On a Sunday in the middle of March, a gray, mild afternoon with the river quiet and the new pilings for the new C dock going in up the line with a sound like a slow heart, Claudine was sitting on Clementine's aft deck splicing an eye into a new dock line while Ozro dozed in the fighting chair with a blanket over his knees and his cannula in, when she looked up and saw Lawson Tillery standing on the rebuilt fixed pier at the foot of slot 1.
He had come down without anybody seeing him. He wore jeans and an old windbreaker and no sunglasses. He stood at the head of the gangplank with his hands in his pockets and did not step onto it.
"Claudine," he said.
"Lawson."
He looked past her at his father, asleep in the chair, his mouth a little open.
"I'd like to come aboard," Lawson said. "If that's all right."
She set the line down in her lap, the splice half done, the strands of the three-strand nylon tucked and waiting. She looked at him, and at the old man in the chair, and at the brass plate on the piling between them, SLOT 1. Z. PETTAWAY. DEEDED, polished on Thursday because she'd had a feeling.
"It's his boat," she said. "You'll have to ask him."
"He's asleep."
"Then you can wait." She picked up the line again and went back to the splice. "The slot's mine. You can stand on it as long as you want."
He stood there. After a while he sat down on the edge of the pier with his feet hanging over the water, the way he must have sat on the old fish house dock when he was a boy, before any of it, and waited. Claudine tucked the strands, one over and one under, and pulled each one snug, and did not look at him, and did not tell him to leave. The river moved under all of them, brown and slow, coming in on the flood. In the fighting chair the old man breathed in through his nose and out through his lips, slow, like a man blowing out a candle, and did not wake, and she did not know yet whether, when he did, he would say yes.