I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Pilot House

Iris's POV

The ice went out of the harbor on the twentieth of April, and Matti launched the boat the same morning.

He had finished her in the boat shed in the evenings of the winter, with the stove ticking and the radio low.

She was a twenty-two-foot cedar-strip cruiser with a small pilot house.

He had built her from the keel up out of two years of loneliness, and he had named her the Helmi.

My mother stood on the slip in her good coat and her blue hat, holding a bottle of sparkling cider.

She did not hold with spirits before noon.

"I'll say it," my mother said. "I name this boat the Helmi. May she be stubborn, and may she come home."

She swung the bottle, and it did not break.

Everyone on the slip stared at it.

My mother looked at the bottle in her hand with great dignity.

"Well," she said. "I always did buy the thick ones."

My brother took it from her and cracked it on the bow with his bare fist.

The cider foamed down the cedar, and she hit him with her purse.

It was the first time I had heard him laugh out loud in two years.

I stood at the top of the slip with my hands in my parka pockets.

Beside me Toby stood in the same black wool coat, with no one on the dock to take orders from him.

He had spent three weeks in the lodge's kitchen, where the housekeeper had taught him to bake pulla and told him he was doing it wrong.

Nobody in the West End had called him Mr. Reinholt once.

They called him Toby, and Tobias, and "that big one," and an old woman at the grocery called him "the boy who gave it all back."

He did not seem to mind any of it.

The Helmi slid down the ways, and the water took her with a small clean sound.

She rode level on the dark harbor.

Matti stood at the wheel in the pilot house with his beard trimmed and his hair cut short.

His face was completely open.

"Come on," he called. "Take her out."

"I'm not getting on that," my mother said.

"Ma," Matti said.

"I'll watch from the shore. I'll hold the cider."

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