The one thing I meant to do was meet the first boat.
Twenty-nine years I was the face at that window when the first crossing came in out of the dark, fog or gale, and I could not let a supervisor with a budget make the last memory of that landing a lie about a short fare box. So I walked down to the harbor before light on my own two feet, no key, no uniform, just an old man standing on the dock the way he had stood there half his life, to watch the first boat come in one more time.
The captain saw me from the wheelhouse before he even tied off.
He had run that boat almost as long as I had run that window. We had brought this crossing through storms that turned back lesser men, him on the water and me on the shore, and he knew me the way you know a man you have worked beside for decades. He came down the ramp and asked what I was doing on the dock at that hour with that look on my face, and I told him.
He did not say much. He never does. But he went quiet in a way I knew was not good for somebody.
He told me the fare box they said was short had been counted by his own mate against the passenger log that very crossing, and it balanced to the dollar, and he had the log in the wheelhouse to prove no money ever went missing at all.
The short box was off the new boys booth, a miscount, an easy thing for a kid still learning the tides. The supervisor never checked the log. Never asked the crew. Just needed an old salary gone and picked the oldest one.
The captain radioed it in before the boat was even unloaded. Then the regulars started coming off the ramp, the commuters who had passed my window every working morning for years, and when they heard, they were not quiet about it the way the captain was.
By the time the regional office drove up for their Friday cookout, they had a wheelhouse log that cleared me, a captain who would not be talked over, and a crowd of daily riders who wanted to know why the man who held their soldiers bags and floated stranded travelers home was being called a thief.
The supervisor found his budget somewhere else. My window is still my window if I want it.
I told them I had one more good season in me, and I would take it, and train the new boy right on the fare box so no kid ever costs an honest man his name over a miscount again.
Then I went and stood at the window, and I met the next boat, the way I always had.
