The Lighthouse Keeper's Summer

I was twenty-four years old the summer I ran away to Maine, and let me state right off that I didn't think of it as running away at the time. I told everyone I was "taking a season off" from cooking, like it was a sabbatical or something fancy. Four years of line work in Churchill kitchens had left me with burns on my forearms, a bad shoulder, and a kind of gray hum in my head that wouldn't shut off. The night I quit, a sous chef threw a sauté pan at the wall and I just stood there watching the butter drip down the tile. Something in me went quiet and never came back on.

So I drove north. That is the entire plan I had. Drive until the city stopped being the answer to every question.

The town I landed in was one of those Maine harbor towns that shows up in calendars. Lobster boats, a white steeple, one general store that sold everything and seemed cheerful about it. I rolled in on a Tuesday in June with two duffel bags and four hundred dollars after gas, and I parked by the water just to sit somewhere that wasn't moving.

That's when I saw the boatyard.

It sat at the end of the harbor road, a long low shed with a sign that said COVE POINT BOATWORKS in flaking gold paint. Out back, half a wooden sloop stood naked in a cradle, ribs exposed like a whale carcass. There was a smaller building next to it with a hand-lettered sign: HELP WANTED. NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED. WILL TRAIN. DON'T APPLY IF YOU CAN'T TAKE ORDERS.

That last line made me laugh out loud in the car. I figured any boss who had to write that down was a boss worth avoiding, but I was broke and the summer was long, so I walked over and knocked on the office door.

A woman answered. She was maybe forty, dark hair pulled back with a pencil stuck through it, wearing a fleece despite the warm day.

"You here about the sign?" she asked.

"Guilty," I said.

She looked me up and down, taking in the kitchen scars probably. "We don't get many walk-ins. Most people around here already have three jobs." She stepped back and waved me in. "I'm Marta. My cousin runs the shop floor. Fair warning, he's not a talker. You'll do most of the conversating in this arrangement."

Inside was a cramped office with a woodstove, two desks, and a wall of photographs of finished boats. Marta handed me a clipboard with an application on it and leaned against a desk while I filled it out.

"Name?" she said, reading over my shoulder even though I'd written it right there.

"Evan. Evan Doyle."

"Last kitchen job?"

"Copper Leaf, in Churchill. Four years."

"So you can stand for ten hours and follow a recipe. That's half the job." She took the clipboard when I was done and squinted at it. "He'll want to meet you, but I should tell you, he'll hire you or he won't inside of five minutes. Don't take it personal either way. Julian just decides things fast and then lives with them for forty years."

"That's very reassuring," I said.

"It's meant to be. Wait here."

She disappeared through a side door and I heard low voices, hers quick and his slower, like a conversation between a hummingbird and a barge. Then she came back and jerked her thumb.

"Come on. He's in the shed."

* * *

The shed was bigger than it looked from outside, and cool, and it smelled like pine shavings and linseed oil. (I'll say now that smell followed me around for the rest of that summer, in a good way.) The half-restored sloop sat at the far end, and under her curve stood the biggest man I'd ever seen up close. He was fifty-six, though I didn't know it yet, broad through the shoulders the way you get from decades of hauling timber, with gray gone to silver at his temples. He was sanding a plank and he did not stop when we walked in.

"Julian," Marta said. "This is Evan. Churchill cook, wants the summer job."

He set down the sandpaper and turned. His eyes did a slow pass over me, head to boots, and it wasn't rude about it. It was the way you'd check a hull for soft spots.

"You ever work wood?" he asked.

"No, sir."

"You faint around epoxy fumes?"

"I don't know. I've never been around them."

"Then you'll find out." He wiped his hands on a rag that had given up being a rag years ago. "Job's simple. You show up at seven, you do what I tell you, you don't touch anything I don't tell you to touch, and you leave at five unless I say otherwise. I pay weekly, cash or check, your pick. Pay's not fancy because the work isn't fancy, but it's honest and it's every week."

"Understood," I said.

"The housing's a bunkroom above the office. Bed, mini fridge, hot plate, space heater. It's small but it's dry. You'd be sharing the bathroom in the office when we're open. You got a car?"

"Yes. It runs, mostly."

"Good, you'll want it. Nearest real grocery store is forty minutes." He picked up the rag again, then seemed to think of something. "You quit cooking or cooking quit you?"

I blinked. Nobody had asked it that way before. "Little of both, I guess."

He nodded like that was an acceptable answer. "Marta handles the paperwork. Any questions?"

I had about forty, but the one that came out was, "Why no experience needed?"

"Because nobody my way of working has experience until I give it to them," he said. "I'd rather teach a person from zero than un-teach them somebody else's shortcuts."

"He's been burned by a helper before," Marta said, grinning. "Twice. Ask him about the nail gun sometime when he's had a beer."

"I will not," Julian said, but there was something at the corner of his mouth that might have been the start of a smile, filed away for later.

Marta clapped her hands. "Well? You want it or not? Because I have payroll to do and a man from the co-op coming at two."

"I want it," I said.

The bunkroom was exactly as advertised, meaning it was a room containing a bed. There was also a window that looked out over the harbor, and I decided on the spot that I could live anywhere with that window. I dropped my bags and lay down on the mattress, which was firm in the way of mattresses nobody has complained about yet, and listened to the water.

Around six there was a knock at the office door below, and Marta's voice came up the stairs. "Evan. Julian's cooking dinner at his place and he says you're coming. That's not an invitation, it's a supply drop. You look like you've been living on gas station food."

"I have," I called back.

"Then get down here."

I followed her along a gravel path behind the boatyard to a small shingled house with a garden gone slightly wild and a row of finished canoes stored under an awning. Julian was at a grill on the back porch, and the smell coming off it made something in my chest hurt, the way real food made of real ingredients always does when you've been eating badly.

"Sit," he said, pointing at a picnic table. "You eat fish?"

"Every way it's been invented."

"Good." He flipped a fillet. "Tell me about the kitchens. I want to know what I'm working with."

So I told him, over grilled fish and corn and beer from a cooler, about the burners and the tickets and the ten-hour shifts and the pan on the wall. He listened the whole way through without interrupting once, which I would learn was just how he did everything, and at the end he said, "So you're fast and you're precise and you burned out. That's not a flaw, that's a fuel problem. We'll find you better fuel."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and he let the nothing sit there like it was a fine thing to have said.

Marta, being Marta, did not let it sit. "He does this," she told me, leaning toward me like she was sharing state secrets. "He says four words and people think they've been to therapy. It's infuriating. I've known him thirty years and I still fall for it."

"I've known you twenty-nine," Julian said.

"And I've carried this operation for all twenty-nine, don't start."

They bickered the way family does, comfortable and pointless, and I sat there in the last of the daylight thinking that maybe I hadn't run away at all. Maybe I'd just driven until I found a place that hadn't gotten the news that I was supposed to be tired.

Julian refilled my plate without asking, which no one had done since my grandmother died, and when I thanked him he just said, "You'll need it. Tomorrow's sanding."

The next morning at seven sharp I found out exactly what that meant, and my arms hated him for a week.

The son showed up on a Tuesday, three weeks in, and he did it the way everything arrived in that town, without any warning. I was in the shop sanding a stem piece when I heard a truck on the gravel, and then a voice outside that was not Marta's and not Julian's.

"Dad. You'll never guess what I drove past on the way in."

I looked up. Julian didn't even turn from the plank he was planing. "If it's the moose again, I've heard it."

"It's always a different moose." The man came through the door then, and I understood where he'd gotten his shoulders. This was a younger, louder copy, maybe thirty, with the same dark hair and none of the patience. He saw me and stopped. "Oh. New person."

"Evan," I said. "I work here."

"Evan's been with us three weeks," Julian said. "He doesn't sand like a farmer."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me," I said, and the son laughed, one short bark, and stuck out his hand. "Nathan. I'm up from