The Counter

The Skerry Harbor town office was a white clapboard building beside the church, with a flag, a snow shovel by the step and a notice on the door about dog licences. Win held the door for Aggie Pruitt at five minutes to ten on Friday morning. It was nineteen degrees and bright, and the harbor ice had gone blue at the edges.

He had been married to no one for thirty-four years. In about ten minutes that would stop being true, and he had prepared for it by checking twice that his birth certificate was in his breast pocket.

“You’ve gone grey around the mouth,” Aggie said.

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t. I said you’d gone grey.” She stamped the snow off her shoes. “I’ve known you since you were eight years old, Win. You told me last Wednesday week that you were getting married, and you used the voice you use for moving a dentist’s appointment. I haven’t asked you one question.”

“I’ve noticed. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m saving them up.”

The office was a single room with a counter across it. Behind the counter were a safe, a wall map of the town and a woman of about Nell’s age with red hair pinned up with a pencil. In front of it stood the Thibodeaus.

Leon wore a dark suit under his barn coat and leaned on his cane. Rémy stood at the back wall by the coat hooks with his arms folded, in his work jacket, as far from the counter as the room allowed. The black dog lay across his boots.

Nell turned around.

She had on a dark green wool dress and her good boots, and her braid was freshly done and lay over one shoulder. He had seen her every working day for two weeks in coveralls and a hard hat, with soapstone on her knuckles. He had not known she owned a dress. It was a plain one. The grey of her eyes looked different above it, lighter, and he looked a moment too long and knew it.

“You’re on time,” she said.

“I was early. I sat in the car.”

“Of course you did.”

She had been on his floor since Monday the eighteenth. On her first morning she had asked for the drawing of the bracket and a pencil, and by noon there was a new one, with a long tapered toe and the weld stopped short of the point. It was the first sheet in the hull 1 set to carry a sequence diagram, and the corner said N. Thibodeau. Win had not been there. Toby Keegan had reported it in nine words, which for Toby was an outpouring.

She had driven home each Thursday night. From Monday to Thursday she had stayed at a motel on Broadway in South Portland and paid for it herself. Her first invoice had come to his desk yesterday, for eighty-one and a half hours at one hundred and eighty-five dollars, with the half-hours accounted for.

“Faye,” Nell said, “this is him. Win, Faye Tibbetts. We were in kindergarten together. She knows.”

Faye Tibbetts looked at him across the counter with open, unhurried interest.

“Mr. Lathrop. I’ve licensed four hundred dogs and married eleven couples, and I liked the odds on all of them better than this.” She said it cheerfully. “I’m doing it because she asked me. I want that understood.”

“It’s understood.”

“Good. I also keep the tax rolls, so I know where everybody lives. Have you got your papers?”

He laid his birth certificate on the counter. Nell laid hers beside it. Faye turned the licence form around and went down it with her pencil, reading aloud. Winslow Edmund Lathrop, born November 1992, Portland. Eleanor Odette Thibodeau, born December 1995, Skerry Harbor. He had not known the Eleanor. He filed it.

“Name after marriage,” Faye said. “Nell?”

“Thibodeau.”

“I’d have fainted if you’d said anything else. Forty dollars.”

Win took out a twenty. Nell put another on top of it. Aggie, beside him, watched the two bills go into the cash drawer and said nothing at all, very noticeably.

“Witnesses,” Faye said. “I need two.”

“Dad. And Mrs. Pruitt, if she’s willing.”

“It’s Miss, and I am,” Aggie said.

“Rémy?” Faye looked past them to the back wall. “There’s room on the line for a third. It’s not required. It’s just nice.”

“No.”

“Rémy,” Nell said quietly.

“I said I’d come and I came. I’m standing here. I’m not putting my name on it.” He kept his eyes on Win as he said it. “You’ve got two. That’s all the law wants.”

Leon turned his head and looked at his son. He did not speak. After a moment he turned back to the counter, and Win understood that the old man had decided to leave it alone. It had cost Rémy something to walk through that door at all. Win made a point of nodding to him. He got nothing in return and had not expected to.

“All right,” Faye said. “I’ve got a long version with a poem and a short version. Nell asked for the short one. Stand there, the two of you. Nell, have you got the rings?”

Nell reached into the pocket of her dress and brought out a folded shop rag. She opened it on the counter.

There were two bands in it. They were plain and narrow, with the edges eased round and no stone, no pattern and no engraving. The metal was a deep warm gold, redder than brass, and she had polished it until the light from the window ran around inside each one.

“They’re bronze,” she said. She said it to him, low, while Faye found her page. “My grandfather bought a bar of it in 1958. Every boat we’ve built has a slice of it screwed to the bulkhead. I cut one slice and turned both of these out of it on the yard lathe. It’s not a gift. I’ve taken eleven dollars of metal off Tuesday’s invoice, so you’ve paid for yours.”

“Eleven dollars.”

“I weighed it.”

He wanted to say that he had seen the bar. He had seen a round of sawn bronze on a windowsill with a hand of cribbage in front of it, and had not asked what it was for. He had the feeling that he was being handed something a good deal larger than eleven dollars, and that she had put a price on it precisely so that he would not be able to say so.

“Do you, Winslow,” Faye read, “take Eleanor to be your lawful wife?”

It was the right word. It was the word in the clause.

“I do.”

“Do you, Eleanor, take Winslow to be your lawful husband?”

“I do.”

“Rings. Him first.”

Nell picked up the larger band. She took his left hand in hers to steady it. Her fingers were warm and dry, with a rough place at the base of the thumb. She slid the ring over his knuckle, where it caught for a moment as a ring ought to, and then it seated.

It fitted exactly.

There was no play in it. It did not pinch. She had never asked him for a size. She had never touched his hand before that morning in the loft, and she had told him then that she already had it. She had looked at him across his own table, on a day when she was angry enough to spit, and had carried the measure of his finger home in her head for three weeks, right to the half size.

He did not know what to do with that. He was used to being the one who had the figures, and he had not known he was being measured.

“Win,” she said under her breath. “Mine.”

He picked up the smaller band. It looked like nothing in his fingers, a curtain ring. He put it on her and it went home the same way, over the knuckle and snug. Her hand was small and square and very strong, and he let go of it a second later than he should have.

“By the authority given me by the State of Maine,” Faye said, “that’s it. You’re married. Mr. Lathrop, you may kiss the bride.”

She had said it out of habit, or perhaps she had not. Her face was perfectly innocent.

Nell held out her right hand.

She held it out as she had in the loft, level and steady. Her chin was up, and there was colour along her cheekbones that had not been there a moment ago.

Win shook it.

It was a good handshake. It was the same grip she had given him over the vellum, and he gave back the same one. The new metal on his other hand was already taking the warmth of his skin. Behind him he heard Rémy let out a breath through his nose, and beside him Aggie made a very small sound, like a woman adding to a list.

“Well,” Faye said. “That’s a first for this counter.”

Leon signed the certificate first. He set his cane against the counter and wrote his whole name with his right hand, slowly, and nobody in the room moved until he finished. Aggie signed under him in her quick secretary’s script. She capped the pen and looked at Win over the top of it. She looked for about two seconds, and he felt read from the top of the page to the bottom.

“Congratulations,” she said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Leon had his cane again. He came around to face Win and put out his hand, and the grip was as hard and brief as it had been over the cribbage board. Win could see the jaw working, and he waited as he had learned to wait in this town.

“Listen,” Leon said.

It was not a greeting. Win had the clear impression that it was an instruction for the year.

“I will, sir.”

The old man held on a moment more, then let go and tipped his head toward the door. Rémy was already through it, with the dog at his heels.

Nell walked Win out as far as the step. The cold made her eyes water, and she wiped them with the back of her wrist without embarrassment.

“Term six says I’m here Fridays,” she said. “But the paper says one household, and I’d rather it started on the same date as the certificate. I’ll be at your house by six tonight. I’ll drive back up in the morning.”

“That’s sound. I’d have asked.”

“I know. I’m saving you the trouble.” She looked at his left hand, and then at her own. “Does it bother you?”

“It fits.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

No lies between them. He had signed that three weeks ago, and it was the one she had underlined.

“It unsettles me that it fits,” he said. “I’m not used to anyone having my measure.”

She considered that. Then she nodded once, as she did when a weld passed, and went back in to her father.
***
He was at his desk on Lathrop Wharf by a quarter past one. Aggie had not asked a single question in ninety-two miles. She had talked about her sister’s knee, the price of heating oil and a tug captain’s retirement party, and it had been a punishing performance.

The two papers were waiting in a folder. He had drafted them himself the week before.

The first was an amendment to the Thibodeau Boat Works note. It suspended all payments, all accrual of interest and all remedies of the lender for twelve months from the date of signing. The balance of $1,876,000 and the three missed payments stood exactly where they were. He read it through once, since he read everything through, and signed it. W. E. Lathrop, President, Lathrop Marine Finance.

The second reinstated purchase order LS-2291 to Vendor 0417. It was for six wheelhouse modules at $400,000 each, $2,400,000 in all, to a revised drawing to be supplied by the vendor. Two were released against hulls 2 and 3 and four were held against the owner’s option. The proceeds were pledged to the note, so it went out under the lender’s hand as well. He signed it with the same pen.

On Monday he had asked the yard whether the Petrel’s own wheelhouse was flat. It was eleven millimetres out on the forward face. Nell had not been surprised.

He crossed out Vendor 0417 in the address block and wrote Thibodeau Boat Works, Skerry Harbor above it by hand. Then he restored the number in the margin, because the accounts system would need it.

“Aggie.”

She came in with her pad.

“These go out by registered mail today. Copies go to the loan file, the purchasing log and the quarterly lender’s report.”

“The quarterly report goes to the board.”

“It does.”

“Your uncle reads the lender’s report, Win. He’s the only one who does.”

“It’s a material change to a note and a seven-figure purchase commitment. It belongs in the report.”

She looked at the two signatures, and at the line beneath each.

“You want them dated today?”

“They were signed today.”

“So they were.” She tucked the folder under her arm. Her eyes went to the bronze on his left hand and rested there. “It’s a busy date, that’s all. I’ll file them.”

It did not occur to him to file them any other way. He did not know another way.
***
Her truck pulled up under the streetlamp on the Western Promenade at ten to six. He had been listening for it since five and went down to the door himself.

The house was brick, four storeys with the cellar, built in 1884 for a Lathrop who had wanted to see his own ships come up the Fore River from his bedroom. It had a slate roof, a bay window on each floor and a front hall with a black and white tile floor. Nell stood on the tiles with a duffel bag over her shoulder and a cardboard tube of drawings under her arm, and looked up the stairwell.

“How many people live here?”

“One. Two, as of this morning.”

“Who cleans it?”

“A Mrs. Ouellette, Tuesdays and Fridays. I keep most of it shut.”

He showed her the kitchen, which was the only room on the ground floor he used. He showed her the dining room, where the chairs were under sheets, and the library, where his grandmother’s reading glasses were still on the arm of her chair because he had not been able to move them. Nell stopped in front of the glasses. She did not say anything about them, and she did not hurry him past.

“There’s soup,” he said in the hall. “Aggie made it. She left it on the back step while I was signing your freeze, with a note that said only Feed her.”

“She’s guessed.”

“I think Aggie guessed at about the moment you put twenty dollars on the counter. She hasn’t said so, and I haven’t lied to her.”

“Then leave it there.” Nell shifted the duffel. “I’ll have the soup. I didn’t stop on the road.”

They ate it at the kitchen table, across from each other. She asked what the freeze said, word for word, and he told her. She asked when the purchase order would reach the yard, and he said Monday, registered. She took a spoonful and looked at him over it.

“You crossed out the vendor number.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I didn’t. I was hoping.” She very nearly smiled, and he found that he was waiting to see whether she would. She looked down at her bowl instead. “Show me where I sleep. I’ve been up since four.”

He carried the drawing tube. She would not give up the duffel.

The stairs narrowed above the second floor. The third-floor landing was small and square, with a round window over the street and two doors facing each other across six feet of worn carpet.

“That’s mine,” he said, of the left. He opened the right. “This was her sewing room. It has the best light in the house, north and east. I had a bed brought up.”

Nell went in and stood still.

There was a bed, made up that morning, and a chest of drawers. Under the north window stood a drafting table. It was a real one, oak, six feet long, with a tilting top gone dark with a century of sleeves, and a brass lamp on an arm. Along the back edge of it sat a row of small lead weights. Each was shaped like a sleeping bird with a bent wire hook for a beak.

She put the duffel down. She walked over and picked one up, and weighed it in her palm exactly as her father had weighed the bronze.

“These are lofting ducks.”

“Is that what they’re called? She called them her whales.”

“You hold a batten down with them when you’re fairing a curve. Nobody’s made them like this in fifty years.” She counted along the row with one finger. “Nine. Win, why did your grandmother have a loftsman’s table in her sewing room?”

“It came out of the yard’s drawing office when they went over to computers. She wouldn’t let them scrap it. She said somebody would want it.” He heard that as he said it, and so, from her face, did she. “She did sew on it. I never saw her draw.”

Nell set the duck back in its place in the row and squared it with the others.

“I’ll want it,” she said.

“It’s yours. For the year,” he added, since it was on paper.

“For the year.”

She turned around. The lamp was behind her and the green dress was creased from the truck. A strand had come loose from her braid and lay against her neck. He was standing in her doorway with a cardboard tube in his hands. He was aware of her bed and the six feet of carpet behind him. He was aware that he had married her that morning with a handshake, and that he could still feel the shape of her hand.

He held out the tube. She took it.

“There’s a bathroom at the end of the landing. It’s yours. Mine is through my room. I leave at six-thirty on weekdays.”

“I’ll be gone before you’re up tomorrow. I’ll be back Sunday night.”

“I’ll leave the hall light on.”

“All right.” She rested her hand on the edge of the door. The bronze band caught the lamp. “Good night, Win.”

“Good night, Nell.”

He stepped back onto the landing. He crossed it and went into his own room and stood with his hand on the knob.

Her door closed, quietly, and the latch clicked. He closed his own.
***