Iron Daughter

The Bertram had been sitting on blocks for three weeks with its cowling off, and every time Raine walked past it she felt a specific kind of impatience, the kind that came from watching somebody else's mistake take up space in her shop. The owner wanted the engine "just cleaned up a little," which was what people said when they didn't want to hear the real number. She had already told Gus twice that the manifolds were shot. Gus had already told her twice to let the man find that out on his own dime. She wiped her hands on a rag that had stopped being white sometime around the Clinton administration and looked up at the sky instead, because the sky was doing something worth looking at. Heat lightning, way out past the inlet, silent, the kind that never turned into anything. Gulls worked the shrimp boat coming in at the far dock, screaming over each other for scraps nobody had thrown yet. The whole yard smelled like diesel and low tide and the particular sweetness of fiberglass resin baking in ninety-one degree heat, a smell she'd stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own house. "You gonna stand there communing with nature or you gonna pull that head gasket," Gus said, from somewhere behind a stack of outboard flowers he was supposedly organizing. "I'm building suspense." "For who. Me. I already know how it ends. It ends with you being right and Wilkerson being mad about it." She almost smiled. That was as close as she let herself get most days, this small transactional almost-smile that cost her nothing and gave Gus just enough to work with. Six years she'd worked for him, and in six years he had learned exactly two things about her past that he hadn't had to drag out of her: that she came from somewhere north with an engine in her blood, and that she didn't want to talk about it. He'd stopped asking around year two. She appreciated that about him more than she'd ever said out loud. She went back under the cowling. Her hands knew this part without her thinking about it, the half turn, the resistance, the give, and that was the whole appeal of engines, the reason she'd built a life around them instead of anything that required people to be honest with each other on purpose. An engine didn't perform for you. It ran or it didn't, and when it didn't, there was always a reason you could find if you looked hard enough and didn't flinch from what you found. That was the thing nobody back home had ever understood about her, not really. They'd called her Duke's little wrench monkey like it was cute, like it was a phase, a thing she'd grow out of once she found a man worth doing her hair for. She used to laugh along with it because laughing alone cost less than explaining that the garage was the only room in that clubhouse where nobody was keeping score, where nobody cared whose mother had brought the better casserole to the last cookout or whose daughter had a prettier laugh. An engine didn't have a favorite. That had mattered to her more than anyone had bothered to ask why. She heard the truck before she saw it. Diesel, older model, the specific rattle of a trailer hitch that hadn't been greased since Reagan. She didn't look up right away. Trucks pulling boat trailers into Hendrick's Marine was not, in itself, an event. "You Raine?" The voice did something to the back of her neck before her brain caught up to why. She turned around holding a wrench she didn't remember picking up, and there was a man standing at the gate with his hand still on the top rail like he wasn't sure the fence would hold him if he let go, and for one full second she did not recognize him, because the boy she was looking for didn't have that jaw, didn't have those shoulders, didn't have a scar running pale through one eyebrow that hadn't been there the last time she'd seen him laughing at something stupid her father said. Then he said, "It's me," like that clarified anything, and it did. "Cash." His name came out flat. Not a question. She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of a question. "Yeah." Neither of them moved. Gus, to his enormous credit, kept unpacking outboard lowers like the temperature of the yard hadn't just changed by about thirty degrees. "You got a boat that needs work, or you drove four hours to stand at my gate," she said, because it was easier than the alternative, which was standing there feeling every single one of the six years she'd spent not thinking about him arriving at once, all together, uninvited. "Client's boat. Guy back home did charters, blew a water pump on the way down and didn't want to limp it the rest of the way to Beaufort." He nodded at the trailer behind him, a center console with a Route's End Charters decal peeling off one side, and something in her chest did recognize that, the way you recognize a smell before you remember what it's attached to. "I offered to run it down. Didn't tell him why I really wanted the drive." "Don't." "Don't what?" "Don't do the thing where you make this sound like fate. You didn't offer to trailer a stranger's boat four hours because the universe wanted you standing at my gate. You looked me up." He didn't deny it. That was almost worse than if he had. He just stood there with his jaw doing something complicated, and she remembered, against her will, that he had always been like this, slow to talk himself out of a thing once he'd decided on it, and apparently six years hadn't touched that part of him even if it had touched everything else. "I looked you up eight months ago," he said. "Sat on it eight months." "Congratulations on your patience." "Raine." "Don't." "I'm not doing anything." "You said my name like it means something." "It does." Gus dropped an outboard lower with a clang that was probably not an accident, and it broke whatever was building between them just enough for her to remember there was a whole boatyard around this conversation, salt air and gull noise and a shrimp boat idling at the dock, ordinary Tuesday things happening on all sides of something that did not feel ordinary at all. "Pull it around back," she said, nodding at the trailer, already turning away because turning away was the only tool she had left that still worked on him. "I'll look at the pump. You can wait or you can not wait, doesn't matter to me." "I'll wait." "Didn't ask." "I know." She walked back toward the shop without looking to see if he was following the truck around, because she already knew he would be, the same way she'd known six years ago exactly which back road he'd take to the clubhouse if he wanted to avoid his father, exactly how long he'd sulk after losing an argument before he came around to admitting she'd been right. Some knowledge didn't go anywhere just because you stopped using it. It sat in you the way muscle memory sat in a hand that hadn't touched a wrench in years and still knew, on the first try, exactly how much force a stripped bolt could take before it gave. Under the workbench, out of sight, her hands were not steady. She looked at them like they belonged to somebody else, flexed them twice, and picked up the wrench again. The Bertram's manifolds could wait another ten minutes. She needed those ten minutes more than Wilkerson's boat did. She gave herself exactly that long. Then she pulled the cowling the rest of the way off, laid the bolts out in order on a magnetic tray the way she always did, and worked until the light over the yard went the flat gold color that meant six o'clock without her needing to check a clock. Cash's truck was still parked around back when she finally straightened up, the charter boat propped on stands, the old water pump sitting on a rag on the tailgate where he'd apparently pulled it himself rather than sit idle. She noticed that and hated that she noticed it. She didn't go find him. She locked the shop, told Gus she'd see him Thursday, and drove the fifteen minutes home with the windows down because the air conditioning in her truck had died sometime in July and she hadn't gotten around to caring. Marsh Hollow at dusk smelled like somebody's charcoal grill and somebody else's marsh mud, and normally that was enough to settle her, the particular ordinariness of it, a town where nobody knew what she used to be. Her phone buzzed on the passenger seat at a red light. A number with an area code she hadn't seen in six years, no name attached because she'd never bothered to save it, because saving it would have meant admitting she still had it memorized. She let it buzz twice more, all the way through, and did not pick it up. She also did not delete it.