Chapter 22: The Pier

I walked out onto the pier alone.

Behind me, Joan and the Navy escorts stayed at the foot of it, in the dark.

The boards were wet.

The wind came across the lake and flattened my tie against my chest.

My father stood at the very end, under a lamp, with his hands in his pockets.

He looked smaller out there.

"Emmett," he said.

"Dad."

"You wore the tie."

"You asked me to."

"I did." He almost laughed. "You always did what I asked, until you didn't."

I stopped three feet from him.

He looked out over the black water, toward the lights of the yard.

"I built this from nothing," he said. "Four men and a rented shed. Six hundred families eat off it now."

"I know."

"Do you know what the Navy contract was? It was every one of them."

"Every mortgage, every kid's college."

"And you wrote a memo that would have shut it all down."

"Over a creep rate in a joint that wouldn't matter for ten years."

"It would have mattered to the crew on the tenth year."

"The crew would have been somebody else's problem."

"They'd have been somebody's son."

He turned his head.

"I never said I wanted you dead."

"You said let him go down."

"I said it to Quist, in a car, on a bad day."

"You said it on the second night, in a hallway, on the phone, after the flange was in."

His face did not change.

"You were never meant to be a casualty," he said.

"You were supposed to be a footnote."

"I thought the Tern would be recalled, that's all. A scandal, a settlement."

"And Kit's call?"

"Kit was there to bring you in. You wouldn't have gone for a stranger."

"No."

"You'd have gone for him. You always did."

"That's why you used him."

"I used what worked."

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