Dutch bawled the weights in lots as the brailer swung, and Ellen wrote them down, and when the last tote was emptied and the scale beam settled, the total stood at fourteen thousand two hundred pounds on the ounce. Anna came up the dock steps with slime on her boots and signed the ticket without reading it, the way she always did, and a young deckhand new to the Sea Wren's crew stared.
"She don't check it?" he said.
"Her pencil don't steal," Anna said, not unkindly. "You could learn something from that, boy." She turned back to Ellen. "How's Peter?"
"Growing like a weed and eating like two of them."
"Twelve's a hungry age. You tell him the Wren's short a deckhand when he's sixteen."
"I'll tell him when he's thirty," Ellen said, and Anna laughed, a short bark, and went back to her boat.
The Wren's crew worked the brailer with the easy rhythm of people who had done it ten thousand times, and Ellen watched through the glass as the last of the sockeye slid glittering into the totes — bright fish, ocean-bright, the color of hammered copper. It had been a clean set, a lucky set, the kind that made a season. Anna stood at the rail counting totes on her fingers like a girl, and when the count matched the ticket she gave Ellen a nod through the window, quick and private, the way one professional acknowledges another. They had worked the same waters, in their different ways, for twenty years. They had been friends since Anna first tied up at Northlight with a borrowed seine and more nerve than sense, and Anna was one of the few people in Kestrel Bay who had sat in Ellen's kitchen the winter after Tom's boat went down and not tried to fill the silence with words. Ellen watched the Sea Wren back away from the float, her wake spreading white across the harbor, and felt the day settle a notch deeper into its groove.
The noon whistle blew at twelve sharp, and ten minutes later Peter came down the dock with a paper sack in one hand and his library book in the other, picking his way between the totes with the practiced step of a boy raised around working boats. He was twelve, all elbows and knees, with Tom's dark hair and Ellen's steady gray eyes, and he set the sack on the corner of her desk like a delivery he was proud to make.
"Peanut butter," he announced. "And an apple. I cut it so it wouldn't brown."
"You cut it with what?"
"The paring knife. Carefully." He pulled the morning's wire tray toward him without being asked and began stacking the tickets alphabetically by boat name, squaring each pile with the edge of his palm. It was a job he had given himself two summers ago, and he performed it with the gravity of a bank clerk. "Sea Wren had a big one," he said. "I saw her come in."
"Fourteen thousand two hundred pounds."
Peter whistled through the gap where his eyetooth had been. "How many cans is that?"
Ellen did the arithmetic the way she always did, out loud, so he could follow it. "Roughly a pound and a quarter of fish to the can, forty-eight cans to the case. Call it near two hundred and forty cases, once it's through the retorts."
"That's a lot of salmon sandwiches."
"That's a lot of everything," Ellen said, and ruffled his hair, and he ducked away from her hand with the dignity of twelve. He ate half her sandwich while she ate the other half, and read to her from his library book between bites, and for twenty minutes the cannery roar went soft around the edges.
He had asked her once, that spring, whether his father had liked the noise. Ellen had told him the truth: Tom had loved it, had said a quiet cannery was a cannery going broke, and had taught her to read the retort gauges by the pitch of their hiss. Peter had nodded and filed it away with all the other things he was collecting about a man he had been seven when he lost. He never asked twice about anything. That was Tom in him, too. When he left he took the empty sack and the apple core, and the tickets stood on her desk in square alphabetical piles, and she thought, not for the first time, that the boy had his father's way of making order out of other people's hurry.
Harold Venn came down the scale house stairs at two with a pink bakery box balanced on one palm, the way he did most afternoons in July, and set it on the break table with a small flourish.
"Doughnuts from the Harbor Cafe," he announced. "Still warm. I told Marge the cannery girls work harder than the fishermen and she threw in an extra dozen."
He was fifty-four, silver-haired and churchgoing, eleven years the manager at Northlight, and he ran the place the way a good mayor runs a small town: he remembered birthdays, he asked after sick mothers, he had signed Bea's birthday card in June along with the whole office, and the men on the dock would have run through a wall for him.
That very morning he had spent twenty minutes at her window with an old troller disputing a settlement, going over the ticket line by line until the man was satisfied, and had clapped him on the shoulder and told him to bring his grandson by the office for a look at the big adding machine. It was all of a piece. Whatever else Harold Venn was, he was good at being liked, and Kestrel Bay returned the feeling without ever thinking about it. He stopped at Ellen's desk on his way back up, the way he always did, and asked after Peter's loose tooth and whether the roof had held in last week's blow, and Ellen answered him warmly, because there was no reason not to. He was, as far as Kestrel Bay knew, a good man doing a hard job for an absentee Seattle company that never once sent anyone north to see how the work got done.
Then he picked up the top fish ticket from her tray — a troller's delivery, eight thousand four hundred and thirty pounds of mixed pinks and chum — and frowned at it, and uncapped his pen, and drew a line through her pencil total and wrote above it in ink: 8,210.
"Dock tally slipped a little," he said, recapping the pen. "Dutch confirmed it. No harm done."
He smiled at her, and went up the stairs, and Ellen filed the ticket in its slot. She said nothing. But she had heard Dutch bawl that weight himself, clear as a bell over the machinery noise, and the number in her pencil had been the number Dutch called, and she sat for a moment with her hand resting on the filed ticket before the next boat's horn called her back to the window. It was a small thing. In the rush of July, small things happened all day long. She wrote the corrected figure into the daybook in her square capitals, and the pencil moved on, but some part of her kept the first number the way a tongue keeps returning to a sore tooth.