Summer Harbor (8 page)

Will was awake before his alarm went off. Crows were making a ruckus in the big oak trees that bordered the backyard. The thin sound of light rain sizzled on the roof, plainly audible in the second-floor bedroom. Nothing lay between Will and the sky but a plank wood ceiling and asphalt roof shingles. He rolled back over, feeling something like relief that matters had been taken out of his hands. His mother still didn’t know about the sailing lessons. When neither he nor Grainger said anything about having met before, it seemed too weird to suddenly confess that they had. He’d made up some story about wanting to begin running before school started, hinting at maybe joining the cross-country team, to cover his out-of-character early rising.

Lying there, resuming the troubling thoughts from his hours of sleeplessness, Will felt a mocking cowardice. Did he have the
cojones
to confront his origins? Once known, the facts of his conception might end up plaguing him more than his ignorance of them. Maybe he should just trust his mother’s judgment in keeping these facts from him. Maybe he really was better off
not
knowing anything about how he had come to be.

With this weather, he could roll over and go back to sleep, and leave the sleeping dogs to lie. He opened his eyes again. Grainger hadn’t said if these lessons were weather dependent. He’d better plan to go. He really didn’t want to piss Grainger off first thing, asssuming the lessons continued. What was a little rain to a sailor? Anyway, it would probably quit in an hour.

He heard his mother’s alarm go off and waited for her knock on his door. When nothing happened, Will assumed that she must have heard the rain too, and decided he’d abandon his running till later. He swung his feet to the floor and yanked open a drawer to pull out his bathing suit and a clean T-shirt. He was surprised to find that he was shaking a little with a blend of excitement and dread. Sort of like the first day of school.

Tiptoeing down the back stairs to the kitchen, he hoped that his mother would stay in bed. She seemed so tired lately. She wouldn’t talk about it, but Will knew that readying the house for sale was emotionally hard on her. Little objects kept showing up on the kitchen table as if she had been sitting there examining them, weighing their significance, debating whether to keep them or let them go with the house. Did they have enough weight to be added to the growing collection of the Museum-in-the-Making? Or were they unimportant and destined to remain in the house for the new owners? This morning, a blue glass jar sat dead center on the small drop-leaf kitchen table. An ordinary, if authentically antique, jar that once held some salve or ointment. Why his mother had left it here, Will couldn’t imagine. It was too wide in the mouth to make a successful vase, and the big chip on the lip spoiled it for antique value. He slid the object to the other side of the table and poured a bowl of cereal.

Will still hadn’t told his mother about breaking up with Lori. With her, you just had to find the right time. Last night, she’d suddenly remembered that she’d picked up a letter from Lori for him. She had always been respectful of his privacy, requisite parental advice about protection and/or abstinence notwithstanding, and didn’t ask him about the letter. He had taken it from her hand without looking at her. One glance in his mother’s eyes and he’d have been pinned to the wall like a butterfly on cork, while she elicited the whole sorry story out of him. He’d stuffed it into one of the capacious pockets of his cargo pants and muttered something about reading it later.

The truth was, he just wasn’t ready to tell her about Lori. Even though he was still hurting from Lori’s dismissal, a residual defensiveness came up when he imagined his mother’s satisfied statement: “Well, I never liked her anyway…” He just didn’t want to hear it. He’d dropped Lori’s letter onto his bureau without reading it.

Will did a few stretches on the front porch. The rain was like a beaded curtain sluicing off the porch roof, each drop a fat individual. Maybe he should just call Grainger and cancel.

“Rain before seven, clear by eleven. It’ll probably stop by noon. Why don’t you wait till then?” Kiley opened the screen door and came out, her arms crossed against the damp air. “I’ll make French toast.”

“It won’t kill me, and if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it.” Will wished suddenly that he could admit to what he was really doing. He needed confirmation that Grainger had once been a good friend. No, he needed evidence that Grainger was
more
than a friend. He hadn’t been blind to the tension between the two of them in the tavern, like adversaries on neutral ground. Will bent to retie his running shoe. “Maybe I can outrun the rain.”

“I’ll have the water hot for tea when you get back.”

“Thanks, but you should go back to bed.”

“Can’t. The real estate agent is coming by early.”

Will stood up and impulsively bent to peck her cheek. “It’ll be all right.”

“I know.” His mother turned away as she sighed. “I know.”

Will leapt off the porch without touching the steps and set off at a mild jog.

The rain thickened as Will jogged down the hill toward the village. Still early, only minimal traffic moved past him, twice dousing him with tire splatter. As he jogged along the beach road, Will contemplated a quick dip to clean off the dirt, but it was taking him much longer to get to Egan’s Boat Works than he had expected. Despite all the wind sprints and miles run for sports training, Will had never been an effective runner. He knew he pumped too hard and breathed too deeply, failed to pace himself adequately. Never once had he found the magic high so many of the track team members had told him about. He’d rather feel the hard smack of a baseball against the sweet spot of his bat than get a runner’s high. Finally his lungs demanded he ease up, and Will settled into a jog barely better than a walk. No point in arriving on Grainger’s doorstep and collapsing. Will smiled at the image of himself falling into Grainger’s arms, with his last breath asking the unaskable question:
Dad?
The smile ran from his face. A photograph was hardly proof of paternity, a stilted introduction, no evidence. With sudden clarity, Will realized that it was only his mother he could ask that question, pointing to the last photograph:
Is this guy my father, or this one?
He should just turn around and go back and…what? Forget this whole stupid idea?

It was too late, he was nearly there. The peninsula of Hawke’s Cove, its shape likened to Jimmy Durante’s nose by some, was scalloped by inlets and smaller coves, some edged by houses, others like this one, mostly private. Grainger’s boatyard was on the inside of Maiden Cove, a good-sized deepwater cove with easy access to the main road. A sign declaring “Egan’s Boat Works” pointed down a gravel driveway, and Will walked the remaining distance to the boathouse.

Unaccountably, he walked a little ways past it toward the beach, looking at the cove beyond. A pier jutted out, with a wooden rowboat tied to it. A small sailboat swung at anchor a few yards offshore, and three or four larger craft were moored farther out. In the rain and wind, they all pointed southwest, the same as the weathervane atop the boathouse. A rubber dinghy was bottom up on the sand, a line running from under it to a granite block high on the beach with an iron ring hammered into it like a hitching post. Three big boats in varying stages of repair loomed in the yard. At a distance, Will could see a fourth boat, its small hull shrouded by yards of blue plastic sheeting, the cords tying it down green with age.

Visibility across the cove was nil, the opposite shore obscured, the narrow enfolding arms of the cove rendered invisible, the only sound that of the surf booming on the ocean side of the barrier beach. Will heard the chime of a clock and glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty. He went back to the side door and knocked.

It was nearly a minute before Grainger pulled open the heavy door. He looked at Will with a vague surprise on his face, as if he’d doubted Will would show up. Or maybe he hoped he wouldn’t. “You’ve come.”

“Yes.”

“Well, come in, get out of the rain.” Grainger disappeared for a moment and came back into the room with a heavy cotton towel. “Dry yourself.”

Will rubbed the white towel over his head, then down the length of his dripping body. He wrapped it around his waist and stepped out of his soaked sneakers. Most of the room was taken up with a large vessel, its bowsprit almost touching the plank sliding door, its stern close by the open sliding door of the opposite end of the building.

Overhead was a loft, from the bottom of which hung ropes on hooks neatly coiled in figure eights. Half a dozen pairs of oars of varying lengths stood sentinel against the walls between timbers and wooden blocks and pulleys; mooring flags and glass floats made up the remainder of the artwork on the walls.

In one corner was a woodstove, in front of it a soft easy chair, a small coffee table stacked with magazines featuring boats on their covers, and a thirteen-inch television set on a painted bureau. In the opposite corner, a stove and refrigerator were separated from the rest of the room by an island counter.

Will smelled a tantalizing mixture of pungent oil, fresh sawdust, and coffee. A faintly fumy undertone lingered like a taste behind the more pleasant odors of the boatbuilder’s trade. He saw the protective goggles and masks hanging over a workbench, the hand and power tools neatly stowed on hooks or in cubbies along the length of the massive workbench. A vise attached to one corner was gripping together two pieces of wood.

“You live here?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Grainger’s wirey haired dog eased himself out from under the workbench.

“What’s his name?” Will bent to pet the dog sniffing him with deliberateness.

“Pilot.”

“What is he?”

“A dog of uncertain parentage. His mother was a purebred springer spaniel, his father a complete mystery.”

Will looked at Grainger to see if he was taunting him. He rubbed the towel over his hair once more, then handed it back to Grainger. Pilot left off his sniffing and wandered to his water bowl, where he lapped with sloppy abandon.

“Why didn’t you drive here?” Grainger tossed the wet towel across a wooden dowel. “Or just call and cancel?”

“I want to start running, maybe do cross-country in college.” If he repeated it often enough, it would be the truth. “And I didn’t want to cancel either. I wasn’t sure how you’d take that. I mean, given…”

“The circumstance of our meeting?”

“I thought you wouldn’t think I was serious if I canceled just because it was raining. Besides, it’ll stop.”

“Not today.” Grainger walked over to a bookshelf tucked beneath the wide ship’s ladder leading to the loft. “Hands-on work doesn’t make sense, so, here.” Grainger handed Will two books; one an illustrated book on sailboats, the other a brief guide to learning how to sail. “Read those and come back and we’ll apply what you’ve learned.” Grainger pointed to the small sailboat framed by the wide-open rear doors of the boathouse. “That will be your craft.”

“What kind of boat is it?”

“Beetle Cat.”

“Is it a good boat to learn in?”

Grainger shrugged. “It’s a good one for beginners.” He grasped the handle of the big door and drew it closed, blocking Will’s view of the cove.

Will bent to put his sneakers back on, the books on the floor beside him. The insides of his running shoes were sodden and unpleasant. He’d only brought the one pair of shoes with him, and he’d have to spend the day in flip-flops.

Grainger handed Will a plastic grocery bag to put the two books in. “Why don’t I drive you home?” He pulled on a yellow slicker. Pilot met them at the door, his front feet pumping up and down with anticipation of an outing.

“You don’t have to. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m worried about my books.”

“Oh. Okay.” Will stood up and patted Pilot’s head. “He’s happy.”

“Yeah, he’s always happy.”

They ran out to Grainger’s truck, Pilot leading the way.

“I live on the other side of the town. Almost to…”

“I know where your house is.” Grainger slammed the truck door and twisted the ignition.

“So, where’s my grandfather’s boat?”

“That one.” Grainger pointed through the foggy window to a wooden hull, lifted high in a cradle.

“Wow. She’s a lot bigger than I thought.”

“They always look bigger out of water.” Grainger backed out of the parking space and turned up the driveway. Then he put the truck back in park. “Why didn’t your mother ever come back?” Grainger’s voice was nearly a sliver, as if he’d spoken the question out loud accidentally.

Will shrugged, shifting away from the weight of the dog that leaned against him as if he were an old friend. “I really don’t know. It has something to do with…”
With who my father was. Who you might be to me
. “…a family thing.”

Grainger made a sound like a humph, or stifled pain, then put the truck in drive. They continued the journey in silence, with only the sound of the beating windshield wipers and Pilot’s occasional whine as they passed other dogs.

As Grainger turned left onto Seaview Avenue, Will wondered if maybe this was one of those windows of opportunity, and he pushed the words out of his mouth. “You and my mother were friends, right?” One hand was on the armrest of the truck’s door, clutching it as if they were careening around.