Epilogue
The Blessing
Ayear on, Roan Mercer stood on the co-op dock at the Blessing of the Fleet and did not once, the whole long gold afternoon, look for the exits.
He noticed himself not doing it, the way you notice a tooth that's stopped aching — kept reaching for the old habit and finding it gone, kept waiting for the reflex to prick his ears back toward the harbor mouth and the open water and the clean anonymous south, and it just didn't come.
He was where he was. That was the whole of it, and it had taken him forty-two years and one dead man and one very stubborn live one to learn it, and he figured that was about the right amount of trouble for a thing worth this much.
The fleet lay dressed in the harbor the way they had the day he'd sailed in bleeding.
Every boat strung stem to masthead to stern in snapping signal flags, swinging to the light summer air in a long proud rank, pretending not to know how good they looked.
The pastor was up on the end of the dock with his hand raised over the water.
And out in the middle of the fleet, dressed like the rest of them, flags running the length of her from her gaff to her bowsprit, rode the Petrel — sound below the waterline, her brightwork gone gold again under a winter of Roan's hands, her name freshly gilded on the trailboard by a man who'd finally been able to bear touching it.
A year ago the town had blessed every boat in the harbor but her.
This year the pastor's hand went out over the whole fleet, and the Petrel was in it, and Roan stood on the dock and watched a whole town bless the only thing he owned, home at last, and had to look at the planking for a second.
"You're leaking," Hollis said, beside him. Not unkindly. Hollis said most things not unkindly now; it turned out the flat mute wariness had only ever been a man braced for a blow that had finally stopped coming.
"Salt air," Roan said.
"Mm." Hollis didn't push it. He'd learned, over the year, the exact size of the room to give a man, which was smaller than the whole ocean he used to hand people and much harder to hold.
He stood there big and sun-reddened in his one good shirt, and his hand found the small of Roan's back, and stayed, which was its own kind of anchor.
***
The sign had gone up on the shed in April.
CYR his yard, held; his brother, working a boat with him again; his name, and now a second name, on the shed.
A man who had spent his whole life certain he was the kind of thing the world sailed away from, standing on a dock at a Blessing, surrounded by every soul who'd refused to.
"You're leaking," Roan said.
Hollis huffed something that was almost a laugh. "Salt air."
***
They'd sailed the Petrel out to the mouth that morning, before the crowds, just the two of them.
Roan had wanted Hollis to feel her once with everything dressed, and Hollis — who could now, after a year of Roan's patient bullying, come about without putting them both in the water more than one time in three — had taken the tiller out past the point and brought her around, head to wind, in that suspended, empty, terrifying second where a boat leaves one tack and hasn't found the other, and had held the turn on, and trusted it, and let her fill on the new side and carry them home.
"You used to be scared of that part," Hollis had said, out on the water.
"The middle. Where she's got no drive and it feels like you've made a mistake.
" Roan had watched the harbor come up over the bow, gray shed, rusty railway, whole heart.
"Yeah. I spent seven years so scared of that second I never let a boat all the way through it.
Never let anything all the way through it. "
"And now?"
"Now I've got a man who taught me she comes through if you trust her — learned it off a shipwright who was scared of the water.
" Roan had grinned. "You know that's the most Merritt Harbor thing I ever heard?
Builds boats his whole life and never once trusts one to hold him up.
I had to haul you out past the point to teach you your own trade backwards. "
"I trust them to hold other people up," Hollis had said, mild, minding the luff. "Wasn't sure they'd hold me. Different question."
"Yeah," Roan had said, quieter, because that was the whole of both of them in a sentence, wasn't it. "I know it is."