He went to the pilots' association and asked to be moved to a schedule with more predictable turns, which meant fewer ships and less money, and the association, which had a lot of pilots with children, said yes. On the nights he was still on the bay, Skyler stayed two doors down with Carol Brannigan, Tom's wife, a retired fourth-grade teacher who made enormous dinners and had strong opinions about board games and told Skyler stories about Tom that Tom did not want told. Tom paid up on his fog-night favor many times over. He also had to listen, one Sunday afternoon on the dock, while Grant said out loud in front of witnesses that his daughter was faster at picking crabs than he was. Tom said he had always suspected it.
The refrigerator was still too smooth for magnets. So one Saturday Grant bought a sheet of thin steel at the hardware store in Parole and cut it to size and painted it white and glued it to the side of the cabinet next to the refrigerator, and then he went up into the attic and found the old chart of the bay in the box with June's notebooks, soft and creased and coffee-stained, and put it up with four magnets. Skyler found the sailboat magnet herself, at the bottom of a drawer in her mother's old desk, where it had been for four years. She put it on the chart halfway between Thomas Point and the Bay Bridge.
"Where's that?" he said.
"That's where you are right now," she said. "In my head. When you're gone."
He looked at it for a long time. "I'll call you when I go past it," he said.
He did. Every time.
* * *
On a cold bright afternoon in early November, they took the two halves of the padlock down to the end of the dock.
It was Skyler's idea. She had kept them on her windowsill since the night of the party, next to a shell from the first crab she'd eaten afterward, and one day she came downstairs holding them in her palm and said, "I want to throw these in the creek." So they walked down the lawn together, past the boat shed and the bare hydrangeas, to the end of the dock where the old cleat was, and the letters scratched into the gray wood beside it in a child's careful capitals. June. Skyler crouched down and ran her finger along them the way she always did. Then she stood up, and held the two pieces of brass over the water, and opened her hand.
They hit the creek with two small sounds, one after the other, and were gone. Somewhere down there in the mud, Grant thought, was a blue crab from a birthday party that had gone back to the place it came from. He hoped it had made it. He hoped it was arguing with the others about who got to go into the pot last.