They Thought My Mate Chose Her novel · Chapter 21 of 24
Chapter 21: The Boatyard
The hall broke into noise.
People were standing up all over the room, asking each other what he meant.
I knew what he meant.
I knew before Merryn put her hand over her mouth.
"You don't have four hundred thousand dollars," I said, across the elders' table, not caring who heard.
"No," he said. "I've got a boatyard."
"Cador."
"It's worth about eight hundred. There's a man in Houghton who's been asking my dad to sell it to him for ten years." He looked at the elders. "That pays Duluth. And it fills the widows' fund back to where it was before Clement had the key."
The hall went quiet again.
"That's your father's yard," the senior elder said.
"It's my father's beach too. He'd have sold the yard in a minute." Cador's mouth moved. "He'd have complained about the price for a year. But he'd have sold it."
He sat back down beside his grandmother.
Merryn took her hand off her mouth and put it over his.
She didn't say a word.
That was how I knew what it cost.
The man from Houghton drove up on Thursday with a cashier's check and a lawyer.
He offered eight hundred and twenty thousand, and Cador didn't argue.
On Saturday, I drove out to Lac La Belle to help clear the office.
The yard had already started looking like somebody else's.
The new man's truck was parked where Cador's always was.
Somebody had put a new padlock on the parts shed.
Cador was in the office with two cardboard boxes, putting his father into them.
Invoices from 1990. A thermos with a dent in it. A pair of reading glasses exactly like his own.
The cot was folded against the wall.
"I'm leaving the cot," he said. "The new guy can have it. Dad would want somebody to sleep on it in the spring."
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