Chapter 9: Eleven Years in the Yard

Emmett's POV

Joanna asked me to give them ten minutes.

I stood on the end of the dock with my hands in my jacket and my back to my own kitchen window.

Behind me, through the glass, two women sat at my table.

One was my brother's wife.

The other was the woman I had planned to marry eleven years ago.

I could not make that sentence feel like a sentence about my life.

She had been twenty-eight then, and in July she told me she was pregnant.

I was holding a hull plank, and I was afraid to put it down.

Three weeks later my mother sat at my kitchen table and told me the baby was gone.

"She's gone back to Bryce to recover, and she doesn't want to see you."

I called the house, and Bryce said, in a voice I didn't know, "Leave her alone."

I wrote her a letter and it came back unopened.

Two months after that, my mother stood in church and said I had taken money from my father's business.

I hadn't, and I couldn't prove it, and I couldn't stay in a town that had already decided.

So I took a trailer, two planes and my father's old tools, and I drove to the water.

Behind me the kitchen door opened.

I knew her step on the stairs by now.

Joanna came down onto the dock in her coat with her arms wrapped around herself.

Her face was white.

The light from the window fell across the planks and across her shoes.

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