Chapter 9 #2
"No," Hollis said. "I'm not — I'm not doing the thing.
I always do the thing. I give everybody the out.
You said it. You're standing on my float wrecked and crying and every part of me wants to tell you it's all right, you can go, no hard feelings, so you don't have to be scared, because that's how I love people, I make it easy for them to leave me.
" His voice broke on it, and he pushed through, because Hollis Cyr was, under everything, the most stubborn man on the coast. "I'm not going to do it this time.
So here's — here's what I'm going to do instead.
" He took a breath like a man going underwater.
"I'm going to ask. Stay. I want you to stay.
Not for the yard, not for the boat, not for anything you can fix.
I want you to stay, in my house, in my life, because I — " and there it stalled, the man who could talk for an hour about a scarf joint and had never once in his life said the plain thing about himself, and he shut his eyes and said it anyway, to the gray morning, to the man in front of him — "because I want you.
That's all. That's the whole of it. I've wanted one thing for myself in twenty years and it's you, and I'm asking. Stay."
Roan crossed the last of the float and took the big man's face in both his rope-scarred hands, the way Hollis had taken his, and put his forehead against Hollis's forehead, and for a moment neither of them could do anything but breathe.
"Yeah," Roan said, finally, cracked all the way open. "Yeah. I'll stay. God, Hollis. You asked. You actually asked." He laughed, wet, disbelieving. "You have no idea what you just did."
"Reached," Hollis said, against his mouth. "Twenty years late."
"Right on time," said Roan, and kissed him, on the float, in the gray Saturday light, in front of the whole waking harbor, and this time when the wanting came up in Hollis Cyr it landed on a man who had come back around the point to catch it.
"There's a plan," Roan said after a while, foreheads still together, both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere.
"A real one. Marc's half, the yard, a way to keep the whole thing working so the fleet doesn't lose the railway.
I worked it out coming north. The vote's tonight, and if we do this right we save the yard and settle Marc and fix it so nobody can ever flip it — not Corliss, not anybody.
" He pulled back enough to look at Hollis.
"But I wanted you to know I came back for you before I told you I came back with a plan.
Because the plan's a thing I can do for the yard, and I didn't want you thinking —" he stopped, made himself get it exactly right — "I didn't want you thinking I came home to fix something.
I didn't come home to be useful to you. I came home because you're where I want to be.
The yard's just the place you happen to keep it. "
And Hollis Cyr, who had spent his whole life being wanted for what his hands could fix, and had just been told plainly by the one man he wanted that he was wanted for nothing at all but himself, had to turn and look out at the gray water a moment before he could trust his own face in front of anybody.
***
The town hall was even fuller for the vote than it had been for the hearing, because the whole harbor had heard by noon that the delivery man had come beating back around the point at dawn and kissed Hollis Cyr on the town float, and there is no meeting on earth a Maine town will not attend if there's a chance of watching a thing like that resolve.
They came in the same two sides. But something had shifted in the room, and Hollis, standing at the front this time instead of against the back wall, could feel it — the fleet solid on the left, and on the right the frightened, decent, drowning half of the town, and between them now, for the first time, something that looked less like a wall and more like a question nobody had been given a good answer to. Until tonight.
Roan stood beside Hollis at the front of the room, which was the most exposed place he'd stood in his adult life — a man who read exits for a living, planted in front of a whole town that had every reason to distrust him, that had watched him turn out to be the buyer's man and then watched him come beating back around the point at dawn, and had not yet decided which of those two men he really was.
He could feel them deciding. He kept his eyes off the doors, which took some doing.
There was nowhere on earth he wanted to be but here, which was so new a feeling that he kept quietly checking it, the way you keep pressing a tooth that has finally stopped hurting.
It was Gil who stood up first, because Gil had insisted, because a captain leads.
He laid it out plain the way he laid out everything: that there was another way to do this, one that didn't cost the town its working waterfront and didn't leave the Cyr yard to die one uncharged haul at a time.
That Roan Mercer — and here the whole room looked at the man standing beside Hollis, the stranger who'd turned out to be the buyer's delivery skipper and turned out, after all, to be something else entirely — that Roan Mercer was buying out Marc Cyr's half of the yard.
Not at Corliss's inflated development number, because if the town voted the rezone down there'd be no development and no inflated number — just a working yard worth working-yard money, which a man who'd banked seven hard years of delivery pay and never owned a thing could just about reach, if he spent every dime of it and took a working-waterfront loan against the rest.
Gil laid it out in his flat bollard voice with no pretty edges on it, which was exactly why the room believed him.
Gil Levesque had never once in his life oversold a thing — had barely ever sold a thing at all — and when a man like that stood up and said there was a way to keep the harbor a harbor, the fence-sitting half of the room leaned in and, for the first time all fall, listened instead of bracing.
That the yard would be run, going forward, by Cyr and Mercer, both.
And that a working-waterfront covenant would go on the deed — Elias Medeiros had driven up from the county with the paperwork and stood now at the side of the room, the engineer who'd saved the town pier the year before, explaining in his careful way that the state had a program for exactly this, that the covenant would bind the land to marine-industrial use in perpetuity, that no marina, not Corliss's or anybody's, could ever flip it, not in fifty years, not ever.
Wyatt Boudreau stood up from the fleet side, which surprised the room, because the harbormaster didn't speak at meetings as a rule — he ran the water, not the room.
He said, flat and short in the way the whole harbor had learned to trust, that he'd looked at the covenant and the numbers both, that they held, and that as harbormaster he would stake his job on the working waterfront being worth more to this town over fifty years than eight weeks of summer slips.
Then he sat back down, having said more in public than most of them had heard out of him in a decade.
Beside him, Elias caught Roan's eye across the room and gave him the small dry nod of one man who'd washed up a stranger in this harbor and been kept, to another.
Which meant the fence-sitters didn't have to choose between the fleet and their own mortgages after all.
They could vote the rezone down and keep their working harbor and know the yard wasn't going to die on them for it, because a man was putting his whole life savings and his name into keeping it alive, and the state was going to make it permanent, and the co-op was going to fill it with boats.
Somebody had finally handed the drowning half of the room a rope that wasn't tied to their own anchor.