Chapter 24: The Wharf

On the third Saturday of May, I hung the Ada P. from the wharf hoist.

I had come to finish the second name on her stern.

The cherry plank had gone on the transom in March, bolted flat under my mother's white letters.

I had cut the H badly, and the O after that.

Tiernan had stood behind me with his hands in his pockets and said nothing at all.

Now I set the chisel to the last letter, tapped it with his mallet, and blew the dust from the groove.

HOME.

It was the word that had lit up his bench the night he first saw my father's wharf.

I had never told him I'd typed it myself, on the day I bought the phone.

"You carve like you gut a fish," said Joslyn from the wharf rail, with her coffee.

"Thank you."

"It wasn't a compliment, but it's good."

She had a wreath of pink rope flowers around her bleached head and a sea-green dress that was somehow still a hoodie.

"Linwood's in the room over the hardware store," she said, not looking at me. "He pays the county forty dollars a week."

"Nobody at the diner will pour him a coffee. They let him pour his own."

"Good," I said.

It was the only word I had left about him, and I let it be enough.

At six o'clock the light went gold on the water.

Half the harbor stood on the wharf in their good boots, among the traps and the strings of paper lanterns.

The co-op had built a trestle table along the length of the planks.

The oyster seller's mother had brought a thermos for the bride.

My father walked me down the planks in his one good jacket, with his cap on his head until the last step.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Secret Lover Is His Brother from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.