The boatyard
The yard gate dragged along the ground when Iris opened it. Her father had meant to rehang it all spring. She had told him the gate was a disgrace to a man who could make a boat sit level in a rough sea. He had said the boats paid. The gate did not. Now she had to lift its far corner herself while Julian stood aside with those borrowed boots on his feet.
Dev was under the canvas cover beside Eamon's launch. She could hear a hand saw working in short strokes. When he came out he was carrying a narrow piece of wood, curved to the hull. He saw Julian and smiled before he understood what he was seeing.
“I need you to hold this at the bow,” Dev said, offering him the wood. “Eamon changed his mind about the—”
Iris took it from his hand. Dev's face emptied. He had been at the funeral yesterday. He knew where her father was. The body's absence was easier to forget in the place where her father had worked every morning.
“I'm sorry,” Dev said to Julian. “For a second.”
“It's all right.”
“It isn't,” Iris said, then softened when she saw Dev's eyes. “Come help me fit it. You cut the other end.”
Julian stayed by the cover's edge. She could see that he wanted to be useful. The desire itself made him a little harder to hate, which irritated her. She put the strip of wood against the hull. Dev held it while she marked the place where it no longer followed the curve. The marks were light because this was a piece they might use. Her father had taught her not to carve a decision into wood before she had made it.
“This is Eamon's?” Julian asked.
“His launch. He wants a sea trial before the end of next week. The trip with his daughter comes after that.” Iris kept her pencil moving. “Dev has another job after that. The yard doesn't become empty because we're sad.”
Dev winced. “I can ask the other owner to wait.”
“You've already asked. I heard you on the phone.” She turned the strip over. “Don't ask again until we know what we're doing.”
Julian stepped nearer to see how the wood lay against the boat. Iris handed him a pencil rather than a tool. “Mark that corner when I say.”
He held the pencil above the hull. When she said now, he made a mark a finger's width from where she meant. There was no harm in it; she rubbed it out. Her father would have felt the curve through his palm and marked without being told. Julian had a sound man's careful hands, with a tiny callus from carrying cases, and no knowledge of this boat. Dev noticed too. He looked away first.
An engine started on the far side of the yard. A customer's small skiff was being moved from its cradle toward the water by two neighbors who had promised to help. One called to Iris to mind the line. She set down her pencil and went to them. Julian followed but did not grab a rope until she asked him to. They eased the skiff along a greased plank. At the last moment the bow swung; Iris caught the line around a post and felt it tighten against her gloved palm. The boat settled where it belonged. A boat could surprise you even when you knew every inch of it. She liked that more than she would tell anybody today.
When she returned, Dev had laid Eamon's strip on the bench. He was looking at the wall calendar. A square around next Friday carried her father's handwriting: EAMON — trial. Under it, in smaller letters, was Iris finish bow. Her name had been written there before he asked her. She had found it the day they argued. Dev had not erased it.
“He told Eamon you'd do it,” Dev said quietly. “I know you have the berth.”
“I have more than the berth.” She set her gloves on the bench. “I have work I said I'd do before I leave. That wasn't all of it.”
Dev nodded, but he was watching the date. He had worked at the yard long enough that a delayed boat would become his delayed invoice. Her father had been generous with his own hours. Sometimes he had acted as if other people's hours came from the same bottomless box.
Julian said, “Could I pay for another pair of hands?”
Iris turned to him. He had been in the yard perhaps twenty minutes. He did not know who might take the work, what Dev had promised elsewhere or why Eamon cared about the date. The offer was easy for him because money could travel farther than a person needed to stay.
“You can ask Dev what kind of help he needs,” she said. “You can't buy an answer from me.”
Julian put his hands in his coat pockets. He looked at the calendar and then at the empty space beside the launch where her father used to keep his saw. The saw was there, hanging on its hook. It was the space around it that was empty.
At the gate, Iris stopped him. Dev was wiping pencil dust from his fingers. Soon Eamon would come by again, looking for a date she could not give him.
“My mother will talk to you after lunch,” she said. “If you come back, listen when she tells you about him.”
“I will.”
Behind them Dev started the saw again. Julian stayed at the gate until the first cut was done.