Swing Like You Mean It

The chain of my mother's cradle was wound twice around my fist.

It was July twelfth, four weeks after the bottle bounced, and the crew of the Sea Lantern had refused to take her out of the harbor until she was christened properly. Forty-one years of Ozzie's superstition had turned into a union position. I had not argued.

Some of the rest is already public record.

Trevor signed a consent judgment in the second week of July. Every dollar of the six point four million went back, along with the consulting fees behind it. Every office he held was gone by the end of the month, and for seven years he may not serve as an officer of any company that owns a ship, a dock or a payroll. Neil Baxendale surrendered his license and spent a day on the stand explaining the seal token. Dockside Ventures was dissolved. Kaylee sat through four interviews with Miriam's auditors and a state investigator and answered every question, including the ones nobody would have caught her lying about.

The deed of gift never vested. My father had written the condition carefully. Eighteen percent of a company and a shared voice on its future came with a single condition: no breach of trust. Trevor had breached it on a Thursday night, into a phone.

Now it was July twelfth, ten years to the day.

I climbed onto Berth Nine in the gray coat. The velvet rope was gone. Two hundred folding chairs faced the hull, and every one was taken by somebody who worked for us. Lionel Ashby sat on the platform, and beside him stood the empty chair with the card that had said HOLD. He had kept it since the day of the christening. He handed it to me without a word, and I set it face down on the seat.

At the top of the gangway hung the ship's new bell. Ozzie had poured it himself at the yard foundry the week before. Brass in it, and one small palm-wide slab of old plaque, melted down as my father had asked in his own hand. The bell had come out of the mold flawless.

Far back, past the last row, Trevor, in a rain jacket, stood at the yard fence, on the public side of the wire. He raised one flat hand and lowered it. I nodded once. He was the first to turn away.

Ozzie stepped beside me.

"Nine years old," he said, "and you tapped it twice, polite as church. Your father hollered from the dock."

I remembered. My father, in his shirtsleeves, cupping his hands. Don't tap it, Tess. Swing like you mean to stay afloat.

I drew back.

The bottle met the bow with a crack that rang off the pier, and the champagne burst white down three hundred feet of steel. Glass rained on the boards. The whole pier shouted, and somebody rang the new bell, and it spoke clear and low across the water.

Ozzie's eyes were wet. "There," he said. "It remembers."

I stood with the broken neck of the bottle in the cradle's mesh, foam running down the hull, and nobody on the pier asked whose names were in the bell.