Arithmetic

The sign at the top of the hill said Skerry Harbor, Settled 1791, and below it the road dropped to a white church, a store, a town float locked in ice and a long metal shed at the water’s edge with smoke coming out of a stovepipe. Win parked the Volvo beside a truck with Thibodeau Boat Works on the door. The dashboard said eleven degrees. It was twenty past nine on Saturday morning, and nobody knew he was here.

On the seat beside him lay ninety-four pages in a binder clip. Aggie had found the thesis on Thursday in the Webb Institute library catalogue. It was dated 2018 and was about the control of weld distortion in aluminium hulls, and he had read it Thursday night at his grandmother’s kitchen table and understood perhaps a third. He had read it again on Friday night and understood most of the rest.

The argument, once he had it, was one he could follow anywhere. Heat was a debt. Every inch of weld put heat into the plate, and the plate paid it back in movement. You could not avoid the debt. You could only decide where it came due, and the order you welded in was how you decided.

Under the thesis were nine sheets of drawings from the Marine Finance loan file, for a thirty-eight-foot oyster boat called hull 211. Every sheet said Drawn: N. Thibodeau in the corner. Every structural sheet carried a small numbered diagram showing which weld was made first, which second and in which direction. He had put them next to the drawings of his own hull 1 on Friday and looked for the same thing. There was no such diagram anywhere in three hundred sheets.

On Thursday he had asked his chief engineer who had drawn the bracket. It had taken four hours to get an answer, and that was information too.

He got out of the car. A black dog came around the corner of the shed, smelled both his knees and escorted him to the door.

Inside, the cold let go only a little. There was a woodstove halfway down the shed and a silver boat on staging near it, finished and gleaming. At the far end, by the big doors, someone small in a leather jacket and a welding hood was bent over a long aluminium frame on trestles. Win knew the braid down the back of the jacket.

He also knew what she was doing, because it was Figure 12. She laid a few inches of weld, stopped, moved back and laid the next few inches up to meet the first. The light flared and died and flared again in short, even steps.

He stayed where he was, just inside the door.

Four or five people had stopped work to look at him. One of them put down a grinder and came up the shed. He was young and tall, with dark curls and a face shield pushed up into them.

“Help you?”

“I’m Winslow Lathrop. I’ve come to see your sister, if you’re Rémy Thibodeau.”

Win held out his hand. Rémy looked at it for long enough to make the point and then looked back at his face.

“I know who you are. You’ve got some nerve, I’ll say that.”

“Possibly.”

“My father had a stroke two months after your email. Did she tell you?”

“She told me.”

“And?”

“And I’ve driven up to talk to her.”

Rémy’s mouth twisted. He swept an arm toward the far end of the shed. “She’s right there. Go tap her on the shoulder.”

“She’s in the middle of a seam.”

“So?”

“So every stop and restart is a place for a crack to begin. That’s page thirty-one.” He lowered his hand, since it was plainly not going to be taken. “I’ll wait.”

Rémy stared at him. Some of the certainty went out of his face, and he seemed to resent its going.

“You read her thesis.”

“Twice.”

“Stove’s down there,” Rémy said, after a moment. He did not say Win could use it. He went back to his grinder.

So Win waited by the door, where the draught came under it and across his shoes. Nobody had asked him further in, and he had learned something on Wednesday about walking onto another person’s floor.

He waited forty minutes by his watch. His feet stopped reporting after fifteen. The dog gave up on him and went to lie by the stove. In the window of a plywood office in the corner, a man with a grey beard sat watching him steadily over a hand of cards.

Mostly he watched her. He had expected the waiting to be long, and it was not. She worked the way the diagrams said, with no hurry and no wasted motion, and she shifted her feet before each step so that her hands were never reaching. Twice she stopped to lay a straightedge on the frame and sight along it. He realised he was looking at the thing his own yard did not have. It was a little unsettling how much he liked looking at it.

At last she held the gun still a second longer over the end of the weld, let go and pushed up the hood.

She saw him at once. Her face did several things and settled on wary.

“How long’s he been standing there?” she called.

“Forty minutes,” her brother said from the staging. “I didn’t offer him a chair.”

She pulled off her gloves and came up the shed, pushing her left sleeve down over her forearm as she walked. Her grey eyes went from his face to his shoes.

“You could’ve stood by the stove.”

“Nobody asked me to.”

“You could’ve said my name. I’d have stopped.”

“I know. That was the reason not to.”

She took that in without comment. Behind the office window, the bearded man rapped twice on the glass with the head of a cane and held up a deck of cards.

Nell sighed. “That’s my father. He wants to play you a game of cribbage. He does it to everybody who comes here wanting something, and you want something or you wouldn’t be in those shoes in January. Do you play?”

“My grandmother taught me. I haven’t played in twenty years.”

“Then it won’t take long.”

The office was warm. Leon Thibodeau did not get up, but he put out his right hand, and his grip was hard and brief. He looked at Win with the same eyes his daughter had. Then he cut the deck, won the deal and dealt one-handed, slowly, sliding each card off with his thumb. Win started to reach for the pack to help. Nell, in the doorway with a coffee mug, shook her head once, and he put his hand back on his knee.

A round of sawn bronze sat on the windowsill with nothing stamped on it. He noticed it and did not ask.

Leon said nothing at all. He played a card, pegged his points and waited. Win found himself announcing his own counts aloud into the silence, like a schoolboy.

On the fourth hand Win turned up a two, a three, a jack and a king, with a five cut for the starter.

“Fifteen two, fifteen four,” he said, and reached for his peg.

Leon laid a finger on the two, the three and the jack. He moved it to the two, the three and the king. Then he took four holes for himself.

“House rules,” Nell said. “What you miss, he gets.”

Win looked at the cards. Two and three and ten made fifteen, twice over. He had counted the pairs of cards and never looked for the threes. He could not remember the last time he had missed a number that was lying face up in front of him.

Leon pegged out with Win twenty-eight holes behind. The old man gathered the cards and squared them against the desk, and gave his daughter one slow nod.

“Come upstairs,” she said to Win. “It’s the only room in the building where my brother can’t hear.”

The mould loft ran the length of the old part of the shed, a long bare room with windows over the harbor. The floor was painted white, and it was covered from end to end in the curved lines of boats drawn full size, one over another in pencil and red and blue. Nell sat down on a sawhorse with her coffee. She did not offer him the other one.

“You’ve got until I finish this.”

“Then I’ll put it as plainly as I can. I have two problems and each one has a date.” He stayed standing. He thought better on his feet. “The first is June thirtieth. Hull 1 is due to her owner that day, a hundred and seventy-two days from now. She’s the first of three at eighteen million each, and every day late is fifteen thousand dollars. The owner has an option for four more at nineteen million. If she’s late, I lose seventy-six million dollars of work to Louisiana. You showed me on Wednesday what’s wrong with her. I don’t have anyone who can make it right, and I’ve read enough since to know that you can.”

“That’s the job I turned down.”

“Yes. The second problem is March twentieth.” He took off his glasses and put them on again. “On Tuesday my uncle brought the board an offer for the whole company. It’s from a Rotterdam group called Meridian Brandt, for one point two billion dollars. The shareholders vote on June eighteenth. The buyers will keep the shipping line. Within a year they’ll close the South Portland yard, which is three hundred and ten jobs, and sell the finance company’s loan book to whoever bids. Your note is in that book. Whatever you decide about me, you should know that.”

Her mug had stopped halfway to her mouth.

“My uncle owns thirty-four per cent. I own six. The employees own twenty and vote as a block. The other forty sits in my grandmother’s trust, and she left a condition on it. If I am lawfully married and keeping one household with my wife for ninety days before that meeting, I vote the forty. If I’m not, my uncle does, and he has seventy-four per cent and the sale is done. Ninety days before June eighteenth is March twentieth. That’s seventy days from this morning.”

He had rehearsed the next sentence for most of Route 1, and it still came out like a line item.

“I need a wife by then, for one year, so that nobody can say it was dissolved the week after the vote. The clause asks for a lawful marriage and one household. It asks for nothing else. I’ve read it eleven times.”

Nell put the mug down on the sawhorse beside her, very carefully.

“Say that again without the percentages.”

“I’m asking you to marry me. On paper, for a year. You’d live in my house in Portland. It has eleven empty rooms.”

She didn’t laugh. He had thought she might. She looked at him the way she had looked at the photographs on his table, hunting for the place where it had gone wrong.

“Does your lawyer know you’re here?”

“Nobody knows I’m here.”

“And you can’t find a woman in Portland.”

“I can find several. My uncle stands to make four hundred and eight million dollars from this sale. Whoever I marry, he’ll go to her, courteously, and offer her more than I can. I need someone he can’t buy.” He drew a breath. “In return I’ll forgive your note. The whole balance, one million eight hundred seventy-six thousand. And I’ll add one million dollars on the day the year ends.”

The loft was silent. Down in the shed a grinder started and stopped.

“Why me?” she said.

It was the only question she had asked that he had not prepared for, and so he answered it truthfully.

“Because in the last year a great many people have told me I was wrong. My uncle, my board, my superintendent. Each of them was arguing a side. You stood at my table for fifty seconds and told me I was wrong about something I couldn’t even see. Then you chalked it on my boat in front of my own men, and you were right. Nobody has done that since my grandmother died.” He stopped. “You’re the only one. I’d rather have that in my house than anyone agreeable.”

Colour had come up in her face. He did not think it was pleasure.

“Did you hear yourself just now?” she said. “You told me you need a woman who can’t be bought. Then you named a price. Two million eight hundred seventy-six thousand dollars, you had it all added up.”

He opened his mouth and found nothing in it.

“That’s an insult, Mr. Lathrop. I don’t think you meant it as one. I think you priced it out as generously as you knew how, and that’s almost worse.” She stood. She was a full foot shorter than he was and it made no difference. “My father borrowed that money. He shook on it. We paid it for fifteen months with nothing coming in, you said so yourself, and we’ll pay the rest. Thibodeaus pay what they owe. Nobody forgives us anything. You don’t get to wipe it off like chalk and call us square.”

“Then I’ve misjudged the—”

“You have. I haven’t said no.”

He went still.

She walked to the window and stood with her back to him, looking at the ice. He could see her thinking. He had seen it under the boat, in the set of her shoulders.

“A hundred and seventy-two days,” she said. “And the loan book gets sold either way if he wins.”

“Yes.”

“And you’d close this yard to save that one, if those were the numbers.”

It was not a question he could answer well. “On Wednesday morning I would have. I don’t know that I could do it now. I know the name.”

She turned around. She studied him for a long moment, and he made himself stand under it.

“If I did this, it wouldn’t be on your terms. It’d be on mine. I’d write them down, every one, and you’d sign them or you’d drive home.” She picked up her mug. “I’m not telling you them today. I’m going to finish that float, and then I’m going to sit up half the night and think about whether I can stand you for a year. Come back at six tomorrow morning if you want to hear them.”

“Six.”

“In the morning. The stove’s lit by then.” Her glance dropped to his feet. “And buy some boots.”

She went down the stairs ahead of him. He followed her through the shed, past her brother, who watched him the whole way, and past the office window, where Leon Thibodeau was dealing himself a fresh hand.

Outside, the cold closed over his face. Win stood beside the Volvo with his keys in his hand and went back over the last five minutes as he would have checked a column of figures.

She had turned down a million dollars and the whole of her debt. She had called him insulting, and she had been right, which made twice in one week. He had no idea where a man slept in Skerry Harbor in January.

She had not said no.
***