Page 13 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

Most of them just need sistering. People too, probably, though I'm the wrong man to ask. In the back stair there's a doorframe where some family carved their children's heights from 1911 to 1934, Edwin, Margaret, Little Tom, and when we redid that wall I built the frame out around the marks rather than sand them, because a house like this doesn't belong to whoever holds the deed. It belongs to everyone it has ever held.

You're a custodian or you're a vandal. There's no third job.

By six, I've got black tea going in the mug with the chipped rim, the one Hollis has tried to throw out four times, and I'm out on the cliff path with Oren Pike, who manages the grounds and has opinions about the sea the way other men have grudges.

"Lost another eight inches off the point since March." He toes the survey stake, gray braid whipping in the wind off the water. "Bluff's honeycombing under the old boathouse. You can hear it in a storm now. Talks to itself."

"How long?"

"With rock armor and drainage? Decades. If we keep pretending it's fine?" He shrugs at the horizon. "The sea's patient, Shaw. It's got nothing but time and appetite. You want the real survey, you know who does the real survey."

I do know.

That's the problem, and Oren knows it's the problem, which is why he says it to the horizon instead of my face, and why I answer the part he didn't ask.

"The county's coastal report comes out in the fall."

"The county measures from a desk." He heads for the equipment shed, delivering the rest over his shoulder. "Your sister measures from a boat. But sure. Wait for the desk."

By half past six, I'm at the loading door reviewing a lumber delivery with Lena Flores, who runs this estate's books, calendar, and better judgment, and who is currently running a finger down the invoice like it owes her money.

"They shorted the copper nails again."

"Third time."

"I'll make the call. It'll be a warm conversation."

She flips the clipboard shut and gives me the look, the one over the top of her glasses that she's been giving me since she worked for my grandfather's crew.

"The Hendricks wedding checked out of the cottages yesterday. Housekeeping's on at eight, so whatever you're about to say?—"

"Already walked them."

"Beckett."

"Cottage three has a slow drain. Left a note."

"You left a note." Lena removes her glasses, which is how I know I'm getting the whole sermon. "For the maintenance man. Whose entire job. Is the drains."

"I was passing."

"You're always passing. You pass by everything on this property twice before the people paid to handle it get their boots on." She hooks the glasses back on and mutters something in Spanish that I've never asked her to translate because tone is a language too. The tone says stubborn dead man walking.

The kitchen smells like bacon when I come in, which means my grandmother has let herself in again with her own key, the one I gave her for emergencies, a category she interprets to include breakfast. Mara Shaw is eighty-one years old, four foot eleven in her boots, and currently laying strips in my skillet with the cane hooked over her forearm like a duelist between rounds.

"Sit," she says, without turning around. Shaw women don't need to turn around. "You've been on that roof since five."

"Flashing was shot."

"Uh huh. And the boiler, and the beams, and the cottages, and I'll bet my good hip you signed for the lumber too." She sets a plate in front of me, eggs, bacon, toast cut on the diagonalbecause in her kitchen there are standards, and lowers herself into the chair across from mine to watch me eat it, which is its own kind of supervision. "Three employees, Beckett. You did the morning work of three separate employees before any of them woke up. Again."

"It needed doing."

"Everything needs doing. That's not a reason, that's a hiding spot."

She loads her toast with an amount of jam her doctor has specifically legislated against.

"You know what a man who does everyone's job is telling everyone? That he doesn't trust a living soul to hold anything without dropping it. Nice message to wake up to, don't you think? Very warm. Very community-minded."