Chapter 7 #2
The awful part wasn't even the yard. Hollis found, standing in the doorway with the morning going on stupidly bright behind the cars, that he wasn't thinking about the railway or the frontage or Marc's lawyer or the vote three weeks out.
He was thinking about the night before last — a man's head heavy on his chest, a man's arm come across his ribs in the dark — about how he'd lain awake after Roan slept and let himself, just for those few hours, just the once in his whole life, believe the story where somebody wanted Hollis Cyr and stayed to prove it.
He'd known better. He'd known better for forty-six years.
And he'd set the knowing down anyway, the way you set down a tool you're tired of carrying, and picked up hope instead, and hope had turned in his hand into precisely this.
That was the lesson, if a man was fool enough to need it a second time: the reaching was the mistake.
Not the man. The reaching. Keep your hands to the work and the work will never once make a liar of you.
He set the caulking iron down on the bench.
He did it carefully. He lined it up square with the edge, the way he lined up a pencil, because if he was doing that with his hands then his hands were not doing the other thing, and a man had to keep his hands somewhere.
Roan had gotten free of Corliss's handshake and crossed the yard and he was saying Hollis's name, low, fast, the charm gone out of his voice entirely, and behind him Corliss was saying something bluff and apologetic to Sutter about small worlds and Gil was standing very still by the railway with a look on his face like a man watching a friend get robbed, and the whole yard had that terrible held quality of people who've all understood something at the same moment and are waiting to see what the wronged party does with it.
"Hollis." Roan stopped in front of him. His face had gone open and desperate, and some far-off part of Hollis noted that he'd never once seen the man look desperate, not on a lee shore in the dark, not anywhere. "Hollis, I was going to — I've been trying to find the way to —"
"How long," Hollis said. His own voice came out flat and level, the voice he used on a bad seam, and he was distantly grateful for it, because it was the only thing holding.
"I found out three days ago. The name. On the letter, on your table, I saw it and I —"
"Three days." Hollis nodded slowly, taking the measurement, the way he took every measurement, precise and without mercy.
"You knew for three days that the man buying my yard out from under me was a man you worked for.
That you brought his boat into these waters.
You knew it three days ago, and you were in my bed two of those nights, and you didn't say it.
" He wasn't asking. He was reading the hull.
"You let me find out standing in my own shop door. "
"Because I knew you'd look at me exactly like you're looking at me right now.
" Roan's voice cracked on it, and it should have moved Hollis, and it did move Hollis, and Hollis had spent forty-six years learning that being moved and being safe were two different waters.
"Hollis, I didn't know. I swear to God I didn't know when I stood up in that meeting, I didn't know until I read the letter, it's — it's a coincidence, it's the ugliest coincidence, my whole world is that world, of course a thread of it runs through me, but I never —"
"I know it's coincidence." Hollis cut him off, because he could not stand to hear the man beg for a thing Hollis was already going to give him.
"I'm not a child, Roan. I know you didn't plant yourself in my harbor eighteen months ago on the off chance.
I know how the world's stitched — your whole life is boats and money and the men who own them, and one of those threads ran back to Corliss, and you could no more have stopped it than I could stop the tide coming up my own railway.
" He said it evenly, and it was mercy, and it was also the sound of a door being shut so gently you didn't hear the latch catch until you tried the handle. "That's not the part."
"Then what —"
"I believe you," Hollis said.
And he did. That was the worst of it, the part that would keep him up in the cold house for a long time after — he did believe him.
He believed it was coincidence. He believed Roan hadn't known.
It changed nothing, and it changed nothing in a way that told Hollis something final about himself, which was that the betrayal he could not forgive wasn't the boat or the buyer or the wrong side.
It was the three days. It was that Roan Mercer had held the true thing in his hands for three days, in Hollis's bed, and decided — chosen, freely, with his eyes open — that leaving Hollis to find out in public was easier than trusting Hollis to hear it.
That was the whole of it. Roan hadn't trusted him with it.
Roan, like every soul Hollis had ever wanted, had looked at the choice of staying-and-being-known versus going, and had reached for the door, and the only surprise was that Hollis had let himself be surprised.
"You've got that delivery," Hollis said.
It wasn't a question either. He'd seen Roan on the pay phone, seen his face.
"The one that came in this morning. That's your out.
Boat splashes Thursday, you're square, and you've got somewhere to be by the weekend.
" He picked the caulking iron back up, because his hands needed the work, because if his hands were working he could get through the next part. "So go."
And it should have been loud, Hollis thought, from somewhere far off.
A thing this size should tear something.
Should make a sound. It didn't. It never did, with him.
The biggest losses of his life had all happened at exactly this volume — his father going, Warren going, the yard's slow twenty-year drowning — quiet, and reasonable, and dressed up as good sense, a man setting a tool down square on a bench and telling somebody to leave in a level voice while the whole floor gave way beneath them both.
He'd had so much practice at the dock. He was the most practiced man on the coast at watching the thing he wanted get smaller across the water.
He could do it in his sleep. He would, in fact, be doing it in his sleep for a good long while now.
"Hollis —"
"Go, Roan." And here it came up out of him, quiet, the thing he'd built his whole life to protect and had handed this man anyway three weeks ago in the dark, the thing that made it unforgivable and unbearable both.
"You told me. In my own bed. You said don't tell you you'll come after when you know you won't. So I'm not going to stand here and let you tell me.
I'm going to save us both the lie." He turned back to the Cormier boat, to the plank, to the work, which had never once left him, which was the only thing in his whole life that never left.
"You were always going to be gone before the leaves.
You told me that the first day. I'm the fool that stopped hearing it. "
***
Roan stood in the yard for a while after Hollis turned his back, which was a thing Roan Mercer never did — stood still after a door closed, when every instinct he had said the second a place stops wanting you, you weigh anchor.
Corliss and Sutter had the decency, or the discomfort, to get back in their cars and go — Corliss throwing Roan a puzzled, faintly wounded look on the way, the look of a man who couldn't understand why his friendly greeting had detonated something, because men like Corliss never could see the blast radius of themselves.
Gil looked at Roan across the yard for a long moment, and there was no hate in it, which was worse than hate; there was just the flat appraisal of a man revising an estimate downward, and then Gil went back to his boat, and that was the fleet's whole verdict, delivered without a word.