What the Tide Brings Back

The fortnight became three weeks the way water becomes ice, without any single moment you could point at.

She told herself it was the boat. Somebody had to deal with the boat, and dealing with the boat meant talking to Ren Farrow at the yard, and talking to Ren Farrow at the yard meant that by the end of the week half of Cape Lorne knew that Dougie Nolan's girl was back and the other half had been told twice.

Ren had got older in the way that men who work outdoors get older, which is all at once and then not again for twenty years.

He looked at the boat for a long time before he said anything, and what he said was, "He knew."

"Knew what."

"That it was done. He knew in, what, twenty-two. He kept at it anyway." Ren rubbed the back of his neck. "I told him. He said he wasn't fixing it to sail it."

Ada waited.

"He said he was fixing it so there'd be something here that still needed doing." Ren shrugged, uncomfortable with having said it. "Anyway. She's scrap, love. I'm sorry."

She walked back the long way, along the front, past the chapel and the closed-up chip shop and the bench with the plaque for somebody's mother.

The thing nobody tells you about coming back is that grief is not the hard part. The hard part is the arithmetic. Nine years times one letter is nine letters. Nine years times one gull is one gull, still alive, still arriving, still expecting.

Nine years of a man getting up and finding something that still needed doing.

She stopped walking.

The tide was a long way out, further than she had seen it in years, and the whole floor of the bay lay open and shining and absolutely ordinary, every rock and rope and lost thing on it laid out in the flat grey light with nothing over it at all.

It would come back in. It always came back in. That was not comfort and it was not threat, it was only the arrangement, and standing there at the rail Ada understood for the first time that her father had not been waiting for her to come home.

He had been making sure there was a home to come to, which is a different job, and a longer one, and he had done it alone every single day for nine years without once asking her to come and look.

She went back to the house and she got the envelopes and she brought them downstairs to the kitchen table where the light was good.

Then she opened the second one.