The gatehouse at Sachuest Yacht Haven had been built to look like a lighthouse keeper's cottage, with white cedar shingles and a little copper cupola that had been aged green on purpose with some chemical the architect had flown in from Maine, and every morning at a quarter to seven Silvino Arruda unlocked it and stood for a moment in the doorway breathing in the smell of new paint and old harbor, and thought about how much the cupola had cost.
He knew the number.
Everybody who had worked at the marina before the sale knew the number, because it had been printed in the Newport Daily News, along with the rest of the renovation budget, and the number for the cupola alone was more than he had made in the whole of 2019.
Before the sale, the gatehouse had been a fiberglass booth with a space heater and a coffee can of pens. Before the sale, the marina had been called Sachuest Wharf, and a man named Tiago Faria had run the fuel dock and the gate and the pump-out boat and most other things, and the crew from the big yachts had come and gone through whichever gate was closest to wherever they were carrying something. Then a hospitality group from Boston had bought the whole waterfront parcel, all eleven acres and the three long concrete piers that could take boats up to ninety meters, and now there was a guest lounge with a fireplace and Italian leather chairs, and there was a concierge desk inside the lounge staffed by young people in navy blazers, and there was the gatehouse with its green cupola, and there was the Guest Experience Standard, which was a laminated card Silvino kept in his shirt pocket because they had told him to keep it there.
The fourth bullet point on the card said: Crew, contractors, and vendors are to be directed courteously to the Service Entrance. The main gate and lounge are reserved for owners, guests, and accompanied visitors.
He had been written up under the fourth bullet point two weeks ago. A deckhand off one of the Dutch boats had come through the main gate at nine in the morning carrying a cooler of fish on his shoulder, dripping, and walked straight through the lounge because it was the shortest way to the parking lot, and an owner's wife who was sitting by the fireplace with her coffee had seen him and said something to somebody, and by noon there was an email from Boston with the subject line Guest Experience Incident, and by four o'clock Tiago had called Silvino into the office behind the fuel dock and closed the door.
"I know," Tiago had said, before Silvino could say anything. "I know, I know. You were in the head. It was nine seconds. I know."
"I wasn't in the head. I was out on B dock with the electrician."
"It doesn't matter where you were. It's your gate." Tiago was fifty-four and had gone gray all at once in the year of the sale, and he rubbed his face with both hands when he was unhappy, which was most of the time now. "They're counting, Silvy. They have a sheet. It's a points thing. You get three on the sheet, it goes to HR in Boston, and HR in Boston doesn't know you from a hole in the ground."