The brass barometer in Hattie Pelletier's kitchen had fallen a tenth of an inch since breakfast, and she had not argued with that needle since 1976.
She tapped the glass by the window with one fingernail, the way she had every morning of her married life. The needle slid down another hair.
Below her house, the harbor at Gannet Harbor, Maine, lay as flat as a dinner plate. Not a breath of wind. Thirty-one lobster boats sat on their moorings with their bows all pointed the same lazy way.
But a long, slow swell was rolling in past the breakwater. It lifted the boats one after another and set them down again, gentle as a hand on a cradle. There was no wind to make it. It came from somewhere far out, where the wind already was.
Hattie had seen that swell before. She did not like it.
Her grandson Cody came in at seven for coffee and the last of the blueberry muffins. He was twenty-two and in his first season with his own boat, a thirty-six-footer he had bought in March with a loan from the bank and everything he had saved since he was fourteen.
"Glass is falling," Hattie said.
"Forecast says southeast twenty-five, gusts to thirty-five." Cody held up his phone. "We've had worse."
"Forecast was written last night. That swell came in this morning." She pointed out the window. "And there was a ring around the moon. And it's a king tide tonight. High water at eleven-forty, two feet over normal."
Cody kissed her on the forehead. "Gram, I love you. I'm going to haul my last string by the Ledges and be back on my mooring by two."
Hattie had fished for twenty years after her husband Leo died. She had fished his boat, the Ruth E., alone, out of this same harbor. Some of the men had said she wouldn't last a season. She outlasted most of them.
She remembered the Groundhog Day storm of 1976, when she was a young wife. That storm had flooded downtown Bangor. Here, it had come in on a high tide with the wind behind it, and she had stood at this same window and watched three boats drag their moorings across the harbor and onto the ledges by the point.
Afterward, Leo had walked her down to the shore and shown her one of the broken lines.
"A mooring doesn't fail at the chain," he had said. "It fails at the chock, where the rope rubs. Take care of the rub and the rope will take care of you."
She had never forgotten it.
At the co-op wharf, Travis Dunham was on the phone with a buyer in Boston. Travis was thirty-eight and ran the co-op and the harbor both. He was good at it. He had gotten them better prices than they'd had in years.
He hung up when he saw her coming.
"Mrs. Pelletier. What can I do for you?"
"Tell the boys to double their pennants tonight," Hattie said. "And put chafe gear on at the bow chocks. That swell means something big is coming, and it's going to come in on top of a king tide."
Travis smiled. It was not an unkind smile.
"I appreciate it," he said. "But I've got the marine forecast right here. Twenty-five knots. And I've got a holiday order for four thousand pounds going on a truck at five tomorrow morning. I need every man here and rested, not up half the night fooling with their boats."
A couple of the young sternmen on the wharf laughed.
"Gram Pelletier's got her weather knee acting up," one of them said.
Hattie did not laugh with them. She did not get angry, either. She had heard worse on this wharf in 1999.
"All right, Travis," she said. "I'll do my own."
She spent the afternoon in Leo's old shed with a sharp knife, a roll of friction tape, and a length of old green garden hose.
She cut the hose into pieces a foot long and split each one down the side. When Cody came in from hauling at two, she was waiting on the float with a canvas bag.
He looked at the bag. Then he looked at the sky. The wind had started to come in from the southeast. The swell was bigger.
"Gram."
"You can help me or you can watch me," she said. "But I'm doing your boat and mine."
He helped her.
They rowed the skiff out to his mooring. Cody ran a second pennant from the mooring chain to his bow cleat, so there would be two lines doing the work of one. Hattie fitted the split hose over both lines where they passed through the bow chocks and taped it on tight. When the boat pulled hard against the mooring, the rope would rub against hose instead of bronze.
Then they did the Ruth E., which still sat on Leo's old mooring though Hattie had not fished her in eight years.
On the way back in, they passed Travis's boat. It was a beautiful new boat, the nicest in the harbor. Its single nylon pennant ran bare through a bow chock with a sharp edge on it.
Hattie looked at that chock for a long moment as they rowed past.
The wind came at dusk. By ten, it was blowing sixty out of the southeast, and the rain went past Hattie's window sideways. The forecast had been wrong by thirty knots.
The tide came up and up. At eleven, the water was over the co-op wharf. At eleven-twenty, it reached the bottom step of the bait shed.
Hattie stood at the kitchen window with Leo's binoculars and the lights of the harbor jumping in the dark. Cody had come up from his apartment over the store to sit with her. He had stopped looking at his phone an hour ago.
"Gram," he said quietly. "Look at Travis's boat."
She was already looking.
Travis's boat was riding wrong. It swung wide on its mooring, came up short, and swung wide again. Then, as Hattie watched, it swung wide and did not come back.
The pennant had parted. The big new boat was loose and drifting down the harbor in the dark, straight toward Cody's mooring and the ledges by the point beyond it.
Cody had his coat on before she could put down the binoculars.
"The skiff's at the float," he said. "If I can get a line on her."
The wind tore the kitchen door out of his hand and slammed it against the wall, and by the time Hattie turned around, he was gone into the rain.