My Partner Changed The Lock Before The Fleet Came In

The new lock was bright enough to catch the gray light off Resurrection Bay. My key went halfway in and stopped.

Behind me, rain clicked against the steel deck of the Mercy Bell, the floating workshop my husband had left me. Three brass washers hung from a cord beside the door. I tapped them twice, then once. That had always been our way of saying someone was outside with full hands.

It was a wet November morning in Seward, Alaska. My gloves were already soaked.

This time, Beckett looked through the window and kept his hands in his pockets.

“Shop meeting,” he said through the glass. “You missed it.”

“You didn't invite me.”

“I needed to make some hard choices.”

I was forty-nine, a Lebanese American woman with brown skin, a broad nose, and dark curls going silver at my temples. My coveralls had a patch on one knee and glue on both cuffs. I repaired commercial-diving drysuits, and I could find a pinhole by listening through a length of tubing while a suit held low test pressure.

Beckett could sell a repair before I found the leak. That was why I had taken him into business.

Beckett was forty-three, a white man with sandy hair, pale blue eyes, and a neat beard that never seemed to collect shop dust.

He opened the door just far enough to pass out a grocery bag.

“Your things.”

My lunch, my spare socks, and a picture of Paul lay inside. Paul's face had been pressed against the lid of my soup jar.

“What are you doing?”

“You're grieving. Orders are backing up. Somebody had to take charge.”

Paul had been dead fourteen months. Beckett had used that word, grieving, whenever I questioned a bill.

“Taking charge doesn't mean locking out your equal partner.”

“We'll settle your share. The shop stays here.”

“Whose shop?”

He smiled, almost kindly.

“Myrna. We built the business on this barge. Paul put it into the partnership.”

I looked past his shoulder. My pressure-testing chamber stood against the far wall. Paul had bought the steel hull before we married. I had bought the chamber with money from twelve years of shore work. Neither purchase had been made with partnership funds.

“Get the original inventory,” I said.

“I've got the current one.”

“Those aren't the same thing.”

His smile thinned.

Down the float, a man pushed a cart carrying two folded orange suits. A second man followed with a black gear bag. The winter inspection rush had started. Divers needed working gear before their boats went back to tending moorings and checking hulls in colder water.

Beckett stepped onto the deck and pulled the door shut behind him.

“Take a few days,” he told me. “Please don't make this ugly in front of customers.”

The first man was Owen Vale, who managed gear for a small workboat crew.

“Morning, Myrna. We brought the wrist seal you wanted to match.”

“Morning, Owen. There's been a problem with access.”

Beckett reached for the cart.

“We're handling it. Myrna is moving into a consulting role.”

“Am I?” I asked.

Owen kept both hands on the cart.

“We have inspections Monday. She knows which valve sticks.”

Beckett's jaw worked. He hated that. Any small thing I knew by touch or sound seemed to land on him like an insult.

“A valve is a valve,” he said.

I set my grocery bag down.

“No. And nobody should promise you a test today until this gets sorted.”

I didn't tug at the door or make a speech. The chamber had gauges, seals, and a service log. The barge had a berth agreement. Each thing had a record, and records could wait longer than anger.

Inside my truck was a blue folder marked HARBOR. At home, in a steel box, was the signed opening inventory of Bell Sound Suit Repair. One line had taken Paul three tries to type because his ribbon kept slipping.

Hull, chamber, and berth rights excluded. Use by permission only.

I remembered the words. I had checked them before I signed.

At the harbor office, Tessa Kvasnikoff, the harbor operations clerk, looked up from a stack of forms. She was fifty-six, an Alutiiq woman who spoke so little that people often filled the quiet with things they should have kept to themselves.

“New lock?” she asked.

I stared at her.

“He asked yesterday whether a partnership could change the license holder.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That a question wasn't an application.”

She turned to the filing cabinet before I asked for anything.

My phone rang. Owen's name filled the screen.

“I'm not leaving those suits,” he said. “And I've got something you need to see.”

“What?”

“A receipt saying you tested three of ours last Thursday.”

Last Thursday, I had been in Anchorage getting my mother's hearing aids fixed.