The oldest of the three men in work jackets set the tarp down on my kitchen table, and just as Lorraine reached for her fur coat, Patrick said, Aunt Lorraine, before you go, Dad left something with these men, he said you especially should see it.
Lorraine, who came to her own brothers funeral in a fur coat, had just toasted my Joe by saying he never got off that boat and left me with nothing but a leaky house and some traps, and that at least now I could sell it all.
The old man unwrapped the tarp. Underneath was a strongbox, and a folded stack of papers, and on top, Joes old captains cap.
He told the room who they were. For forty years, Joe fixed the engine of every boat in that harbor for free, never once sent a bill, pulled men off the water in weather that would have drowned anybody else. And the lobstermen of Portland never forgot it.
When Joe got sick, the harbor co-op quietly voted to buy shares in Joes name, year after year, as thanks, and put the papers in that strongbox for the day he was gone. The papers showed that Joe, the man Lorraine said left me nothing, held a stake in the co-op that would provide for me the rest of my life.
Lorraine said forty years on the water left me with nothing. Forty years of a good man fixing his neighbors engines for free left me the devotion of a whole harbor.
And there was one more thing under the tarp. Joes first lobster boat, the little one he started with, which the harbor men had secretly bought back and spent a year restoring, to give to me, with my name freshly painted on the stern. The Rosie-and-Joe.
Lorraine, in her fur coat, set her car keys down and sat back down.
I did not need the strongbox to know what Joe left me. But I will not pretend the harbor men did not break my heart wide open with that boat. My Joe fixed everybody for free for forty years. In the end, the whole harbor fixed things for his widow. That is what he really left me. Everything.