Chapter 18: Palm to Palm

Ansel's key was a brass one on a loop of green cord.

He held it out to me on Friday morning, the tenth of July.

"The foreman locks the gate at five," he said. "He leaves at six. There's a side gate on the cove that I've kept a key to."

"Why?"

"Because I've gone in once a month for eleven years."

I didn't take it.

"To do what?"

"To look."

"Why?" I said again, with the kiss still in my mouth from six nights before.

We hadn't spoken of it.

He had driven me home and kissed my knuckles, gravely, and left.

"Because it's yours," he said. "Take the key. Go in. See it before the bulldozers do."

I took it.

We went at dusk, in his truck, with the lights off on the last half mile.

The side gate was a tilted square of chain link at the end of the cove road.

The key turned stiffly, and the gate screamed once.

We stood there listening.

Nothing.

"Come on," he said, very low.

The Ouellette Boatworks yard ran two hundred yards down to the water.

I had last seen it as a girl of eighteen with the chain on the gate.

Now it was weeds to my hips, rust, and a stack of pallets gone green.

The long gray main shed had a roof that had begun to sag.

The marine railway still ran into the cove, two rails of black iron.

The air smelled of mud and cut pine, and underneath that, faintly, of tar.

"It smells the same," I said, and my voice broke.

"I know."

He walked ahead of me down the cinder path, as he had on the cliff.

One hand was held out behind him for the broken places.

I took his hand and didn't let it go.

The shed door was chained, but not locked, and he lifted the chain from the post and slid it open a foot.

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