The father of Lauren is named Harold Voss, a retired Gulf pilot with a weathered neck and a gentle manner, and he held the paper from the display table up to the string of bulbs over the hull. “Mrs. Burke,” he said, “this is an inventory sheet from the sale of Coastal Bend Boatworks. Item 9. Hull mold, G.B. 1981. Two fiberglass hulls. One set of plans.” He turned and looked at the thirty guests in the open bay, the champagne, the banner reading Burke Custom Boats. “Why does this paper say you are the one who sold this?”
Remy stood at the head of the bay in a new navy polo with the shop logo on the chest. My son is thirty seven, a broad, sunburned man with the hands of his father, and a grin that had been fixed on his face for two hours and now slid off. “Mama, it is a technicality,” he said. “Pete said that nobody was using the stuff.” “Pete said you told him I had approved it,” I answered. At the back of the crowd, Pete, my old foreman, a stout man of sixty five in a clean white shirt, looked at his shoes. “I did not,” I said. “And the company that owns that mold is a company out of Houston, as of the first of June.”
I walked down the length of the bay. The hull sat on its cradle under the lights, white and smooth, a thirty foot fishing boat, and on the transom, at the edge, was the mark I had seen on every boat my husband built. “Remy,” I said, “do you see this?” He did. It was a tiny G.B., pressed into the gelcoat, the way Gaston signed everything, in the corner, where only a person looking would find it. “You stood in front of your guests and told them you had designed this. Your father built this hull in 1981, with his hands, in a shed with a tin roof. He used to say it would still be floating when we were gone.”
A fiberglass hull mold stood under string lights at a grand opening and gave one boatworks owner the evening to bring her son back to honest work.
My son sat down on an overturned bucket. He put his face in his big hands. For some time there was nothing in the bay but the hum of the lights and the sound of Lauren, his wife, crying quietly by the table, a small, steady, hopeless sound. “Mama, I owe the bank,” he said into his palms. “The shop. The lease on the building. The equipment loan. I put everything into this and I had no mold. I could not afford to build one. I thought, Daddy would want me to have it.” He looked up. “And then you sold everything and did not tell me, and I thought, you were giving me nothing.”
That was the true wound, and I felt it. I crossed the concrete and sat on a second bucket beside him, in my good blue dress, among the dust of fiberglass. “I did not tell you,” I said, “because I was afraid you would ask me for it. And I knew I would say yes. And I knew it would ruin you.” I took his hand. “A man who is given the thing he has not built does not love it. I loved the boats of your father because I watched him earn every one.” Remy nodded slowly. His tears fell on the floor, and they left small dark spots in the dust.
Harold Voss said quietly, “Delphine, what does the buyer want?” I had made the call that morning. The company in Houston had agreed to leave the mold and the hulls in Rockport for ninety days. In exchange, Remy would sign a statement acknowledging that he had taken them. “And then,” I said, “there is a proposal.” I looked at my son. “They need a builder for the line of fishing boats in Rockport. A man who knows the mold. A man who has the hands of Gaston.” Remy stared at me. “You mean,” he said, “work for them?”
“Run the shop for them,” I said. “At a salary, with a contract. They keep the name and the plans. You keep your name on the boats you build, in the corner, where a person looking would find it.” Lauren had come up beside him, mascara on her cheeks, and she put a hand on his shoulder. Pete came forward, hat in hand, and said he would stay on as foreman if the young man would have him, and that he was sorry, and that he should have known better. “You should,” I said. “And you did. And you will make it right by teaching him the laminate schedule.”
Remy canceled the grand opening that night. He did it himself, standing at the microphone, in front of his guests, with the champagne going flat. He said that he had made a mistake, that the boats in the bay belonged to the people who built them, and that anybody who wanted to stay for a hamburger was welcome. A good many did. Harold Voss grilled. Lauren passed plates. Afterwards, long after the last guest had gone, my son and I stood together under the lights and touched the hull. It was warm from the bulbs, like a living thing.
Remy worked for the Houston company for eight years. He built two hundred and eleven boats, and every one carried the small mark in the corner of the transom, R.B., next to the G.B. of his father. He paid off the bank. He bought a house with a porch. And Lauren, who had said very little in all that time, told me one evening in my kitchen that she had never been prouder of anything than of the night he stood at that microphone and told the truth.
On the first of the year, he came to see me with a small package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a brass plaque no bigger than a playing card, engraved with a single line: Built by Gaston Burke, 1981. Built again by his son. He had drilled a hole in each corner. With the permission of the new owners we mounted it on the wall by the door, where the first hull of Gaston used to sit before the sale. Remy stepped back. He folded his arms like his father. “It floats,” he said. I agreed that it did.
