Andrew Dugan shrugged. “She’s only a boat, and she’s your boat. Do what you want.” To his brother he said: “I’m taking a walk on the Embarcadero. I’ll grab the ferry back.” He turned to Mitch. “When you remember the eccentric son of a bitch who did the work, look at your brass plaque and remember something else.”

Mitch looked at him silently.

“Remember, there are five years between those dates,” said Dugan. He moved toward the glass door, turned, and tried a grin. It was ghastly. “Try to keep her off the rocks.”

The event, even with Andrew Dugan gone, seemed to call for more than a farewell handshake with his brother. They sat at a table with the John Dugans in the Buena Vista Cafe on the edge of North Beach. The bar was jammed with tourists, homosexuals, airline stewardesses in mufti, long-haired brokers, and advertising men. Everyone was drinking Irish coffee.

Mitch asked Dugan if Andrew would be doing the carpentry he planned to have done on the boat.

“I don’t think he will.” He nodded at the bar. A slim, bare-chested youth in a leather vest, wearing a rigging-knife, was arguing with the Buena Vista’s uniformed rent-a-cop. The boy could be Tony, drifting, when they left...

John Dugan suggested that the kid at the bar was more like what he would get, that even apprentices were hard to come by. “You teach them the difference between a reaming iron and a caulking mallet, next thing, they’ve taken off. Build their own boats, sometimes. Where they sail, God knows.”

“They run pot,” his wife said decisively. “Pot and dope. Anyway, you’ll never get Andrew. He won’t want to face her again. He’s ashamed.”

She told them that the boat had saved their lives. She and her husband had flown one summer to meet Andrew in Anchorage, Alaska, to sail down the coast on Lorelei. Off the cliffs of Oregon, the barometer had begun to drop.

“He waited too long,” said John Dugan. “We tried to get into Tillamook, but it’s breaking across the bar at Cape Meares Light. We’re hove to under jib and mizzen and the wheel’s lashed and the wind’s maybe seventy knots and the seas are maybe forty feet. Three nights! Boat saved our lives!”

“How could he sell her?” Mitch wondered.

Dugan looked at him strangely. “He’d have to tell you about that. I’ll say this, but you know it already: you’re getting her awful cheap.”

“Yes. Why?”