Tabs

The ice had started to go out of the harbor on Thursday. By Saturday morning it lay in grey pans that turned slowly on the tide and knocked against the town float. The thermometer on the shed door said thirty-four at seven o’clock, which was the first time since Christmas that it had been on the right side of freezing, and the yard had turned to mud from the road to the launch-way.

Inside, Thibodeau Boat Works was louder than it had been in a year and a half.

The router table was running. It had cut the twenty-two frames for the Petrel in February, and now it was cutting wheelhouse. The vacuum pump howled and the spindle sang its one high note, and a side panel with three window openings was coming out of a sheet of quarter-inch plate in a spray of bright chips. Jesse Carver, who was nineteen and the newest name on the payroll, stood at the controls with ear defenders on and watched it as if it might bolt.

Beyond the router, where hull 211 had stood, the first wheelhouse module sat on its jig.

Her father had built that jig in the fall of 2024, out of steel channel, for a job that had been cancelled before it was ever used. Nell had spent two evenings in February altering it to her new drawing. Now it held the forward face, both sides and the cabin top of a wheelhouse for an eighty-five-foot boat, all of it tacked together and none of it welded. The cabin top had a long, easy curve in it. She had drawn that curve on an oak table in Portland, under nine lead weights with a dead man’s initials on them.

She was on a stepladder with a tape, checking the diagonals of the forward face, when Win came in.

He had driven up on Friday night and slept in her father’s back bedroom. He had asked on Thursday, in the kitchen on the Western Promenade, the same way he had asked before the storm. They had been very correct with each other all week. They had eaten at the same table and said good night on the same landing, and neither of them had mentioned the inside of a boat at midnight. It had been eight days. She knew it was eight because she had caught herself counting, and counting was his habit and not hers.

He wore the boots and the canvas coat. The coat had lost its stiffness. The gloves had no tag on them.

“Good morning,” he said, from the foot of the ladder. “Is there a job for me?”

“Not from me. I don’t run this floor on Saturdays.” She read the tape, wrote the number on the plate in soapstone and pointed with the stick. “He does.”

Rémy was at the plate rack with a clipboard. He had run the floor four days a week since the eighteenth of January. He had not burned anything down, and he had found out that he liked it, though he would have denied that to a priest.

Win walked over to him. Nell did not turn around to watch. She measured the other diagonal and listened.

“I’d like to work today, if you can use me.”

“Use you for what?”

“Whatever you’d give somebody on his first day.”

There was a pause. She could picture her brother’s face without looking at it.

“Pauline,” Rémy called. “Have we got a spare grinder?”

“We’ve got the old yellow one.”

“Give him the old yellow one.”

The router did not cut a part completely free. It left each piece joined to the sheet by small tabs of metal, the width of a pencil, so that nothing shifted under the cutter. When the sheet came off the table, somebody had to break the parts out and grind every tab flush, by hand, with a flap disc. A wheelhouse module had three hundred and forty parts in it. Each part had between four and ten tabs. It was the dullest job in the building, and it had been Jesse’s until Jesse was promoted to the router.

Pauline Gott had been a fitter at the yard since Cy’s time. She was fifty-eight, with forearms like a lobsterman’s, and she set Win up at the end bench with a bin of brackets, a face shield and the yellow grinder. She showed him once. She took a tab off in two light passes and ran her thumb over the place, and the edge was as clean as if the tab had never been there.

“Let the disc do it,” she said. “Don’t lean.”

Win leaned. Nell heard the pitch of the grinder drop, and then she heard Pauline say something short.

She went back to her diagonals. They agreed within a sixteenth, which they ought to on a jig her father had built. She began marking the weld sequence on the forward face, one small number at every seam and an arrow for the direction. The Petrel’s own wheelhouse had been welded round the edges first, and it was eleven millimetres out, so this one was going onto the Petrel in its place. This one would be welded from the middle of each panel outward, in steps, with the corners last. She wanted every person who picked up a gun on it to see the order written on the metal before they saw anything else.

At eight o’clock she looked over. Win had done nine brackets. Pauline, at the next bench, had a full bin beside her and was starting another.

At half past nine there was a shout of laughter from that end of the shed, and Nell came down the ladder.

Rémy was holding up a bracket between two fingers. Along one edge, where a tab had been, there was a flat place a quarter of an inch deep, as if something had taken a bite from it.

“That’s a twelve-dollar bracket, Portland.”

“I can see that it was,” Win said. He had pushed the face shield up. There was aluminium dust in his black hair and across the lenses of his glasses, and a grey line on his forehead where the headband sat.

“My granddaughter holds it steadier than that,” Pauline said. “She’s nine.”

“Is she available?”

That got a second laugh, a better one, and it included Jesse. Win did not look pleased with himself for it. He was looking at the ruined bracket.

“What does it cost to replace? The plate and the machine time.”

“Twelve dollars and ten minutes of Jesse,” Rémy said.

“Then I owe the yard twelve dollars.”

“You owe the yard nothing,” Nell said, and they all turned. “Scrap’s in the bid. It’s in the fifteen per cent, as of last month. Put it in the bin, Rémy.”

Her brother shrugged and tossed it. Win glanced at her. He did not smile, but she saw him register where the fifteen per cent had come from.

“Pauline,” he said. “Would you show me again? I think I’m doing something wrong with my wrist.”

“You’re doing something wrong with all of you. Stand square to it. No, square. You’re not signing it, you’re grinding it.”

Nell went back up the ladder.

He stayed. She had wondered whether he would. He had come in January and waited forty minutes in a draught, and in February he had carried twelve sheets with a split hand. Those had been short pieces of endurance. This was eight hours of the same small motion at a bench, with a woman correcting his feet and a boy of nineteen doing three times his count. He ate his lunch on an upturned bucket with the rest of them and said very little. Her father came across from the house at noon, looked into his bin, looked at Pauline’s and went into the office without a word. Win watched him go and picked up the grinder again.

By two o’clock the pitch of the yellow grinder had stopped dropping. By three he was not fast, but the edges were clean. Pauline had stopped looking over.

The shift ended at half past three. The router wound down. The crew went out through the mud to their trucks, and Jesse ran the broom. Nell took a drop light and climbed inside the wheelhouse module, as she did at the end of every day, to look at each tack from the back before anyone struck an arc on Monday.

It was a small bright room in there, all bare plate. She was crouched under the forward windows with the light when she heard boots stop outside, a few feet from her head.

“Two hundred and six,” Rémy said. “Pauline did four hundred and some.”

“Four hundred and thirty-one. I counted her bins.”

“Course you did.”

There was the scrape of a bucket. Nell kept still. She ought to have rattled something. She did not.

“You stayed all day,” her brother said.

“Yes.”

“Why? You’ve got people for this. You’ve got three hundred people for this.”

“I’ve been signing for work like this for three years. I’d never done an hour of it.” Win’s voice was tired and even. “And I wanted to be somewhere she was. I’d rather tell you that than have you work it out.”

Nell looked at the tack in front of her. It was a perfectly good tack.

Rémy was silent for a while. When he spoke, he had lowered his voice. It was not the temper. She knew the temper, and this was quieter and much more serious.

“I’ve got eyes. She came down off those stairs the morning after the storm looking like she hadn’t slept, and she’s come home every Friday since with her mind somewhere else. I don’t know what’s still true on that piece of paper. I’m not asking. I’m telling you one thing.”

“Go on.”

“She came back from Seattle with something broken, and it took her two years to stop checking the corner of every drawing. Then your email came, and then Dad. She’s held this place up by herself since. She doesn’t get hurt a third time.” A boot shifted on the concrete. “If you do it, there’s a lot of cold water out there, and I know where it’s deepest.”

“I understand.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I didn’t think you were. I’d think less of you if you were.” Win paused. “If I hurt her, I’d expect you to mean it.”

“Huh,” Rémy said. Then, after a moment, in his ordinary voice: “You grind like a banker.”

“I am a banker. Among other things.”

“Same time next Saturday, if you want. The tabs don’t stop.”

His boots went away up the shed. Nell waited until she heard the office door. Then she knocked the drop light against the plate, twice, like someone just finishing, and climbed out.

Win was sitting on the bucket with his gloves off, flexing his right hand. He stood up when he saw her. His eyes went to the module and back to her face, and she watched him put it together.

“You were in there.”

“I was.”

“Then you heard it. I’d have told you anyway.”

“I know you would. That’s why I’m saying I heard.” She switched off the light. “I’ve got haddock upstairs and more potatoes than I can eat. That’s all it is. It’s haddock.”

“I like haddock,” Win said gravely.
***
The apartment over the mould loft was a room and a half under the roof, with a kitchen along one wall and two windows over the water. She had lived in it since 2022. He had never been in it. He stood inside the door in his sock feet and looked at it as he looked at everything, from left to right. He saw the shelf of textbooks from Webb, the drafting lamp, the one armchair and her mother’s blue enamel pot on the stove.

“Sit down. You’ve been standing for eight hours.”

“Can I do something?”

“You can peel.”

He peeled potatoes at her table, slowly, and got every eye out. She floured the fish. Outside the light was going, and the ice pans in the harbor had turned the colour of the sky.

They ate at the small table with their knees a careful distance apart. He ate everything on his plate. He told her that Pauline Gott had a granddaughter in Rockland who was going to be a marine biologist and a daughter who was not speaking to her, and that he had found this out by asking one question at lunch and then holding his tongue for ten minutes.

“You asked twice?”

“I asked about the granddaughter again at the afternoon break. She showed me a photograph.”

“Then it counted.”

He set his fork down.

“May I ask you one? You said something in the loft, the morning we signed. You said you drew a hull in Seattle and your boss put his name on it. Your brother said it tonight too. I’ve wondered since which hull it was.”

She had not meant to tell him. She had not told anybody in Portland. Toby and Walt and the forty engineers in the warm office knew she had worked for a design firm out west, and that was all they knew.

But he had told her about his father in front of the stove, and she had only given him the one sentence back.

“I went to Halvorsen Marine Design straight out of school, in 2018. It was twelve people in an office on Lake Union. Kurt Halvorsen had made his name on fishing boats in the eighties. I did structure for three years, other people’s hulls.” She turned her water glass on the table. “In 2021 a county sheriff’s office on Puget Sound wanted a patrol boat. Nineteen metres, aluminium, thirty knots, and it had to run in a short steep chop without beating the crew to pieces. Kurt drew a hull. It was a 1985 hull. I told him it would slam, and he told me to get on with the framing.”

“And you drew another one.”

“At night, at home, for five months. It had a finer entry and a second chine I’d worked out to throw the water down instead of up. I ran the numbers on it until I trusted them, and then I put it on his desk. He studied it for a week. Then he sent it to the client.” She looked up. “The title block said Design: K. Halvorsen. I was in the corner in the drawn by box. Two initials.”

Win did not move.

“I went into his office. I wasn’t even angry yet. I thought it was a mistake. He said the name on the door was what the client was buying, and that this was how a firm worked, and that I’d have my own door someday. He was quite kind about it. He gave me a raise.”

“Did you take it?”

“I took it. I stayed another year. I told myself the next one would be mine.” It still embarrassed her more than the rest. “She launched in the spring of 2022. I stood on the dock in Anacortes. She did thirty-four knots on trials, and she went through a four-foot chop like it wasn’t there, and the sheriff ordered three more. There was a builder’s plate by the helm. It had the yard’s name on it and his. I read it, and I drove home and gave my notice, and I was back here in six weeks.”

“Where your name stays on the boat.”

“Where there’s a slice of bronze on every bulkhead and the drawing says who drew it. Yes.”

He was quiet. She braced for it. He would offer to have a lawyer write to Kurt Halvorsen. He would know someone on the board of something. He would put a number on it.

“What was she called?” Win asked.

Nell breathed out.

“The Sentinel. I didn’t name her either.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a dull name for a good hull.”

“It is, isn’t it.” She laughed, a little unsteadily, and got up to clear the plates so that she would have something to do.

He brought his own to the sink. He stood beside her and dried, and for a minute there was only the water running.

“I owe you one,” he said. “I told you part of it in the storm, and the part I told you was the part that flatters me. I said I laid those sixty people off by email because I thought it was the honest way.”

“You said if you stood in front of them you’d start promising things.”

“That was what I told myself afterwards. It isn’t what happened.” He folded the dish towel in half and then in half again. “On Friday the thirteenth of June I had the yard canteen booked for three o’clock. I’d written out what I was going to say. It was a page and a half. Toby had the sixty names and he’d told them to be there. At ten to three I was sitting in my car in the yard lot with the page on my knee. I could see them going in through the canteen door. Some of them were laughing about something. I knew the hire date and the hourly rate of every man walking through that door, and I didn’t know one of their faces.”

She turned off the tap.

“I couldn’t get out of the car, Nell. I sat there until three. Then I drove back across the bridge and sent it from my desk at eleven minutes past, and your purchase order went in the same batch. Toby stood in that canteen with sixty men for a quarter of an hour, waiting for me, and then their phones went off.” He put the towel down. “It wasn’t a principle. I couldn’t face the room. I made the principle up later so that I could live with it.”

She looked at him. He was grey with tiredness, and there was still dust in his hair. He had told her the worst thing he knew about himself in the same level voice he used for a balance.

“Does Toby know you were in the lot?”

“I’ve never told anyone I was in the lot.”

“He might have seen the car.”

“I’ve thought of that. For a year and a half I’ve thought of that every time he picks up the telephone.”

She could have told him it was all right. It was not, and she had put her name to a term about that.

“That’s a bad one,” she said. “I’m glad you told me.”

“So am I. I didn’t expect to be.”

He was standing close. The kitchen was six feet long. She could see the grey line the face shield had left on his forehead, and she had lifted her hand to rub it away with her thumb before she knew she was going to.

She stopped with her hand in the air. He had gone absolutely still. She put the hand on the edge of the sink.

“You’ve got dust,” she said. “Just there.”

He wiped at it with the back of his wrist and missed.

“There’s something else I was going to ask,” he said, after a moment. His voice was not quite steady either. “On the rack beside the router, behind the wheelhouse plate, there are eight pieces with 212 on them in marker. I ground the tabs off two of them this afternoon before Pauline took them away from me. They aren’t wheelhouse parts. They’re long, and they curve two ways.”

She should have known. He had found a missed fifteen in a cribbage hand and forty-one thousand dollars in her metal bill.

“They’re bottom plates.”

“For a boat nobody’s ordered.”

“Nobody’s ordered her yet. I started cutting last Sunday. Two sheets, on Gary’s new contract price, against the frame money when your purchasing office gets around to paying it. Dad signed for it. He added his fifteen per cent to my hours first.” She lifted her chin. “It’s the yard’s money and the yard’s risk. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“I wasn’t going to object. I was going to say it’s the first thing I’ve seen you do without a customer.”

“My grandfather cut his first plate before he had one.”

“The bronze on the windowsill.”

“Yes.”

“What is she?”

“She’s forty-six feet. That’s all you get.”

He nodded slowly. She could see him wanting the rest of it.

“The lines are on the loft floor,” he said. “Under the painter’s tarp by the north windows. I walked past it coming up. May I see them?”

“Not yet.”

She said it too fast, and heard how it sounded.

“It isn’t because of you. I know you’re not him. I knew that the day you spelled my name right on a notice board.” She gripped the sink. “But the last time I showed anyone a hull before she was finished, I lost her. This one isn’t faired yet. There’s a place in the run aft I’m not sure of. I don’t want anyone’s eyes on her until I am, and that goes for my father too. Not yet, Win.”

“All right.”

“That’s it? You bargained three times over the note.”

“I lost three times over the note.” He picked up his coat from the back of the chair. “I’ll ask again when she’s faired. You’ll tell me when that is.”

“I will.”

“Thank you for supper. And for the fifteen per cent, this morning.”

“That was just arithmetic.”

“I know. It’s the only kind of thanks I’m sure of.”

He put on his boots at the door. She held it open, and the cold from the unheated loft came up the stairs. He went down them into the long white room. The tarp lay over a corner of the floor twenty feet from the foot of the stairs, with the edge of a red pencil line showing beyond it.

He walked past it. He did not slow down and he did not turn his head. She listened to him cross the loft and go down to the shed, and then to the shed door and his boots in the mud.

Nell stood at the top of her own stairs with her hand on the latch. She had wanted him to do exactly that. She was sorry, all the same, that he had not argued about a single thing tonight, and she knew quite well it was not the boat she had wanted him to argue for.
***