Chapter 11
It took the four of us nearly two weeks to get the dory back into shape.
Granddad Angus cut the boards with his crosscut saw and Warren used a sheet of plastic and three large steam kettles to make the wood soft enough to bend. After the patching was finished, Dulsie banged in nails while I smoothed the joints with a wood plane. Actually, I tried to smooth the joints, but Dulsie ended up doing that too.
“You make a pretty good carpenter for a girl,” I told her.
“Being a good carpenter doesn’t have a thing to do with being a girl or a boy,” Granddad Angus told me. “You ought to know better than that.”
We sealed the joints with goop that smelled a little like the wrong end of a dead moose. Then we painted the dory, which Dulsie liked best of all. To finish it off, we used brushes for the outside and dumped a gallon of red marine paint into the inside and sloshed it around with a mop that Mom might miss someday.
Afterwards, Dulsie and I sat on the wharf and looked out at the harbour.
We watched the waves rolling in and slipping away.
“The ocean is always waving goodbye, isn’t it?” Dulsie asked.
“It might be saying hello,” I pointed out.
“Might be.”
We looked at the water some more.
“Speaking of progress,” I said. “I got two more emails. One of them came all the way from Vancouver.”
“I phoned the Chronicle Herald in Halifax,” Dulsie said. “I told them I’d seen the sea monster last week.”
“What did they say?” I asked.
“They’re going to pass the story on to a reporter who might travel down here to look into it.”
“Do you think they’ll really send somebody?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” Dulsie said. “I know a ‘we’ll see’ when I hear it.”
“You never know,” I said. “A ‘we’ll see’ can always develop into a ‘let me think about it,’ which might evolve into a fully grown ‘why the heck not?’”
Dulsie giggled at that.
“Keep up the good work,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “My dad’s awfully worried about his phone bill.”
“Tell him he can pay his phone bill with the money he makes giving tourists dory rides.”
“Maybe so,” she said. “But what if this doesn’t work? What if you and your grandfather make this sea monster and your mother still wants to leave?”
“It’ll work,” I said.
It had to work.
We watched the water some more. A seagull flew overhead and dropped something on my t-shirt. Something that smelled bad.
“Eew,” I said, trying to wipe it off.
“Don’t do that,” Dulsie said. “Mom always said that if a seagull does his business on you it’s good luck.”
I thought about that.
“It sounds stupid to me,” I finally decided.
“It’s just something they say, is all,” Dulsie said.
“Why do you suppose they say that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dulsie said. “Maybe they just say it so you won’t feel so bad about getting turded on by a seagull.”
Then she laughed.
I had to laugh along with her.
I knew that if I did have to go I would miss Dulsie and I knew that Dulsie would miss me. Right now, we were just happy to sit there by the harbour and laugh at each other while the waves kept on washing ashore.
If those waves were saying hello or goodbye, neither of us really cared to notice.