I pulled into Harbor Point at 7:42 p.m. and saw my boat, my wife's boat, lit up like a chandelier at the end of the community dock. The Sarah Grace was unrecognizable. White fabric draped from the outriggers. Flower garlands wrapped the railings where my tackle boxes used to hang.
LED string lights covered the flybridge. The fighting chair, the chair where I'd hooked a 900-pound blue marlin three summers ago, the chair Sarah sat in on our last trip together, was wrapped in ivory satin with a bow on top like a gift. The transom where Sarah had painted the name was covered by a white panel with K and T in gold calligraphy. My Coast Guard Auxiliary decals, the blue and white racing stripes that identified the Sarah Grace as a vessel in service to the United States Coast Guard, were hidden behind panels of white organza studded with gardenias.
There were 140 people on my dock and my boat. Women in cocktail dresses, men in seersucker suits, a string quartet playing Vivaldi on the foredeck, a bartender mixing drinks in my galley. My galley, where Sarah's coffee mug still sits in the holder above the nav station. Champagne flutes, a three-tiered wedding cake on a table bolted to my deck where the bait prep station should be.
The bride was standing on the flybridge in a white gown, posing for photographs with the sunset behind her. And Vivian Harcourt, mother of the bride, president of the HOA, the woman who'd spent two years trying to take my slip and my livelihood, was standing at the stern in a champagne-colored floor-length dress with diamond earrings and an expression of absolute triumph. She was holding a wireless microphone, preparing to give the first toast. I stood on the shore and watched.
I could hear laughter, clinking glasses, the string quartet playing something I recognized, Pachelbel's Canon, the same piece Sarah and I walked down the aisle to in a chapel in Jacksonville, North Carolina, 23 years ago. I could see the bartender pouring drinks in Sarah's galley, the same galley where she used to make coffee at dawn while we waited for the fish to wake up. I could see strangers leaning against the railing she'd picked out from a catalog, running their hands along the teak she'd sanded, standing on the deck we'd built together while she was still strong enough to hold a power drill. And I could see the transom covered.