Chapter 20: Ours

Rory's boat was a forty-year-old trawler with a rust stripe down one side and a coffee stain on the wheelhouse door.

He called it the Old Girl, and he talked to it as if it answered back.

"Easy, girl," he said, as the engine caught. "Visitors."

We stood on the dock with the cold coming up through our boots.

Hyunjin wore my brother's red flannel under a borrowed oilskin.

Chan wore his long coat and kept turning his head to count the windows on the harbour office.

"Nobody's looking," Rory said. "Nobody's going to."

"There's a man who's been looking since Tuesday."

"Aye. That's why I came to your door."

He untied the stern line himself.

"The fella in the grey jacket came to the harbour office yesterday.

"He asked the man at the desk if he'd seen two Korean gentlemen.

"The man told him we've got a fish plant, a ferry and a lot of Koreans, because we get tourists in August."

"That's not true," Hyunjin said.

"It's true now. He said it with a straight face."

Chan stared at him.

"He asked in the Legion, then. Eight women told him they'd seen no cousins from anywhere.

"He asked at the church. The minister gave him a cup of tea and forty minutes on the history of the roof.

"A woman backed her Buick across the end of the lane when his car went by.

"Then she forgot how to drive it."

I started to laugh.

I couldn't stop. I put my hand over my mouth.

"Odette told the Legion ladies," Rory said. "The Legion ladies told the church. By supper it was the whole town.

"I'd have stopped it, but I was busy being useful."

"You told them what?"

"Nothing I don't tell everybody. That you're ours."

He said it gruffly, looking at the rope in his hands, and then he went into the wheelhouse before anyone could answer.

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