Chapter 10 - The Salt Line
In May, the river smelled of salt and sweetgrass.
The small dock behind the Bristol cottage had been rebuilt with five new stringers of green heart pine that Auggie Renshaw had delivered on the back of an open stake truck without an invoice. The cottage roof no longer leaked; two young men with Fall River accents and heavy tool belts had spent three days in April replacing the cedar shingles, refusing Delaney’s money and saying only that Mr. Ferraro had already settled the timber account at the yard.
Delaney stood on the end of the dock, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, holding a stiff-bristled brush she had been using to clean the gunwales of an old wooden dory she had bought from a retired lobster fisherman.
A dark car rolled down the gravel lane between the apple trees, its tires crunching with that slow, deliberate weight she had come to recognize before she even lifted her eyes from the paintwork.
The Buick stopped beside the shed.
Elias Ferraro got out. He wore no overcoat today; he had on a tailored suit of dark blue wool, his white shirt open at the throat, the wind from the bay lifting the dark hair across his forehead. He carried a rolled newspaper beneath his arm.
He walked down the narrow path through the sweetgrass and stopped at the foot of the dock.
“You missed a spot near the oarlock,” Elias said.
Delaney rested the brush against the dory’s rail, wiping her forehead with the back of her forearm. “The oarlock is brass. It doesn’t need paint. It needs salt.”
Elias stepped onto the timber, his leather shoes clicking on the fresh pine. He handed her the newspaper—the Providence Journal-Bulletin, its front page dominated by a photograph of the Meridian Hotel’s rooftop terrace.
The headline was simple: MUNICIPAL BOARD ORDERS REDUCTION OF HISTORIC HOTEL ROOFTOP LOAD; HOLLIS RESIGNS BOARD.
“Vance is moving to Sarasota,” Elias said, looking out across the water toward Prudence Island. “He sold his interest in the hotel to an investment group from Montreal. The son has been sent to an agricultural school in Vermont to learn how to breed dairy cattle.”
Delaney looked at the paper, then set it down on the dock box without opening it. “And the river parcels?”
“The city council voted yesterday to deed the South Water frontage to the maritime heritage trust,” Elias said. “The boat repair shops will stay. Noel is opening a music school in the old cooperage next spring.”
“She told me,” Delaney said. “She wants me to manage the accounts.”
Elias turned his head, looking at her with those pale, clear eyes that seemed to take in every line of the dory, every plank of the dock, and the small anchor pin she wore pinned to the collar of her denim work shirt.
“Will you?” he asked.
Delaney looked down at her hands—strong, scarred, steady hands that had spent seven years cleaning up after men who thought they owned the view, and two weeks learning that the view was only as good as the ground beneath the pilings.
“I told her I’d consider it,” Delaney said, reaching for her bucket of river water. “On one condition.”
Elias raised an eyebrow. “What condition is that?”
May you like
“Nobody wears a hat inside the building,” Delaney said, lifting the bucket and sloshing the cold, clear brine across the deck of the boat until the wood shone like dark glass in the May sun. “Not even you.”
Elias Ferraro looked at the water draining through the scuppers, then down at his own bare head, and for the first time since she had known him, he let out a laugh—short, quiet, and genuine—that drifted out over the bay and was carried south by the tide.
