Chapter 7: The Old Phone

Fjelstad Boatworks starts at six-thirty in the morning, with a horn.

I stood in the gravel lot at six-forty with Cliff beside me, in his own jacket and jeans, and watched thirty men look at us.

The yard stretched down to the water behind the sheds.

A half-built hull sat on its cradle under the crane, ribs bare to the sky.

I had brought lunch to this yard for five years.

The foreman came out of the long shed wiping his hands on a rag.

He was sixty, gray, and slow, and he did not look at Cliff at all.

"Mrs. Fjelstad," he said. "Office is open."

"Thank you."

"She's in the back. Mind the step."

Signe's office was a small paneled room that smelled of coffee and toner.

Signe was not there.

The safe was a gray steel box under the window, the old kind with a dial.

The foreman knelt in front of it, grunting, and turned it left, right, left.

It opened with a clunk.

Inside were rolled blueprints, a cash tin and a sandwich bag, sealed.

The phone was in the bag.

It was my old phone, with the cracked corner I'd never fixed.

I took it out.

My hands were steady, and I thought, good.

"Thirty years I've worked here," the foreman said. "I never saw her open it with anyone looking."

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me yet."

He nodded toward the door.

Signe stood in it with her coat still on and her car keys in her hand.

She looked at the phone and then at me.

"What are you doing?"

"Collecting something that's mine."

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