranger had gone quiet — sanding, or pretending to.
"I got a letter," Hollis said.
"So you read it."
"I read the return address." That had been enough. Tern Point Marina Group. He knew what a company like that wanted with a working yard on deep-water frontage the same way he knew what a storm wanted with a harbor. There was only ever one thing. "Marc."
"Don't." His brother's voice tightened, went into the register it had lived in since they were kids, the one that came right before Marc said the true thing he'd driven all the way to the edge of.
"Don't do the — the Marc. The disappointed thing.
I can't take the number they're offering and neither can you, and I own half of it, Hollis, half of that dirt is legally mine, Dad left it to us both whether you've ever once acted like it or not. "
"I know what Dad left."
"Do you? Because you run that yard like it's a church and I'm the guy who won't come to services.
" A breath, and the noise behind him, glasses and a game.
"I'm not doing it anymore. The lawyers, the every-Christmas-you-look-at-me-like-I-quit-on-something-holy.
I've got nothing, man. I've got a divorce and a rental and a truck older than your grudge, and there is a company that wants to write us both a check that changes my whole life, and you're standing in a shed you can't afford to keep the lights on in, calling it loyalty. "
Hollis stood very still. He set the pencil that was in his hand down on the desk. He set it down carefully, and lined it up with the edge of the blotter, square, because if he was doing that he wasn't doing the other thing.
"The railway hauls the whole fleet, Marc.
" He kept his voice flat, level, the voice he used on a bad seam.
"Twenty miles either way there's no other yard'll pull a working boat.
Gil's whole co-op, every one of those boats you watched get blessed as a kid — they lose this and they lose the season they blow an engine, because they can't haul to fix it.
You sell that frontage for slips and you don't just sell me out, you —"
"I know what I sell." Quiet, now. That was the worst of it, that Marc had gone quiet, because loud Marc was just scared and quiet Marc had already decided.
"I know exactly what it is. I grew up on that railway same as you.
I'm just the only one of us willing to say it out loud: it's already dying, Hollis.
You're just the last one holding still enough to go down with it.
I'm giving you a year. Then I'm exercising my rights, and there's a lawyer says I can force the sale, and you can spend that year fighting me or you can spend it getting your hands out of the hull before it goes under. Your call. Like always."
The line went to the noise of the far room, and then to nothing.
Hollis stood in the office with the dead phone against his ear a moment longer than he needed to, looking at the pencil squared up against the blotter, at the letter under the coffee can, at the message light he'd finally have to answer now.
When he turned, the stranger was standing in the doorway of the shed with a sanding block still in one hand, not pretending anymore, having heard enough of one end of it to have most of the shape, and Hollis found — to his own tired disgust — that the thing he felt, standing there caught, was not the wanting-to-be-left-alone he'd have felt with anyone else in the whole town.
"Go on and ask," Hollis said. "You've got the look."
"Somebody wants to buy the yard out from under you," Roan said.
"My brother," Hollis said, "owns the door they'd come through. And he's decided to leave it open."