The Boatyard

She had never once been in the picture. He had never once said more than one word. Between them, they saved a boatyard.

Rosa Hartigan photographed four hundred and eleven plates of food for magazines and was never in a single frame. She came to Linden Cove in a van with a darkroom in the back, rented the old cannery office with the north windows, and has sat in the corner of the Driftwood Diner at six every morning for three months without saying six words to anyone.

Cal Ferrin left Linden Cove at eighteen because his father wouldnt say the boatyard was his. He came back at thirty-eight because his father rang and said one word: knees. Now the two of them stand on a marine railway laid in 1952, hands in their jackets, exactly alike, not looking at each other, while a man from Portland shows the Port Commission a drawing of a marina with a café where the yard used to be.

Rosa stands on the breakwater at low water with a long lens. Cal looks up.

Forty-three photographs hung two inches left of where the level says. A storm, a crane, a troller in the air, and a man on the gravel with his eyes up. A father who finally says it out loud in front of a wall. A dead womans photograph from 1998. A magazine told no, on time. A bylaw in a third cardboard box. A town that votes a hundred and sixty-one to nine. And a Ferrin who has exactly three words, and uses them on a railway at ten past six on Easter morning.

A warm, closed-door love story about stepping into the picture, and the last of the Linden Cove Romances, where the whole Dawes family gathers on the porch one more time for the Fourth of July, and the sign stays.

Fifth and final in the Linden Cove Romances. Each book stands alone with a happy ending.