He had a real job again, restoring a porch in Congdon Park for an owner who paid on time. He went to a meeting on Tuesday nights in a church basement that Ruth had pointedly not asked about. He was trying. Nora was not ready to say more than that. She was not sure she would ever need to.
Far out on the lake, a long dark shape was moving toward the canal, slow and enormous, a thousand-footer riding low with taconite from the Iron Range. As it came closer, the lift bridge sounded its horn, one long and two short, and the ship answered, one long and two short, and the sound rolled out over the water and the town and the hills.
Linnea, who was twenty months old now and could walk, and run, and say forty-one words, which Nora had written down in a new notebook, stood up in the stroller and pointed.
"Ba!" she said. "Ba!"
"That's right," said Tessa. "That's a boat, baby. That's a big boat."
Linnea looked at her mother. She looked at her for a long, considering moment, with the furious chin that was Tessa's own. Then she reached out one hand and grabbed a fistful of Tessa's short hair and held on, like a climber.
"Mama," she said. "Mama, ba."
Tessa did not move. She did not breathe. Then she bent down and put her face against her daughter's head, and her shoulders shook, and Ruth reached over without a word and put a hand on her back and left it there.
Daniel looked away, out at the water. Nora saw his jaw working. After a moment he said, to no one in particular, "She's got a word for everybody now."
"She does," Nora said.
The ship slid into the canal, so close you could have hit it with a stone, its great rust-streaked side going past like a moving wall, the crew small and waving on the deck far above. The bridge sounded again. The ship answered. Linnea let go of her mother's hair, twisted around in the stroller, found Nora's face in the crowd, and held up both arms the way she always had.
"Noni," she said, satisfied, as though she were confirming something she had always known. "Noni. Up."
Nora picked her up. Linnea settled onto her hip, warm and heavy and smelling of sunscreen, and put her thumb in her mouth and her other hand fisted in Nora's shirt, and together they watched the ship go out under the bridge into the harbor, until it was gone, until there was only the wake spreading out across the gold water, and the gulls, and the long, fading echo of the horn.