Chapter 10 - RestorationMia came home for winter break with a plan, which did not entirely surprise me, given how much of her grandfather's stubbornness she'd inherited.
"I want to help you restore her," she said, over dinner our first night, referring to the Wanderlust with the same possessive tenderness we'd both always used for the boat, as though she were a member of the family who simply happened to float. "Really restore her. Not just clean up whatever mess Dad and Brooke left. I mean actually restore her, the way Grandpa would have wanted."
"That's a bigger project than a winter break, sweetheart."
"I know. That's why I want to start now and keep going through the spring. I looked it up — there's a maritime restoration program at the community college near here, weekend workshops, hands-on stuff. I could take a semester off in the spring, work on her with you, go back in the fall."
I studied my daughter across the table, nineteen years old, her jaw set in that familiar, stubborn line, and felt something in my chest loosen that had been tight for months.
"Your father would say that's an irresponsible use of a semester," I said.
"My father," Mia said flatly, "lost the right to have opinions about responsible boat use several months ago."
I laughed — really laughed, for the first time in what felt like a very long time — and something about the sound of it in that quiet kitchen felt like its own small restoration.
We started the following weekend. Owen connected us with a marine restoration specialist named Gabriel Osei, a soft-spoken man in his sixties who had apprenticed under boatbuilders in his twenties and had spent the decades since quietly restoring wooden vessels up and down the Chesapeake. He walked the length of the Wanderlust with a critical, careful eye, running his hands along seams and joints the way a doctor might examine an old patient.
"She's in good bones," he said finally. "Whoever built her — whoever maintained her all these years — loved her properly. That matters more than people think."
"My father," I said. "Twenty years."
"It shows," Gabriel said. "The neglect is only recent. A season, maybe less. She'll forgive that quickly, if you let her."
Over the following months, Mia and I spent most weekends at the marina, sanding brightwork, refinishing brass, learning — under Gabriel's patient instruction — how to properly seal seams and replace worn caulking. It was slow, physical, unglamorous work, and it became, without either of us quite planning it, a kind of therapy neither a lawyer's office nor a therapist's couch had managed to provide.
We talked while we worked. About her grandfather, about the summers she remembered on the boat as a child, about her own tentative, still-forming feelings toward her father, who called occasionally, awkwardly, from an apartment across town, still working to rebuild something that might eventually resemble a relationship with his daughter, though neither of us was in any hurry to make that easy for him.
"Do you think you'll ever forgive him?" Mia asked one Saturday afternoon, sanding a section of railing with more force than the wood strictly required.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "I think forgiveness and rebuilding trust are two different things, and I'm not sure I owe him either one on any particular timeline. I think I just owe myself the truth, going forward. Whatever I decide to do with him after that is separate."
Mia nodded slowly, seeming to accept that answer as honest rather than unsatisfying, which was, I was learning, often the best any answer to a hard question could hope to be.
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By the time the last coat of varnish went on the Wanderlust's freshly sanded rail, catching the early spring light in a way that made the whole boat seem to glow, I understood that we hadn't just been restoring a boat.
We'd been restoring something in ourselves, one careful, patient layer at a time.
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