Maeve didn't say anything.
"Your grandmother tell you about this?" He tipped his head at the boat.
"Last night. I heard. Through the window."
He nodded slowly. He didn't seem surprised. "Figured."
"Are you selling it?"
"Guy in Findlay's interested. Says he'll come look Sunday. If the engine turns over, maybe fourteen hundred." He put the flashlight beam on the outboard motor, a big black Evinrude furred with old spiderwebs. "Probably should've sold it ten years ago. Never could make myself. Every time I came out here to do it I'd think, he loved this thing. And then I'd think, he loved it more than he loved her, probably. Than Mom. And then I'd go back inside." He switched off the flashlight. "Anyway. It's just sitting here."
She waited. She thought this was the part where he would say it. She had waited for it all day, at the credit union and behind the counter and on the drive home in Gil's nephew's car.
He didn't say it. He stood there with his hands full of the flashlight and the phone and looked at the boat, and the moment went on, and then it was over, and he said, "You get that deposit in?"
"Yeah."
"Good," he said. "That's good."
"It's on the fridge," she said. "The confirmation. I put it on the fridge."
"Okay," he said. "I'll look at it."
She went inside. In the kitchen, the light over the island was still out. She stood in the dark by the refrigerator and looked at the printout she had stuck there that afternoon with the lobster magnet, right in the center, over the top of Kenzie's competition schedule. Your place is confirmed. She left it there and went upstairs.
In the morning, the competition schedule had been moved to the side of the refrigerator, and the printout was still in the center. Whether her father had moved it, or Kenzie, or whether Maeve had just misremembered where she'd put it, she never found out, and she never asked.
***