Chapter One
Boat Day
Six mornings a week, weather permitting and sometimes weather not, the island's day began twice. Once when the sun came up, and once, more importantly, when the boat came in.
Cora Fenn was on the wharf for the second sunrise, as her mother had been, and her grandmother, and her great grandmother, who had taken over the post office in 1953 with a baby on her hip and a government manual she famously used to level the woodstove. The wind was out of the northwest and had teeth in it. The bay was pewter, the spruce black, and around the point, right on her time, came the Harriet Q, white and stubby and seventy years old, throwing spray off her shoulder like a woman shrugging off an opinion.
Cora watched her come the way you watch a thing you have seen ten thousand times and cannot imagine not seeing. The boat was not beautiful, except entirely. She had been built in the island's own yard in 1956, oak and cedar, by men whose names were on the church hall's plaque, and she had carried everything the island had needed or grieved or celebrated since: mail and flour, vaccines in coolers, wedding dresses in garment bags, lobster to market and islanders to hospital, four generations of schoolchildren to the mainland fair, and home again every one.
