I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate novel · Chapter 19 of 32
Chapter 19: The Selectmen
"Can I see the letter?" I said.
The store owner looked at the closed door.
Then she opened her desk drawer and took out a single sheet with the station's seal on it.
"I didn't give you this," she said. "I'm making a copy for my files, and I'm going to the bathroom, and the copier jams sometimes."
She went out.
I read it standing between the beer cases.
It was polite and short.
Fifty thousand dollars toward a new fire truck for Gannet Island, contingent on the board declining to forward any petition concerning the north cove before September.
I made two copies.
The copier didn't jam once.
That night I laid one copy on Margie's kitchen table.
She read it twice.
Then she went out on her porch with the VHF handset and called every boat in the harbor by name.
It took her forty minutes.
The Grange was full by six on the fifteenth.
The selectmen sat at the long table up front with the coffee urn.
The store owner sat at the end with her minutes book.
Barrows sat in the front row in a pressed shirt, with the postdoc beside him and a reporter on his other side.
I walked in at five past six with my clipboards.
Margie walked in behind me.
Behind her came the fleet.
They didn't sit.
They came in by twos and threes in their boots and their bibs, straight off the water, smelling of bait and diesel.
They lined the back wall, then the side walls, then the aisle.
Forty-one of them.
The two gray-bearded brothers. The loud one from the Grange, at the front of the line. The kid with the buzz cut I'd hauled off the stern of the station boat, in a borrowed jacket.
Barrows turned around in his chair and looked at them.
For the first time since I'd known him, he didn't smile.
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