Castles

The boat was old, but Quin’s uncle had painted it a decade earlier, and since then it had spent little time in the water, so Quin didn’t think it looked all that bad. Quin and Stevie had pulled it out from beneath the back porch of the cottage with a plan of being out on the bay by ten. The back porch, fully screened with a lumpy cement floor, was up on stilts and everything beneath it was forgotten with dust. Piles of red brick, stacks of yellow newspaper, naked brown bottles, and a portable cement mixer in the corner; Quin remembered seeing black-and-white photos of his grandfather and his uncles, then merely boys with Fifties garb and crew cuts, mixing cement on the side of the cottage. The brush—briars, tall grass, and encroaching holly berry bushes—had closed in from the back yard, creating a natural wall around the space beneath the porch, and Quin and Stevie had to fight their way through just to get close.

“If you want to catch any fish, you have to go out earlier than this,” Stevie had said once they pulled the boat free, “either that or go right around dark. We’re not going to catch anything.” Quin started to respond, to snap, but then he thought better of it, and instead he climbed inside the boat to brush away the cobwebs.

The boat had been Quin’s grandfather’s, as had the cottage, and it had been around as long as Quin could remember. It was little more than a dinghy, almost flat bottomed, but his grandfather had taken good care of it, and when Quin was small they would sometimes take it out on the tidal river that snaked through the marsh behind the cottage. And if the day was calm they might take it out upon the bay. Just inside the gut. His grandfather always said you didn’t want to go past the gut, not in a boat like this. It was too small, too unstable. Quin’s grandfather had been tall with a mess of blinding white hair back then. A red face spotted with white stubble, and remarkable blue eyes. They were hesitant eyes, curious, and you could never be sure if he were going to snap at you or tell you a joke. His shoulders had begun to stoop by the time Quin was in high school, and each year after that he grew smaller and smaller. He was dead now, had been for almost five years, and the cottage had sat empty for most of the summer. Quin’s wife, Sheila, and their small daughters were up there now, sitting at the long table on the back porch—a checkered oilcloth and mismatched chairs—eating pancakes. The sun had been coming in and out from behind the clouds, a chill coming in off the marsh, and Sheila was huddled in a sweater, sipping some tea when he kissed her goodbye.

It had been Quin’s idea to take the boy fishing, to spend some time with him, but Sheila hadn’t argued. It seemed all they did lately was argue—the hinges on a once solid marriage finally pulling free—and more often than not it was about the boy; for the past year and a half he and Quin could not spend more than five minutes at a time together without one of them erupting. Stevie was almost thirteen. He would torment his little sisters or argue with Quin, and each year, as Quin grew older, his fuse had grown shorter. And regardless of the fact that Quin had never laid a hand on him, more often than not, Sheila would be jumping in to protect him, argue his side, blame Quin. And Quin didn’t really expect anything less; she was his mother.

It was a short walk down to the marsh, all downhill, and Quin figured carrying the boat wouldn’t be much of a problem, but Stevie was having a hard time, his body pressed against the back of the boat, his feet taking small, hurried...