Chapter 3 #2
He was most of the way through it, alone at the table, when the big man came out from behind the griddle wiping his hands on his apron and set a to-go cup down in front of Roan without being asked.
"For the walk back," Rory said. That was all, at first. Up close he had the settled, unhurried heft of a man who'd made his peace with staying somewhere — dark hair gray at the temples, a close beard, eyes that gave you the whole of his attention and not one thing more.
He looked at Roan a moment. "You're the boat at Cyr's. "
"Working her off."
Rory nodded, slow, like that told him plenty.
"Known Hollis my whole life. Two wharves down.
" He laid the words flat, the way some men set a heavy thing down gently.
"He'll work himself to nothing for anybody in this harbor, and the harbor lets him.
" A pause, a whole complete sentence built out of very few words coming up behind his teeth.
"You end up in that shed at night — make him stop once in a while.
Nobody else has managed it." He took Roan's empty plate.
"On the house. Don't tell Dee. She likes to charge. "
***
It got under Hollis, later, that he hadn't heard the man come up behind him.
He was at the bench past dark, doing the thing he did when the day was over and the yard was quiet and the wanting had nowhere to go, which was work he didn't have to.
Tonight it was the winch. The old chain drive on the railway had been slipping under load all fall, a tooth going on the main gear, and Hollis had been nursing it along and telling Gil it was fine because the alternative was a number he didn't have.
He had it apart on a shop rag under the work light, and he was doing what he'd been doing for three years with this yard, which was keeping a dying thing alive one more haul at a time by refusing to admit it was dying.
"That the winch that's been screaming every time you pull a boat?"
Hollis didn't jump, but it was close. Roan had come across the yard in the dark without a sound — sea legs, Hollis thought, a man used to a deck at night — and was standing at his shoulder looking down at the guts of the gearbox with an interest that wasn't polite.
"It's fine," Hollis said.
"It's got a tooth gone and two more going, and you've been feeding it grease and prayer.
" Roan crouched, uninvited, and put a finger on the worn gear, reading it in the light.
"I've rebuilt worse than this. Delivery boats, whatever's aboard when it breaks, you fix it or you swim.
This is a Monday to me." He looked up. "You've got a lathe in that shed under a tarp.
I saw it. We could cut a new gear. Might take a couple nights. "
Hollis looked at him.
Here was the thing Hollis did not have a place to put, the thing that had been getting under him for a week and was, right now, standing in his shed at nine o'clock at night offering to spend two nights of a life that had somewhere better to be fixing a winch that wasn't his boat, wasn't his yard, wasn't his problem, would haul nothing of his out of any water.
Nobody did that. In forty-six years the traffic had gone exactly one direction.
People brought Hollis the broken thing. They did not, ever, kneel down in the dark beside him and offer to take a piece of the weight off just because they'd noticed it was heavy.
"You've got a boat to get back in the water," Hollis said. It came out rougher than he meant. "You don't need to be fixing my winch."
"I know I don't need to." Roan said it easy, and then something in his face went briefly, carefully honest, there and gone. "That's sort of the point of it."
And Hollis, who had a whole life's practice at not letting a thing show, felt it go through him anyway — not warm, nothing so simple as warm, more like the particular give a plank has the first second you realize it's going to come fair after all, that you haven't ruined it, that it's going to hold.
He turned back to the gearbox so the man wouldn't see it on him.
"Fine," Hollis said. "Couple nights. You cut the gear, I'll do the fitting."
"Deal." Roan settled onto the shop stool like he'd been invited, which he had not, and reached for the caliper without asking, and started taking the measurements off the broken gear, and Hollis let him, and the two of them worked in the light with the dark yard around them, and Hollis did not say the thing he was thinking, which was that he could not remember the last time the shed had felt like this at night — like there was another set of hands in it, and the weight had gone, for once, the other way.
***
Roan hadn't slept in the forward cabin since Merritt Point.
He'd told himself it was the leak — she'd been wet forward, no point — and then he'd told himself it was the haul, the angle of her up on the ways making the berth a hillside, and both of those had been true enough to hide behind for a week.
But the garboard was in now, and dry, and the boat sat level enough in her cradle, and there was no reason on God's green earth a man couldn't sleep in his own forward berth except the one reason, which was that the forward berth was where the whole of it still lived.
He went down at dusk with the work light because the winch gear was cut and fitted and Hollis had gone up the hill to whatever he did with his nights, and the yard was quiet, and Roan was tired in the specific way that lowers a man's defenses against himself.
He meant to just get the spare caulking mallet he'd stowed forward.
That was all. He opened the locker under the berth and there it was, the mallet, and beside it, where he'd shoved it two years ago and left it, the rest.
Emmett's tools.
A roll of chisels, the leather gone stiff and salt-stained, each one worn to the exact shape of a hand that wasn't Roan's.
A caulking iron with a taped handle, taped the way Emmett taped everything, badly and with total confidence.
And down in the bottom of the locker, wrapped in an oilcloth Roan did not remember wrapping, a framed chart of a stretch of coast down south they'd never gotten to — the run they'd rebuilt her for, the whole reason, three years of nights and weekends spent making an old boat sound so the two of them could point her at somewhere warm and just go, just live on her, be nobody in particular in a string of harbors that didn't know their names.
They'd finished her in April. Emmett got the diagnosis in June.