Etta Calder worked with the patience of someone who had wrenched a life into even planes and told it to sit still. The plane sang over the pine like a small, satisfied thing; wood shavings fell in pale spirals at her feet and collected in the low gutter where she kept last season's nails. Her hands found the grain, moved along it, coaxed away ridges with a sequence of pushes and pulls she did without thinking. Rhythm kept the room honest: one stroke, two; check the edge, set the plane; listen for the tiny, bracing noise that meant the fiber had accepted the shave.
The workshop smelled of tar, lemon oil and a faint tang of seaweed where the wind had pushed in through the open door. Outside, the tide-clock tower on the quay drummed three irregular knocks and a gull answered with a sound like a rusty hinge. The gull had been at the window since dawn, the same jay of the harbor—brash and insolent—and it watched Etta as if she might be tempted to share her lunch. She would have, if she hadn't known the gull would then sit on her best mallet and refuse to leave until twilight.
She tightened a clamp and hefted a plank onto the bench, testing its flex. A man could tell all sorts of stories from a plank; how it had grown, whether it had been wind-pressed or sunbarred, whether the storm last autumn had broken it half and let the salt in where it should not go. Etta listened to those stories by touch. The plank thinned under her fingers; she marked it, not with chalk but with a small, bright notch in the kerf of the wood. The notch would be a compass only she could read.
The bell at the gate clattered—honest, small. Jonah was always late enough to be forgiven by virtue of surprise. He appeared in the doorway with a coil of rope over one shoulder, sea-salt crusting the cuffs of his jacket like a badly kept talisman. He grinned as if he'd been given a secret and couldn't help but share it. "You'd think the gull would return my smile," he said, dropping the rope with a flourish. "It took my hat in the market and now considers itself my fashion adviser."
Etta snorted without looking up. "Tell it to submit a bill," she said. Her hands held a rasp and kept them moving. Jonah's grin softened; he had the kind of face that warmed when you asked it to. He moved like someone who trusted his feet in places other people found slippery. "You want me to check that curve, or keep the gull company?" he asked, voice loud enough to bother the gull into a jump and a sulky retreat.