Opening of chapter one
My father sold the boatyard on a Tuesday, which annoyed me even then, because Tuesday was the day we hauled boats.
I was sixteen. I had spent that morning under the hull of a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser called Second Wind, scraping barnacles with a putty knife and a bucket of water that had gone warm by nine o’clock. Her owner came down every Tuesday to watch us work and tell us how his last mechanic did it. My father let him talk. A man who pays the bill gets to tell you what he’d do, he said, as long as he doesn’t try to do it.
The buyer arrived a little after eleven in a clean white pickup. He didn’t get out right away. He sat with the engine running and looked at the yard the way you look at a used car you’ve already decided to buy: not at what was good about it, but at what it would cost to fix. The rail that ran down into the water. The shed roof, patched in three colors of tin. The pile of old propellers by the fence that my father said he would sort one day.
My father wiped his hands on the red rag he kept in his back pocket and walked over. They talked for maybe ten minutes. I couldn’t hear them over the radio, and I didn’t turn it down, because I thought that if I didn’t hear it, it wasn’t happening.
When the truck left, my father came back and crouched beside me under Second Wind. He looked at the hull for a long time.
“You missed a spot,” he said, and pointed.
I had. I scraped it. He watched me do it, and then he told me the yard would close at the end of August, that the man in the truck wanted the land and not the business, and that he would tell my mother at supper, so I should let him be the one to say it.
That was the whole conversation. I have thought about it for almost fifty years, and I still can’t tell you whether he waited until I’d fixed the spot so that I would finish the job, or so that he would have something to look at while he said it.
We put Second Wind back in the water that afternoon, same as any Tuesday.
