Chapter 9 #3
Marc stood up. Hollis watched his brother get to his feet in the same hall he'd stood up in three weeks ago to sell them all out, and the room braced, and Marc said, "I withdraw my support for the Tern Point sale.
" He didn't look at his notes because there weren't any.
"My brother's partner is buying my half at a fair price, and I'll take it, and I'll be square, and I'll be gone, which is what I actually wanted the whole time — the money, not the wrecking of anything.
I never wanted to wreck it. I wanted out from under a thing that was drowning me same as it's drowning him, and somebody finally offered me a door that didn't cost the harbor everything to walk through.
" He looked at Hollis, then, across the whole room, and there was twenty years in it.
"You were right that I quit. I was right that you were drowning.
Turns out we were both right, and both too proud to say the other half.
I'm sorry, Hollis. Take the yard. Keep it.
I hope to God the two of you can make it float. "
He sat down hard, like a man setting down something he'd carried so long he'd forgotten it had weight, and across the room Hollis found he couldn't be angry anymore, couldn't locate the twenty years of it.
Because Marc was right and Hollis was right and both of them had been alone with their half of the truth for two decades — two brothers on opposite ends of the same broken thing, each dead certain the other was the one who'd broken it.
There'd be time now, maybe. A yard bought out clean, a brother paid fair and freed, a door that hadn't cost the harbor everything to walk through.
There might, Hollis thought, actually be time to be brothers again on the far side of this, which was more than he'd let himself want in longer than he could say.
Corliss did not stay to watch the vote. Men like Corliss never do; they can read a room's ledger faster than anyone, and there was no percentage left in this one.
He'd already gathered Sutter and the renderings and gone, back to the silver car and the wide world of other people's dying harbors, and the room barely noticed him leave, which was, Hollis thought, the truest verdict the town ever passed on the man — not hatred, just the flat indifference of people who'd remembered, in time, what they were.
When old Nadeau called the vote, it wasn't even close. The working waterfront held. The rezone died. The harbor kept itself.
It landed on Hollis strangely. He'd braced his whole life for the town to take from him — his time, his back, his hands, the yard eventually — and had never once braced for it to give.
And here it was giving: three hundred people in a hall voting, in effect, to keep Hollis Cyr's yard alive, to carry with him the thing he'd carried alone for twenty years.
It went into him the way the first warm day goes into a man after a hard winter, almost painful, the body having half forgotten the feeling was available to it.
He'd have to learn it, he supposed. Being held.
He suspected it would take him about as long as the wanting had — and that he had, now, the years to learn it in.
And in the roar of it, the scraping chairs and the fleet on its feet and Dee crying frankly into a napkin and June sitting very straight with a look on her face like a woman who'd known all along, Hollis Cyr stood at the front of a room that had, for once, chosen the thing he'd spent his whole life holding up — had reached back, all of them, and taken some of the weight off him at last — and beside him stood a man who'd sailed away and come about and beaten all night back up a dark coast to put his name on the same piece of ground Hollis stood on.
"Cyr and Mercer," Roan said, low, just to him, testing the shape of it. "Sounds like a law firm."
"Sounds like a yard," Hollis said.
"Sounds like a home," said Roan, and reached over, in front of the whole harbor, and took Hollis's ruined hand in his scarred one, and held it, and did not let go, and had no intention, ever again, of letting go.
Dee got to them through the crowd, because Dee got everywhere, and she planted herself in front of the two of them with her arms folded and her eyes wet and her chin up, and she looked Roan up and down one more time, the way she had on the float the first day, checking him against the picture only she could see.
"Well," she said. "You came home before you wrecked it.
Barely. By about forty miles and one dark night, from the look of you.
" She reached up and patted his cheek, hard enough to be a slap and soft enough to be a blessing.
"I called it. First day. Told you the harbor wasn't full up yet.
" Then she turned to Hollis, and her whole fierce face went to something tender.
"And you. You asked him. I'm told you actually asked him, out loud, like a human person.
Hollis Cyr." She had to stop and press her napkin to her eyes.
"Ninety years I've waited to see it." She got herself back.
"Don't you let this one hold the door open for you.
You hear me? Neither of you. You've both spent long enough being good at leaving. "
And she kissed them each on the cheek and went back into the roar of the harbor keeping itself, and left the two of them standing there, kept.
Outside, at the town float, the Petrel lay quiet on her lines in the dark, home from the sea, made sound at last and going nowhere — and for the first time in seven years, that was exactly where her skipper wanted to be.