The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp

too. Most of them are nailsick.” Noel comes around to see. He fingers the hole where the nail has been reset so many times the wood around it has worn out. “They won’t hold again,” Bridge says. “Does he want the nailsick ones replaced?”
    â€œThat’s what he said.”
    â€œAlright then.”
    Noel thinks of the money. What Honey Lyons has offered him for this one job is more than he’ll turn in a year. He grips for the stool behind him and leans against it. He watches his granddaughter as she works. She pushes her hair from her eyes, her face oiled by sweat, lacquered in the dusty light cast through the windows, and he remembers back to the first time he held her, the day she was born, he remembers her soft ridged skull in the palm of his hand, and even then, he had had the sense it was the whole of his life he was holding, not in pieces or fractured notions, but all of it, in her all of it, and he had felt a stunning joy, and at the same time, a sober, chilling sense of his own age.
    She is grown now, and he loves her the way he used to love the sea. His life is measured by her. Sometimes as he watches her work over a busted hull in one corner of the shop, he will remember the places he has been, and his heart will ache for the wandering. He yarns with her as they work. Every so often, he will glance up and see her face, as fragile and rare as those objects he brought back with him from his voyages: the pelican feet and the ivory mussel shells, the fishing line strung out of mother-of-pearl.
    He has taught her all the knots: the clove hitch and the monkey’s fist, the shroud knot and the Turk’s head. From the time she could walk she has helped him in the shop. He has taught her how to use beeswax to bind frayed strands of thread, to caulk a seam and wield an adze. He has taught her how to push her weight just enough into the saw to make a clean, swift cut, how to force a broadax to shape timbers, how to steam oak ribs and soak wood in water until it bends.
    Before the causeway was built across the tidal flat between Gooseberry Neck and the mainland, he took her seafowling on the bar, and they would wait there together, the old man and the child, crouched in the rocks, their shadows crouched behind them, their boots dug to the shins in cold wet sand.
    He has taught her how to bait a hook and grease a trap, how to stalk and hunt and kill, how to clean, oil, load, cock, point, and shoot a gun. He could tell from the first time he took her down to practice shoot in the gravel pit that she had a knack for cold metal. She had that certain kind of ruthlessness it takes to pull the trigger over and over again, without emotion, without rage or cruelty, desire or greed. She was not like her brother, Luce. She did not have his hotheadedness. From the time she was a mite, she seemed to understand that killing, in its purest form, is an empty-eyed passionless art.
    When she was still young, Noel bought a small gun for her off Samuel Browne, a single-shot .410. Once, when she had left a splinter of air between her shoulder and the butt, the recoil hit back into her chest and chipped off a bit of her collarbone. Another time, she held up the gun, and as she fired, the comb slapped hard against her cheek and bruised the bone. When she was older and he was teaching her on his gun—a double-barreled twelve gauge—she pulled both triggers and the shock of the blast sent her ass-over-teakettle into a pile of shale. She got up again, brushed herself off, and said nothing of it. That was just her way.
    Once, he had believed that what he taught her, what he had to give, would be enough.
    He knows that the world is changing. Bridge reads him snips from the newspapers, and he has heard stories of men who have cut their fortunes overnight. His old friend Rui has made a small but tidy bundle for himself trading in the stock market. A little money is a little means. A little freedom.
    Money is