The Inn at Crescent Cove: Grumpy at The Gate

Daisy OKeefe heard the band saw before she saw the man running it. The high whine cut across the boatyard, threading through the salt air and the diesel tang of motor oil, and she followed the sound past stacked crab pots and a row of skiffs propped on wooden cradles. Gulls screamed overhead. The morning sun glinted off the harbor, turning the water into a sheet of hammered silver, and somewhere down the dock a halyard clanked against an aluminum mast in a slow, irregular rhythm that sounded almost like breathing.

Colton Wells stood with his back to her, bent over a long sheet of marine plywood balanced across two sawhorses. He wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off at the seam, the red and black plaid faded to something closer to rust. Sawdust caught the light as it fell, drifting in lazy spirals toward the gravel. He did not look up when her shoes crunched across the crushed shell path. He did not turn off the saw. He finished his cut, let the blade spin down to silence, and only then straightened, pushing the safety glasses up onto his forehead.

His eyes were the color of the cove in winter, that flat gray green that gave nothing away.

Daisy stopped three feet from the plywood. The smell of fresh-cut fir stung her nose, mixing with the salt and the distant fish scale stink of the cleaning station at the end of the pier. She had rehearsed this conversation in the car. She had practiced it in the mirror of the inn's powder room, watching her own mouth shape the words while the old pipes groaned behind the wall. None of the rehearsed versions had accounted for the way he looked at her now, the way his jaw set slightly and his shoulders squared as if bracing for weather.

Colton Wells, she thought, had the posture of a man who expected every conversation to cost him something.

"Mr. Wells," she said, and the warmth in her voice felt too loud for the space between them. She softened it. "Colton. Hi. I'm Daisy OKeefe, from the inn on Half Moon Lane. I called last week about the boat."

He pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped his hands, slow, methodical, the kind of motion a person used when they wanted you to know they were not in a hurry for you.

"Crescent Cove Inn," he said. His voice was low, unhurried, with a roughness at the edges that reminded her of the cedar shingles on the old boathouse. "Maeve's place."

"Yes." Daisy folded her hands in front of her to keep them from fidgeting. "My grandmother's. I inherited it. I'm restoring it, and the boat came with the property. The Daisy Mae."

He nodded once, as if confirming something he already knew, and tossed the rag onto the workbench. The Daisy Mae sat in the slip closest to the yard, a twenty-six foot wooden cabin cruiser with a flared bow and a hull the color of weak tea. Moss grew along the waterline. A tarp covered the cockpit, secured with bungee cords that had bleached to the gray of old rope. She had not yet inspected the engine. She had not yet dared.

Colton followed her gaze toward the slip, then looked back at her, and something in his expression shifted. Not softness. Something closer to assessment, the way a person looked at a roof before quoting a price.

"I know the boat," he said.

"Good. That's why I'm here." Daisy took a breath and felt the salt air fill her lungs, cold and metallic. "The Blue Crab Festival is in eight weeks. The town has asked me to bring the Daisy Mae back for the opening day parade. My grandmother used to pilot her every year. I would like to do the same."

The silence that followed was not empty. It had texture, the texture of a man deciding how much of the truth he was willing to hand over. Colton leaned one hip against the workbench and crossed his arms, and she noticed the way the flannel pulled across his shoulders, the way a scar traced a thin white line along his left forearm where the sleeve had been torn away.

"Eight weeks," he said, and the words came out flat.

"Yes."

He looked at the Daisy Mae again, then at the plywood on the sawhorses, then at a stack of invoices held together with a binder clip on the bench beside him. His mouth did something that might have been the beginning of a smile, if smiles were things that hurt.

"Miss OKeefe." He said her name like he was reading it off a contract. "I have a six month waitlist. I have two charter boats, a dragger, and a liveaboard sailboat ahead of the Daisy Mae. I have a daughter who needs picking up at quarter past three, a ex-wife who thinks I work too much, and a busted wrist in a cast that is making every job take twice as long." He lifted his left hand. A blue fiberglass cast encased it from knuckles to mid forearm, scuffed at the edges, signed in silver marker by a child whose handwriting was large and uneven. Willa, Daisy guessed. "I do not have eight weeks."

The band saw sat quiet. A halyard clanked. Somewhere across the yard, a radio played country music too softly to make out the words.

Daisy felt the rehearsed speech collapse inside her chest. She had built it like a presentation, with a clear ask and a projected timeline and a personal touch about her grandmother and the tradition of the festival. Colton Wells had not asked for the presentation. He had handed her a list of reasons, and the list was not a negotiation. It was a closed door.

"I understand that you are busy," she said, and she kept her voice gentle, the way her grandmother had taught her when a guest at the inn was upset about a reservation mix-up. You do not match their energy. You lower the temperature. "I am not asking you to drop everything. I am asking if there is any way to fit the Daisy Mae in. Even a partial restoration. Enough to float her, to make her presentable. I can pay your full rate. I can pay a rush rate. I can help."

Colton's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Help," he repeated, and the word came out skeptical, the single syllable stretched thin.

"Yes. I am not useless. I can sand. I can paint. I can hold things."

"You can hold things," he said, and there was no warmth in it, only the dry observation of a man who had heard a lot of people promise things in boatyards.

Daisy kept her hands folded. She could feel her pulse in her throat, the old familiar flutter that used to precede client calls in Seattle when the budget was wrong and the venue was already booked. She had learned, in twelve years of event planning, that the moment you let the panic show was the moment you lost the room. She breathed in through her nose. She felt the salt and the fir sawdust and the faintest undercurrent of diesel.

"My grandmother kept that boat for forty one years," she said. "She piloted it in the parade every summer. When I was a kid, she let me steer, and I ran us into the breakwater, and she laughed so hard she cried. That boat is not a project to me. It is the only part of her I have left that still floats."

The words hung in the air between them. Colton did not move. He watched her with those flat gray green eyes, and she could not tell if she had reached him or merely confirmed something he had already decided about her, which was that she was a sentimental tourist with more money than sense, here to play innkeeper for a season before she ran back to the city.

He looked away first, toward the Daisy Mae. A cormorant perched on the tarp, regarding the boat with the patient greed of a bird that knew things would eventually rot.

"People do not abandon good boats," he said, and his voice was quieter now, the gravel smoothed down to something almost gentle. "Your grandmother did not abandon that boat. Someone did, somewhere along the line, and now you are here asking me to undo it in eight weeks, which is not enough time, and you are offering to help, which is a thing people say when they do not yet understand what the help would cost them."

"I understand," Daisy said.

"You do not." He said it without cruelty. He said it the way a person described the weather. "The garboards are soft. The stringers are questionable. The fuel tank is original, which means it is rusted through in places you cannot see. The engine is a raw water cooled Volvo that has not been started in three years, and saltwater does not forgive neglect. Eight weeks is not a restoration. Eight weeks is a miracle, and I stopped believing in miracles the year Della left and took the truck."

He stopped. The silence that followed was different. He had said more than he meant to. She could see it in the way his jaw tightened, the way his good hand closed around the edge of the workbench, the way his eyes cut away from hers and settled on a point somewhere past her left shoulder.

Daisy did not fill the silence. She had learned that from her grandmother too. Sometimes the kindest thing you could do for a person who had just surprised themselves was to let the surprise stand.

"I am not asking for a miracle," she said finally, and her voice was steady, the warmth banked low. "I am asking for a conversation. I am asking you to come look at the boat with me. I am asking you to tell me, honestly, what is possible in eight weeks and what is not. And if the answer is that it is not possible, I will accept that. But I would like to hear it while you are looking at the hull, not while you are looking at your waitlist."

Colton studied her. The cormorant shifted on the tarp. The halyard clanked.

Then he reached behind him, pulled a battered thermos from the bench, and unscrewed the cap. The smell of black coffee, burnt at the edges, rose into the salt air. He poured a measure into the cap and drank it in one swallow, watching her over the rim.

"I have a job at the chandlery at ten," he said. "I can come by the inn at two. I will look at the boat. I will tell you what I see. And then you will hear the number, and you will understand why eight weeks is not a thing I can sell you."

"Thank you," Daisy said.

"Do not thank me yet." He set the thermos down. "I have not said yes. I have said I will look. Looking is free. Restoration is not."

She nodded. She did not push. She had learned, in the long years of planning weddings for people who were not sure they wanted to be married, that the moment of agreement was rarely the moment of the ask. It was the moment after, when the air had settled and both parties were tired enough to be honest.

"I will see you at two," she said. "The inn is the white house with the widow's walk, at the end of Half Moon Lane. You cannot miss it. There is a heron that lives on the dock, and the gate sticks, and my neighbor Junie will probably try to feed you scones whether you want them or not."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The ghost of one, perhaps, the kind of expression a person made when they heard a thing that surprised them and were not yet ready to admit it had.

"Your grandmother used to bring me scones," he said. "When I was a kid. After my mom died. She would leave them on the porch in a blue tin."

Daisy felt the air leave her chest. "She never told me that."

"She was not the kind of woman who told." He picked up the rag again, folded it, set it down. "Two o'clock. I will be there."

He turned back to the plywood and pulled the safety glasses down over his eyes, and the band saw screamed to life a moment later, and the conversation was over, or at least the part of it that happened in words was over. Daisy stood for a moment longer, watching the sawdust rise, watching his shoulders move under the flannel, watching the cast on his wrist catch the light.

Then she turned and walked back along the crushed shell path, past the crab pots and the skiffs, past the heron that was not a heron but a scrap of driftwood on a piling, and out to the parking lot where her car sat in the sun, the seats too hot to touch.

She sat for a moment with the door open, letting the heat out, and looked at the cove. The water was a sheet of hammered silver. The Daisy Mae sat in her slip, moss along the waterline, tarp over the cockpit, patient as a held breath.

Eight weeks, Daisy thought. She pressed her palms together between her knees. She could feel the faint sting of fir sawdust on her fingers, though she had not touched the wood. She would need to call Junie. She would need to call Hank at the hardware store. She would need to go home and look at the books and figure out what a miracle cost, and whether she could afford to ask for one.

The band saw screamed on behind her, steady and high, and a cormorant lifted off the tarp and flew low over the water, its shadow trailing behind it like a second bird.

The drive back to the inn took seven minutes if she took the back road past the cemetery, and eleven if she followed the highway along the inlet. She took the back road. The windows were down and the air smelled like cut grass and someone grilling somewhere, and the gravel popped under the tires in a rhythm she remembered from summers she had tried very hard to forget.

Crescent Cove had not changed. That was the strange part. She had expected, somehow, for it to have aged along with her, to have packed on its own years, to show the wear of the time she had been gone. Instead it sat along the water the way it always had, the same clapboard and cedar shake, the same rusted out trucks in the same driveways, the same hand-painted signs for the same churches, the same herons stalking the same tide flats. Only the people were different, and even they were only moved around, like furniture in a room you came back to after a long trip.

She turned onto the lane that led up to the inn and parked in the turnaround. The building squatted on its rise above the cove, three stories of peeling white paint and hopeful gingerbread, the wraparound porch sagging in the middle where the support beam had finally given up. Her grandmother's garden had gone feral in the years since anyone had tended it. The rosebush by the front steps was a thicket. The lavender had marched across the walkway and was colonizing the stairs.

Daisy sat in the car and looked at it for a long moment. Then she got out, climbed the porch, and let herself in.

The parlor smelled like lemon oil and mouse. Afternoon light came in through the west windows and lay in long panels across the floor, picking out the dust that turned and turned in the stillness. She had swept that morning. The dust did not care.

She walked through the ground floor, room by room, the way she did every day when she came back from somewhere. The dining room, with its long table and twelve chairs, the wallpaper a pattern of cabbage roses that had been fashionable when her grandmother was a girl. The kitchen, vast and old, the cast iron stove still working, the new refrigerator humming in the corner like it was trying to prove a point. The library, shelves of paperbacks and old National Geographics, two armchairs with their bellies gone soft, a view of the cove through the bay window. The sun porch, where the wicker had mended and the cushions had faded to the color of weak tea.

Upstairs, the five guest rooms, each with its own small bathroom, each with a name her grandmother had painted over the doors in a careful hand. The Trillium. The Heron. The Lighthouse. The Compass. The Bridal. The Bridal was the one Daisy had slept in as a child when her mother was alive, and it was the one she slept in now, because her grandmother's room at the end of the hall still felt like a room that belonged to someone who might come back.

She climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor, where the ceiling followed the roofline and the eaves came down low on either side. This was the storage level. The trunks were up here, and the boxes of Christmas ornaments, and the old records in their milk crates, and the photographs in their albums with the black pages and the corners that had gone soft with age.

She was not here for any of that. She was here for the photograph she had found the week before, tucked behind the workbench in the boathouse, where she had been sorting nails and came across it by accident.

She had brought it up to the inn because she did not know what else to do with it. It sat now on the dresser in The Bridal, leaning against the mirror, two teenagers sunburnt and grinning on the deck of a fishing boat. She had looked at it that morning before she went down to talk to Colton, and she had looked at it again when she came back, and the looking had not made it any easier to know what to do.

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it now.

The boat was the Daisy Mae. She could tell by the lettering on the bow, faded but legible, the script her grandfather had painted there the summer he brought her home from the dealer in Bellingham. Two teenagers sat on the deck with their legs stretched out in front of them, a thermos between them, a line trailing over the side. The girl had her head on the boy's shoulder. The boy had his cheek against the top of her head. Both of them were laughing at something out of frame, the kind of laugh you only get when you are young and the sun is on you and you do not know yet that the picture is being taken, or you do know and you do not care.

The girl was Maeve. The boy was Colton.

Daisy looked at her grandmother's face, young and unlined, the freckles still dark across the bridge of her nose, and tried to find the woman she had known in the shape of the mouth, the angle of the jaw. The mouth was the same. The eyes were different. Her grandmother's eyes, in the years Daisy had known her, had been careful and kind and very, very tired. The eyes in the photograph were wide open and lit up from the inside, and they were looking at a boy.

Daisy looked at the boy. The hair was longer, the shoulders narrower, the jaw not yet the square thing it had become. But the mouth was the same, the line of the brow was the same, and the way he sat, tipped slightly toward the girl, the shoulder offered, the cheek on her hair, was the same way he had stood that morning with his arms folded and his chin tucked, the same angle of offering and refusal, the same door half open and half shut.

She thought about what he had said. Two o'clock. I will be there.

She thought about what he had not said, which was everything else.

The room was quiet. The cove was quiet. Downstairs, the refrigerator went on with a small click and a hum, and somewhere in the eaves a swallow shifted and the wood creaked under its weight.

Daisy stood up, crossed the room, and took the photograph off the dresser. She turned it over. On the back, in her grandmother's hand, in pencil that had gone soft with age, a date and a name. The date was forty-one years ago, in the summer. The name was Della.

She turned the photograph back over and looked at the girl's face. The hand on the boy's shoulder. The way the fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt.

Della. The name she had read in the divorce filing at the county clerk's office, the name on the mailbox at the edge of the Wells property, the name Junie had said with a careful sort of distance the first afternoon Daisy had asked about Colton. Della, who was no longer here, and who had been here once, and whose name was written on the back of a photograph of a girl who was not her.

Daisy set the photograph back on the dresser. She sat down again on the edge of the bed. She pressed her palms together between her knees, the way she had in the car.

The light in the room had moved. The panels on the floor were longer now, and the dust turned and turned in them, and the swallow in the eaves shifted again, and the wood creaked, and the cove went on being the cove, the way it always had, the way it always would.

The photograph watched her from the dresser, and Daisy let it watch. The room was full of small sounds, the kind a house made when it had been standing for a hundred years and had learned to breathe on its own. She sat for a while. Then she stood. She pulled on her cardigan. She went downstairs, and she left the inn through the front door, and she did not look back at the photograph, and she did not look back at the stair.

The afternoon had settled into that particular quality of Pacific Northwest light that was neither sun nor shadow but a kind of silver, and the air coming off the cove smelled of salt and cedar and the faint sweetness of the woods at low tide. Daisy walked down the lane with her hands in her pockets and her shoulders set in a way that would have told anyone who knew her, which in Crescent Cove was almost everyone, that she had made a decision about something.

The general store sat where it had always sat, on the corner where the lane met the harbor road, a low building with a false front and a screen door that banged in the wind. JUNIES was painted in faded green letters on the window, and beside the door, in a wooden crate, sat the usual summer offering of dahlias and zinnias wrapped in brown paper. The door banged when she pulled it open, and the bell above it gave its small, familiar chime.

Junie was behind the counter, arranging a jar of pickled beets next to a jar of pickled onions. She looked up. She had paint under one fingernail, and her hair was pulled back with a strip of linen, and her eyes behind her round glasses had the particular sharpness of a person who had been waiting to be asked a question and was pleased to be asked it now.

"Well," Junie said. "Look who decided to come up for air."

Daisy set both palms on the counter. The wood was cool and slightly tacky where someone had wiped it with a damp cloth earlier. "Junie. I need everything you have. The white sage. All of it. And the lemon verbena. All of it. And if you have any of the dried rose petals from the garden, those too."

Junie set down the jar she was holding. She took off her glasses, cleaned them on the hem of her apron, and put them back on. "All of it," she said.

"All of it. Every bundle, every jar, every bag. I'm reopening the kitchen at the inn, and I'm doing it whether the town likes it or not, and I'm starting with the tea and the scones and the lemon curd, and I'm not asking permission."

Junie rested her chin on her hand and looked at Daisy over the counter. "You're not asking permission," she repeated, as if tasting the words.

"I'm not asking permission. I'm going to walk back down the lane with as much of it as I can carry, and I'm going to start the kettle, and I'm going to leave the door open, and if people want to come in, they can come in, and if they don't, they don't, but the door is going to be open, Junie. I am done with closed doors."

Junie was quiet for a moment. The screen door banged once in the breeze, then stilled. From the back of the store came the low hum of the cooler, and somewhere in the shelving a mouse or a moth moved with a small papery sound.

"Alright," Junie said. She straightened up. She pushed her glasses up her nose. "Alright, Daisy OKeefe. Sit down on that stool and tell me what you're thinking, and I'll go get the stock, because the white sage is on the top shelf and I'm not letting you climb up there in those city shoes."

Daisy sat on the stool. The wood was smooth and worn in the places where generations of locals had sat to wait for change or to read the posted flyers or to argue about the price of bait. She told Junie, in a voice that was not loud but was very steady, what she was thinking. She told her about the kitchen, and the kettle, and the door, and the way the room had felt when she had stood in it that morning, and the way the light had come in, and the way her grandmother had always said the inn was meant to be a place where people could come in from the cold, and how she had been so afraid of doing it wrong that she had been doing nothing at all.

Junie listened. She did not interrupt. When Daisy finished, Junie nodded once, as if something had been confirmed.

"You know," Junie said, "your grandmother used to say that the worst thing about being afraid of doing something wrong is that you end up doing nothing, and nothing is the only thing that is always wrong."

"She did say that."

"She said a lot of things. Most of them were right. Some of them were about men, and those were also right, but in a different way." Junie came around the counter and took Daisy's hands. Her own hands were cool and dry, and her fingers were stained at the tips with the particular green-blue of copper oxide that came from working with certain patinas. "I'll get the stock. You stay there. And when you leave, you come by the boathouse first, because I have something for you that I've been saving for the right day, and I think this might be the right day."

Daisy nodded. Junie disappeared into the back of the store, and Daisy could hear her moving boxes, and the sound of jars being set on shelves and then taken down again, and the sound of the cooler door opening and closing, and once the sound of Junie laughing to herself, which was a sound Daisy had known since she was seven years old and which had not changed.

When Junie came back she had her arms full. She had, indeed, every bundle of white sage that she carried, and every jar of dried lemon verbena, and the dried rose petals from the garden in a small muslin bag, and a tin of her own blend of loose-leaf tea that she had been mixing for years and giving away only to people she loved. She set all of it on the counter. She added, without comment, a small jar of honey from a beekeeper up the hill, and a paper bag of scone mix from the bakery in the next town, and a card with a drawing of a cove on the front that she had painted herself.

Daisy looked at the pile. "Junie. This is too much."

"It is exactly enough. Now take it and go, before I change my mind and decide I'm a coward too, and we can both sit here and do nothing together, which would be very companionable and also a waste of a perfectly good afternoon."

Daisy stood up. She gathered what she could into her arms. Junie helped her with the rest, and they packed it into a canvas bag that Junie produced from under the counter, the kind of bag that had been used for flour or for mail at some point in its life and had been washed and dried and was ready for another use.

"Junie," Daisy said, from the doorway. "Thank you."

Junie waved a hand. "Go. Before I get sentimental. I have a reputation."

Daisy stepped out into the silver afternoon. The door banged behind her, and the bell chimed, and she stood on the sidewalk for a moment with the bag on her hip and the weight of it against her side, and she looked down the lane toward the inn. From where she stood she could see the chimney, and the cupola, and the windows catching the low light. She could not see the front door from here. She would have to walk to it.

She walked. The lane was quiet. The dahlias in the crate by the store door nodded slightly in the breeze. A gull cried somewhere over the water. A dog barked once, far off, and was quiet. Daisy walked, and the bag was heavy in a way that felt useful, and her shadow stretched long in front of her on the packed dirt of the lane, and she did not stop, and she did not turn around.

When she reached the inn she went in through the front door, and she set the bag on the kitchen counter, and she unpacked it, and she set the kettle on. The kitchen filled with the small domestic sounds of a person preparing to make something, the click of the burner, the rush of water, the soft thud of a jar being set on the counter, the tear of paper. She set out the white sage, and the lemon verbena, and the rose petals, and the tin of Junie's tea, and the honey, and the scone mix. She found a tray, the same one that had been in the cupboard when she arrived, with a chip on one corner and a pattern of small blue flowers around the rim. She set a cup on it, and a saucer, and a spoon.

The kettle began to whisper. Then it began to sing.

Daisy opened the front door. She left it open. The afternoon came in, and the sound of the cove came in, and the smell of the woods at low tide came in, and she stood in the doorway of the inn, in the kitchen, in the silver light, and she waited. She did not know if anyone would come. She did not know if it mattered, in the end, if anyone came. What she knew was that the door was open, and the kettle was on, and she had done the thing she had come to do.

Somewhere up the lane, in a house at the edge of the Wells property, a man who had not slept well the night before set down a coffee cup and looked out his window at the cove, and thought, without quite knowing why, that the light was different today. Somewhere in a converted boathouse, a woman with paint under her fingernails smiled to herself, and went back to work. Somewhere on the porch of a hardware store that was closed for the afternoon, an old man sat in a chair that had been there for thirty years, and looked out at the water, and was, for the moment, content.

The kettle sang. Daisy listened to it. The door was open. The cove went on being the cove.