The New Dock Lock Held Fast While My Nursery Lost Heat

The key stopped halfway into the lock. I pulled it out, breathed on it, and tried again.

At four degrees, even small things could seem broken.

Then I saw the brass tag hanging from the new chain. My old lock had been blue. I had painted it so I could find it with my headlamp.

I was Simone Darden, a thirty-six-year-old Black woman with dark brown skin, wide shoulders, and tight curls tucked under a yellow wool cap. I ran a seaweed nursery in a shed off Rockland's working waterfront.

I grew young sugar kelp on thin seed string wound around plastic spools. Farms set that string on their ocean lines. Before that, the plants needed clean seawater, light, and steady care.

Behind the locked gate, six tanks held a winter's work.

Fletcher Ames came out of the shed carrying my coffee mug.

Fletcher was a forty-five-year-old white man with pale eyes, a red windburned face, and sandy hair pressed flat beneath a gray watch cap.

"Your key won't work," he said.

"I noticed."

"We need clear lines. The harbor lease is mine."

He lifted his new key. He had always done that when we argued, even before I bought his share. He liked a piece of metal he could hold better than a page he had signed.

"Open the gate, Fletcher."

"Come back when you've accepted the arrangement. You can still work here. Hourly."

I looked past him. Two white shipping boxes sat beside a hand truck. Neither wore one of my dated stock tags.

"What's in those?"

"My inventory."

The word landed harder than the cold.

Sixty days earlier, he had signed his way out of our operating company. That morning, the first page of our equipment schedule was folded inside my notebook. The whole signed copy was somewhere safer.

I did not tell him where.

A pickup stopped near the gate. Mae Bell, who ran a small kelp farm with her sister, rolled down her window.

"Still on for Friday, Simone?"

Fletcher walked toward her before I could answer.

"Speak to me about orders now. Simone was hired help. We've made a change."

Mae looked at my boots, then at the chain.

"She took our deposit."

"On behalf of the business," he said. "Which stays here."

"Your order's on the books," I told her. "Please don't change your pickup date until you hear from me."

She nodded without smiling and drove away.

I wanted to shout after her that I had built the wash station, counted every spool, and cleaned filters on Christmas morning. Instead, I wrote down the time.

7:18 a.m. Mae present. Fletcher claimed ownership. Access denied.

My fingers shook, but the words stayed neat.

Anika Roy came up the dock carrying a tool bag that bounced against her knee. She was thirty-eight, Indian American, and almost never stood still. Even waiting for a boat, she checked loose cords with her eyes.

"Why are you out here?" she asked.

I pointed at the chain.

She turned toward the shed. "Where's the fan noise?"

Under normal load, the small heat loop hummed through an outside vent. It kept our water at eight degrees Celsius. Kelp liked cold water. Our little plants did not need the water freezing around them.

Fletcher shrugged. "Those heaters were eating money. Ocean plants can take winter."

Anika set her bag down very slowly.

"Your pipes aren't in the ocean."

"I'm not paying you either," he said.

"You already paid for the installation. I'm looking at it."

She stayed on the public side of the gate. She did not reach for a cutter.

"When did you shut the heat off?" I asked.

"Yesterday afternoon."

My remote tank monitor had last sent a reading at six that morning. Four-point-two degrees. I had blamed the weak signal for the missing updates.

"And the router?"

"Unplugged it. No reason you should watch my building."

I pictured the pipe elbows along the north wall. Each had proper insulation under a loose wool cover I knitted in loud colors. Orange, pink, green. The covers caught little leaks before they became big ones. Wet wool went dark where a drop struck.

My grandmother had called that giving trouble a flag.

"Those covers won't save the loop," Anika said quietly.

"I know."

Fletcher went inside and turned the key behind him.

I called our bookkeeper from the truck. Then I called a lawyer whose number had been sitting in my notebook since the buyout.

While her receptionist took my name, Mae sent me an email.

Fletcher had promised her the whole order at noon the next day. He had promised three other farms the same early delivery.

At the bottom of his message, he had added one line.

The stock is ready, and Simone no longer has any say.