Chapter 4
Lee Shore
Marc's truck was in the yard when Hollis came down at dawn, which meant his brother had driven up from Portland in the dark to be sure of catching him before the meeting, which meant Marc was scared, which meant Marc had already decided and had only come to watch Hollis find out.
He was sitting on the tailgate with a gas-station coffee, in a jacket too good for the truck, and he looked older than the eight years should have made him.
That was the first thing Hollis felt, before the anger got its boots on — that his little brother looked worn down to the frame, thin in the face, a man who'd been bailing a while.
The Cyr in him was still there, the coloring, the set of the shoulders, the way he turned the coffee cup in his hands, which was their father's tell and their grandfather's before him, a family that fidgeted at the exact moment it should hold still.
But where Hollis had planted himself in one spot for forty-six years and let it grow bark, Marc had spent the same decades being sanded, and it showed.
"You could've called," Hollis said. "You're good at the phone."
"I wanted to say it to your face for once.
" Marc looked past him, up the ways, at the boats on the stands, at the whole yard he half-owned and never came to.
"The hearing's tonight. Tern Point's asking the town to rezone the frontage.
Marine-industrial to recreational. They can't lay a single slip without it, so it all comes down to whether the town votes to let them.
" He brought his eyes back. "I'm going to stand up and say I'm for it.
I'm the co-owner. It'll matter that I say it, and it'll hurt you that I say it, and I've decided I can live with the second thing. "
Up in the Petrel's cradle the ladder creaked, and Roan came down it into the middle of the thing, because there was no staying twelve feet up while two brothers took a family apart in the open air.
Hollis watched Marc clock the stranger — the salt-bleached hair, the deep tan, the gutted boat on the stands behind him — and file him fast, and file him right, which was the trouble.
"You're the delivery guy." Marc said it slowly. "Came in during the Blessing." He looked from Roan to Hollis and back, and something in him went keen, because Marc had spent a lifetime being the one who left and could spot a leaver at forty feet in bad light. "Passing through."
"Working off a haul-out," Roan said. Easy. Giving up nothing.
"Sure." Marc almost smiled, and it was tired, and it was mean only because most of the meanness was aimed at himself.
"Then you'll be gone by fall and I'll still be his brother come spring, so do us both a kindness and stay out of a family thing.
" He picked the coffee back up off the tailgate.
"He collects strays. You'll have noticed.
Boats, dogs, guys down on their luck — anything that'll hold still and let him carry it.
The town calls it a heart of gold. It's not.
" He said it without heat, looking at Hollis now, and the lack of heat was what made it land like a blade.
"It's the only way he knows to keep a thing from leaving.
Give it enough weight and it can't. Load it down till it stays.
" A beat. "Ask him how that's gone for him.
Ask him where I am. Ask him where the last guy is who was going to stick around. "
Hollis said nothing, because there was nothing to say to a true thing said by someone who loved you.
And Roan said nothing either — but Hollis saw the man take it aboard, saw it go in and find the exact berth that was already cut for it, the place that had known it before Marc ever said it out loud.
"Six weeks," Marc said, gentler, to his brother, getting down off the tailgate.
"The vote's six weeks out, once your precious haul-out's done.
Spend it fighting me if you want. Or spend it getting your hands out of the hull before it goes under and takes them with it.
" He got in the truck. "I do love you. That's the part nobody believes.
I'm doing this because I love you, and you'll never once let that be true at the same time as the other thing, and that's your whole problem, Hollis.
You never could hold two things at once.
" The engine turned over rough. "Only ever one. Always the heaviest one."
He drove back down toward town to spend the day being right, and Hollis stood in the yard and did the thing he did, which was hold, which was let the weight settle and find its footing and become just another thing he carried, and he did not look at Roan, because he could not, right then, be read.
***
The town hall filled the way it only filled for the things that split it, which in Merritt Harbor's experience was funerals and money.
By seven there wasn't a folding chair left.
Hollis stood at the back against the wall, because the back wall was where a man could see the whole room and not be seen carrying his own face, and he watched the harbor come in and sort itself, and it sorted the way he'd known it would, which was the worst of it.
The fleet came in a body — Gil and his crews, oilskins and ball caps and boots, taking up the left side of the room like weather coming in.
But the right side filled too, and it filled with people Hollis knew and mostly liked.
The woman who ran the gift shop that opened eight weeks a year and starved the other forty-four.
The young couple who'd sunk everything into the old Blue Inn and couldn't make the math work on a town that emptied after Labor Day.
Two selectmen who'd been staring at the same shrinking tax base for a decade and had the look of men doing sums in church.
These were not villains. That was the thing nobody outside a dying town ever understood — half the room wanting the marina wasn't greed.
It was drowning, the same as Marc, the whole town treading the same cold water and reaching for the same rope, and the rope just happened to be made fast to the one cleat that would sink the fleet.
Near the front, small and straight-backed in the second row, sat June, and when Hollis's eye found her she caught him at it and gave him the flat unimpressed look she gave the whole world, which from June was close kin to a blessing.
She'd buried a husband who'd fished this water and an era that had gone down with him, and if anyone in the room still carried the memory of what the working waterfront had actually been, it was her.
She'd want to speak. Hollis dreaded it and needed it in about equal measure.
The Tern Point man was named Sutter, and he was good.
Hollis would give him that. He stood up front in a soft quarter-zip and put slides on the wall — renderings, clean white pontoon slips floating where the co-op's tired floats now sagged, a restaurant deck, a parking lot that the artist had thoughtfully drawn full of out-of-state plates as though that were the same thing as prosperity.
He said revitalize four times and legacy twice.
He said the yard was, and he hoped they'd forgive his being frank, a failing operation sitting on the most valuable water in three counties, and that Tern Point wanted nothing more than to honor that heritage while carrying the harbor into a future that could actually pay for itself.
He talked about jobs. He talked about the tax base, and Hollis watched the two selectmen lean forward like men shown water in a dry month.
And he said — here Gil went rigid all down the left side of the room — that of course they'd heard the fleet's concerns, and that the plan carefully preserved haul-out capacity for working vessels, right there in the materials, page nine, they were welcome to read it.
"Ask him what page nine actually says."
Hollis didn't know, for a second, who'd spoken.
Then he placed the voice, because he'd spent a week learning it, and turned, and Roan was a few feet down the same back wall — Hollis hadn't seen him come in, sea legs, a man who arrived without a wake — arms crossed, eyes not on Sutter but on the room, reading it the way he read every room.
Except he wasn't looking for the exit this time. He was looking for the leak.
"I'm sorry?" Sutter said, pleasant, finding him.
"Page nine." Roan came off the wall and a step forward, unhurried, and Hollis watched a different man come up out of him — not the charm, not the easy deflection, but something precise and cold that Hollis hadn't seen yet and understood at once was the true keel of him.
"You said you'd preserve haul-out capacity for working vessels.
I deliver boats up and down this coast for a living.
I've watched a dozen working yards turn into exactly what's on your wall, so I know the paragraph, and I'll tell the room what it says before you do.
It says capacity 'subject to marina operations and available draft.
'" He let it sit a second. "Here's what that means in a marina.
It means the morning a lobster boat's leaking diesel into the water the summer people are swimming in, that boat does not get hauled.
It means a working railway — that grinds, and drips, and stinks of tar and bottom paint — does not get to exist inside a hundred yards of a restaurant deck.
You know that. So you'll close it inside two seasons and call it a business decision, and it'll be legal, because page nine let you. "
The room had gone quiet in the particular way rooms go quiet when somebody says the thing everyone half-knew and nobody would say.