The lender on the mortgage was Fiona.
My daughter. Standing on the pier with a camera at her feet and no idea what Verna was talking about.
Because Fiona had never lent anybody eighty-five thousand dollars. But she did have eighty-five thousand dollars, or she had the previous September. It was her mothers life insurance, which I had given her in 2018 because I did not need it and she had two kids headed for college. It had been sitting in an account at the credit union in Peabody with her name on it and Petes name on it, because that is how married people do things.
Pete had moved it. He had drawn up a note that said Fiona was lending the money to me, secured by the boat, and he had signed my name on it, and he had recorded the mortgage with the Coast Guard. The money had gone into an account that paid the lease on his insurance office, which had been behind for a year, which Fiona also did not know.
His plan, as far as anybody could ever work out, was to sell the boat to Quentin, pay the mortgage off to Fiona out of the proceeds so the account looked whole again, and keep the rest. It would have worked if a bank in Salem had not pulled the abstract of title before lending a young man two hundred and ten thousand dollars.
Verna explained all of that on the pier, carefully, because she could see Fiona was about to fall down. The bishop was thirty feet away blessing a dragger. Half of Gloucester was listening.
Pete said I had signed. I said I had not. Verna said the Coast Guard would want to see the original, and that a forged signature on a preferred mortgage was a federal matter, and that she was not going to be the one to decide it, but she was going to be the one to report it.
He had told the whole dock I could not tie a knot, and the only knot that mattered was the one he had tied around my daughters money with my name.
Quentin walked. He was polite about it. He shook my hand and said he was sorry, and I told him he had nothing to be sorry for.
The mortgage was voided in August. The Coast Guard documentation office does not move fast, but it moves, and a mortgage with a forged signature is not a mortgage once the owner swears an affidavit and the handwriting does not match. My signature is on fifty years of fish tickets. There was plenty to compare it to.
Fiona filed for divorce in July. She also filed a complaint with the credit union, and the credit union filed with the state, and Pete is answering for the money in a courtroom in Salem. He has not sold insurance since the fall. I am told he has moved back in with his mother in Peabody.
Fiona and the kids are in my house. She asked me whether I believed she had known. I told her I had watched her drop that camera and that nobody drops a camera on purpose.
The boat is still mine. She is tied up at the same berth. I wash her down every Saturday.
And in October I called Quentin. He is twenty-nine and he has fished since he was a boy and he had been trying to buy a boat because nobody would let him run one. I told him I was not selling. But I told him that a fifty-two-foot steel hull does not like to sit, and that I was seventy-eight with two bad knees, and that if he wanted to run her, I would lease her to him by the season, with my name on the certificate where it has been since 1985.
He took her out in November. I stood on the pier by the ice house and watched her go out past the breakwater with my wifes name on the stern, and I will tell you, I tied the spring line myself before she left. It held.