The Second Chance was a white sailboat, thirty two feet, with a blue canvas cover and a name painted in tidy black letters across the stern. It sat in slip fourteen with its lines coiled neatly on the dock. A man was sitting on the bow with a thermos, a tall gray man in his seventies, in a frayed windbreaker, looking out across the water as if waiting for a train. I stood at the end of the pier with my heart going like a hammer. I had imagined this man for three days. I had imagined every kind of man. I had not imagined him old.
He saw me and stood up slowly, one hand on the rigging. He did not look guilty. He looked relieved, the way a person looks when the doorbell finally rings. “You must be Dale,” he said. “You have the eyes of Anne.” I could not answer. He climbed down onto the dock and held out a hand spotted with age, and I took it without meaning to. “My name is Gil Marsh,” he said. “I am sorry I did not come to the funeral. I did not know. I was in the hospital in Portland until last week. Please. Come aboard and let me explain.”
We sat in the cockpit with the thermos between us, and he poured a paper cup of coffee that I did not drink. Gil told me he had met my wife in 1976, when she was nineteen, working a summer job at the marina snack bar. He was twenty five, a deckhand. They had been in love for exactly one season. Her father, my father in law, had found out and was furious, because Gil was poor, and a boat man, and Black. He drove down to the dock and told Gil to leave her alone, and Gil, who was proud and frightened, left.
A love that is cut off by a father does not always die; sometimes it simply changes its shape, and sails quietly on for fifty years.
I put the cup down. “She never told me,” I said. “She told me about her whole family. She never said a word about you.” Gil nodded slowly. “She married you in 1983,” he said. “She wrote me one letter that spring. She said she had met a good man, a steady man, who made her laugh, and that she was going to be happy, and that she wanted me to be happy too. She asked me not to write back.” He looked out at the water. “I never did. For thirty years.”
I did the arithmetic in my head and did not like what came out. “And then?” I asked. He sighed. “In 2013, she came to the marina. She said she had been walking the docks every summer for ten years, looking at boat names. She had seen the Second Chance on a magazine cover. She said she wanted to know if I was alive. And I was. And we sat right here, and we talked for six hours.” He gave me a rueful smile. “Dale, there was nothing more. I swear it on my life. She came every summer for ten years and she sat in this cockpit and we talked about her children and her garden. She called it her vacation from being sad.”
I did not understand that last part. He explained it gently. After the death of our daughter in 2003, my wife had gone quiet in a way that I had never known how to reach. I had given her flowers and trips and forbearance, and none of it had worked. What worked, it turned out, was a friend who had known her at nineteen, before she was the mother of anyone, before she had anyone to lose. He said she talked about our daughter on that boat. She cried, and he held his tongue, and then she laughed. She had needed a place to put it down.
The photographs on the phone, the ones of the arm around her, were the arm of a friend. Gil showed me the one from the last summer. She was thin by then, in a sun hat, and he had one arm around her shoulders, and both of them were laughing at something out of the frame. I looked at her face and I saw the girl I had married. I saw her happy. It is a strange thing to be jealous of a man for making your wife laugh and then, in the same breath, to be grateful to him from the bottom of your soul.
“Why did she not tell me?” I asked again. Gil took a long time answering. “Because she was ashamed,” he said at last. “Not of me. Of needing me. She thought she should have been able to be well for you. She said you had loved her for forty years and she could not bear to tell you that the love was not enough to heal her.” His voice thickened. “She was wrong about that, Dale. It was enough for everything else. It just was not made for that one thing.”
I sat on that boat for four hours, until the tide turned and the gulls came in to look for scraps. At the end of it, I did something I had not expected. I put out my hand, and I said, “Would you take me out on the water?” He blinked at me. Then he stood up and started the little engine, and we motored out past the breakwater into the open bay, and he let me take the wheel. The sun was low on the water. I scattered half of her ashes off the stern, because she had asked, and Gil took off his cap, and the wind carried her.
In September, he came for supper at our house, and our son Ben, who is thirty five and suspicious of everything, shook his hand like a man who was being introduced to the family doctor. By the end of the evening they were arguing over sailboat design and passing the potatoes. Gil comes every second Sunday now. His doctors say he has a year, maybe two, and neither of us pretends otherwise. We do not talk about it. We drink coffee on the porch and watch the sunset and talk about a woman we both loved.
The boat is mine now. He signed the papers himself, in the hospital, in a hand that shook. He said it was what she would have wanted, and that a Second Chance ought not to be left to rot in a slip. I have spent the summer learning to sail, badly, with Ben beside me and the ghost of Anne in the empty seat. I have not changed the name. I have only added a line beneath it, in small white letters, for anyone who walks the dock. Everybody gets one.