I stood in the door of a corrugated shed that smelled of two-stroke oil and river water, at 11:40 on a Thursday morning in June, and watched a seventy-one-year-old man in a gray T-shirt work a wrench on an outboard mount, and I did not say anything for close to a minute.

He had a full head of white hair. He had gotten heavy in the shoulders and thin in the arms. He was humming.

“Dad.”

The wrench stopped.

I want to record that he did not jump. He did not drop anything. He set the wrench down on the deck of the boat, deliberately, the way you set down a tool you intend to pick up again, and he put both hands on the gunwale and lowered his head for about four seconds.

Then he said, “You worked the channel yourself?”