Hattie had not run anywhere in ten years. She ran now.
She pulled Leo's old oilskin coat off the hook and went down the hill after Cody with the rain hitting her face like gravel. She held the railing the whole way. A broken hip would not help her grandson.
The co-op wharf was under a foot of moving water. Cody was on the float at the end of it, which was bucking like a bronco on its pilings. He had the skiff's painter in his hands and was trying to pull it close enough to step in.
"Cody," she said.
He did not hear her. She grabbed the back of his coat with both fists and held on.
"Cody. Look at me."
He looked. His face was wet with rain and something else.
"That's Travis's whole life out there, Gram."
"And you're my whole life," Hattie said. "You step in that skiff tonight and I'll be burying you before Christmas. Look at the water."
He looked. The harbor was white from shore to shore. The skiff slammed against the float so hard it shook under their feet.
"Now watch your boat," she said.
They stood together in the rain at the top of the wharf, where the water only reached their ankles. Hattie held his arm.
Travis's boat came down the harbor broadside, rolling hard. It came down on Cody's boat in the dark and struck it on the port side. Even over the wind, they heard the crack of hull against hull.
Cody made a sound like he had been hit himself.
Then the two boats swung together, tangled, and came up hard against Cody's mooring.
Hattie felt Cody stop breathing. She didn't breathe either.
This was the moment Leo had warned her about on the shore in 1976. Two boats on one mooring now, with a king tide and sixty knots behind them. Every bit of that weight going through two ropes and two pieces of garden hose in a bow chock.
Cody's boat jerked. Rose on a swell. Jerked again.
And held.
The two boats swung back together and rode there, side by side, rolling and banging fenders, tied to the bottom of the harbor by Cody's doubled pennant.
"It's holding," Cody said. "Gram. It's holding both of them."
"Leo always said take care of the rub," Hattie said, and found she had to sit down on a fish tote to say it.
A little after one, headlights came down the hill. Travis Dunham climbed out of his truck in a sou'wester and came to stand beside them at the top of the wharf. He had been in the co-op office all night, watching the water come over the pilings.
He looked out at the two boats riding together on Cody's mooring. He looked for a long time.
"Is that mine?" he said.
"That's yours," Hattie said. "Riding on his."
Travis did not say anything else. Hattie found a thermos of tea in Leo's coat pocket that she did not remember putting there. She poured him a cup. He held it in both hands and never drank it, and the three of them stood together in the rain until the wind began to turn.
The wind went into the northwest a little before three and began to drop.
At first light, Hattie walked down to the shore. The harbor was littered with seaweed and broken traps. Two boats had dragged onto the ledges by the point, just as boats had in 1976. Both of them had single pennants. Both would need the boatyard all winter. Neither one had a soul aboard, and for that she said a short prayer.
Out at Cody's mooring, Travis's big new boat sat rafted against Cody's, both afloat. Cody's port side had a long scrape and a cracked rub rail. That was all.
Travis was still on the wharf when she got there. He had not gone home. He held a frayed length of nylon line in his hands.
"Cut clean through at the chock," he said. "Right where you said."
Hattie took the line and looked at the end. It was not cut. It was worn through, strand by strand, fuzzed and melted shiny where the rope had sawed back and forth on bronze all night.
"Chafe," she said. "It'll happen to the best rope in the world."
Travis was quiet for a while.
"That's four hundred thousand dollars of boat," he said. "Still floating because of a piece of garden hose and a grandmother half this wharf laughed at." He swallowed. "I'll pay to fix Cody's rail. And I owe you an apology, Mrs. Pelletier. In front of the same men."
"The rail's enough," Hattie said. "The apology, you can give to Leo. He'd have enjoyed it more than I will."
That afternoon, eleven young fishermen crowded into Leo's old shed.
Travis came too. He brought two boxes of coffee from the store and stood in the back with his arms folded and listened like the rest of them.
Hattie stood at the workbench with a sharp knife, a roll of friction tape, and a coil of old green garden hose. She cut the first piece a foot long and split it down the side.
"A mooring doesn't fail at the chain," she said. "It fails at the chock, where the rope rubs."
Then she handed the knife to the nearest young man and watched him make his first cut.
Through the shed window, the harbor lay flat again, and every boat still on it was pointed the same lazy way.
