Chapter 8: Work for Joy

Bess wanted to write back.

She had a whole comment typed with her thumbs before I could reach the phone.

"Let me post it. Please. It's only four swears. Gran approved two of them."

"No."

"She tagged us, Charlie. She tagged Gran's yard. Like you're in rehab here."

I looked at the picture again.

Archer's hand on Arabella's waist.

His grandmother's ring on her finger.

In my last life, I'd have cried in the shower so nobody heard, then worked until four.

"She looks happy," I said.

"She looks like a toothpaste ad."

"That's the same thing to her." I handed the phone back. "Leave it, Bess. I'm going to bed."

"It's eight-thirty."

"I know. Isn't it great?"

I turned my phone off and put it in a drawer in the loft.

I didn't take it out again for two weeks.

They were the best two weeks of either of my lives.

On Monday Seth taught me to steam a plank by myself.

How long to cook it.

How to wear the gloves.

How to talk to it when it fought you, which according to him was most of the job.

My first one cracked down the middle.

The quieter old shipwright came over, looked at it, and patted me twice on the back.

My second one went on.

On Tuesday Bess and I took the yard's skiff around the point to the Ocean Drive cottage.

My grandmother's little catboat was still on her mooring off the beach, rocking where she'd rocked for forty years.

Arabella's car was in the drive.

She was moving in.

There were boxes on the porch, and somebody inside was playing music too loud.

I didn't knock.

I climbed into the catboat, raised her one fat sail and sailed her across the harbor to the cove.

Bess followed in the skiff, screaming encouragement.

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