“Pat, if Fitz is reading this on the dock, then Chase has put his hand where it does not belong, and you have done exactly right to hold your ground. I would expect nothing else from the woman who sailed through Hurricane Isabel with a fever and a casserole.” Fitzgerald Moore read the first line in a booming lawyer voice, and thirty boat owners on the dock burst into laughter that rolled across the water. Gulls lifted from the pilings. Chase, standing at the head of the pier in his polo shirt, took a half step backward, and the two buyers glanced at each other and then at their shoes.
“I put the marina in the Haynes Harbor Trust in 2015,” the letter went on. “Pat is the sole trustee. Every slip holder has a right of first refusal, and no sale can close without her signature on the dock and the harbormaster as witness. If a paper says Patricia, it is false. I called you Patricia three times in my life, when I proposed, when I christened the boat, and on the day I knew I was sick. Nobody else has ever earned it. And Chase, if you are standing there, I want you to know the boat was never yours to rename. She has been Patricia since the keel was laid.”
Gus Ferreira stepped forward with a gray folder. “Here is the recorded trust,” he said. “Here is the harbor commission copy. And here, folks, is the bill of sale that Mr. Chase Delaney filed on the second of October, transferring the marina to Bayline Holdings for one dollar. The signature is Patricia Haynes. The witness is a man named Dobbs. I looked him up. Mr. Dobbs is on the payroll of Bayline Holdings, and he is listed as the janitor.” The captains and the Sullivan twins began to murmur. Old Mrs. Pomeroy beat the boards of the dock with her cane, loud and slow, like a metronome.
An old captain chair and a sealed letter turned a dock full of neighbors into the best crew a marina ever had.
One of the buyers turned to Chase with a grim face. “You told us this was a clean title,” he said. “We were prepared to put two million dollars on a handshake.” The other buyer pulled out his phone. “I will be calling our attorney,” he said. “And I would advise you to do the same.” They walked down the dock in step, shoulders squared, and I watched them go, and they did not look back. Chase tried to follow them, talking quickly, his hands moving, and one of the twins stepped onto the plank in front of him with a silent look and a very large arm.
“Chase,” said Lauren. She said it quietly. She stood at the edge of the dock, in a blue sundress with the ribbons blowing around her, and her face was white. “Is it true? You signed the name of my mother?” He turned, and I saw him try three different faces in a row. Apologetic, then offended, then loving. But my daughter has known him for six years, and I think she saw them all for what they were. “Lauren, baby, it was a business move, for our future, for the baby.” She put her hand on her stomach. I had not known. Neither, I think, had he, until she said it.
The harbor patrol boat, which had been idling off the end of the pier since noon, slid in with its blue light flashing. Two officers stepped onto the dock. One of them was the daughter of Captain Ruark, in a navy uniform, and she was calm and polite. She read Chase his rights, there on the wooden planks, with the water slapping the hulls and thirty people watching in the sun. He did not resist. He looked once at Lauren, who looked at the water, and then he walked away between the officers, the dock boards creaking beneath his boat shoes.
Lauren sat down on a dock box and wept for a long time. I knelt beside her and held her in both arms, the way I did when she was six, when she fell off her bicycle. “I was so proud of him,” she said, in a small voice. “He made me feel like I had chosen well.” I told her that she had chosen well, because the person she had chosen was someone who loved her. It was only that the man behind the face had not been worthy. She would learn to tell the difference. We all learn it, I said, the hard way, with the tide coming in.
Chase pleaded guilty to forgery, fraud, and attempted theft by deception, and received five years. Lauren filed for an annulment, and moved back into the little house behind the bait shop. In February, she gave birth to a daughter, seven pounds, with a full head of dark hair, and named her Rowan Patricia. I held the baby in the waiting room with tears running down my chin. Fitz Moore, who had come with a bunch of tulips, was crying harder than I was, and neither of us said a word about it.
In April, the boatyard crew lifted the old wooden boat off the blocks and slid her back into the harbor, to the cheering of the entire marina. The children of the dock had scraped away every trace of Chase Way, and one of the Sullivan twins, who is a signwriter by trade, painted the old name along the stern in gold leaf. Patricia. Annapolis. The letters shone in the spring light. I stood on the dock in the captain chair of Roy, which Gus had carried down to the end for me, and the water was green and clear, and I was not afraid of anything.
Last Sunday, the four of us sailed out past the bridge, Lauren at the tiller, me in the cockpit, and little Rowan in my lap in a yellow life jacket three sizes too big. The wind came up out of the southwest and filled the sails. The boat leaned and sang. Lauren looked back at me over her shoulder, with the exact grin of Roy, and shouted something I could not hear above the wind. But I knew what it was. She said it with her whole face. And I raised my hand and held it up to the sun, the way he used to do, to say: steady as she goes.
