Chapter 2: The Dock My Father Built
To understand what that doctor saw on my hands, I have to go back eight days to a dinner at my parents’ house on the lake, and to a cream-colored mug with a big swirly V painted on the side. My name is Victoria Grayson. Everyone who has ever loved me calls me Tori. That fall I was thirty-five years old and I lived in the house I grew up in on the Mooresville side of Lake Norman, North Carolina. My grandfather bought that land in 1961 when the lake was still new and people thought he was foolish for paying good money for red clay and pine trees. My father, Richard Grayson, built the dock himself in the summer of 1994. I was four. I remember sitting on an overturned bucket in a pink life jacket, handing him nails one at a time, and him thanking me for every single one as if I were the most important person on the job.
At the end of that dock, on the last post, hung an air horn. It was the kind boaters use, a little red can with a white trumpet. That was how Dad called me home. One long blast meant supper. Three blasts meant come in now, the weather’s turning, no arguments. I grew up listening for that horn the way other kids listen for their names. He taught me to drive his old boat when I was eleven. The first thing he ever taught me, before the throttle, before the wheel, was the kill switch. It is a little red coiled cord with a clip on one end and a key on the other. Without it in the slot, the engine will not start. Most people leave it hanging on the dashboard. My father would not allow that. “Kill switch goes in your pocket, Tori,” he used to say. “Not on the dash. In your pocket. Then the boat goes where you go and nowhere else.” I said it so many times as a teenager that I said it in my sleep. I still do it. Every time I tie up the boat, the key goes in my pocket.
My mother, Ann, died four years before that fall. For most of a year she had a pain in her back that she said was nothing. Her doctor said it was probably a pulled muscle. We all said it was nothing because she said it was nothing and because we wanted it to be nothing. By the time anyone looked properly, it was in her bones. She drank her coffee every morning on the porch from a blue glazed mug with a chip on the handle. After she died, I left that mug on the kitchen shelf where she kept it. I never drank from it. I just liked knowing it was there. Dad died two years later on a bright October morning on the dock he built. His heart. A neighbor found him sitting against the last post right under the air horn with his coffee still warm beside him.
Ethan held me through both of those deaths. I want to say that clearly because everything that comes after makes no sense unless you understand it. When my mother was dying, Ethan drove me to Charlotte for every appointment. He slept in plastic hospital chairs. He learned how she liked her pillows. When my father died, Ethan was the one who called the funeral home because I could not make my mouth form the words. We had been married six years. He sold commercial heating and cooling systems. He made terrible pancakes every Sunday, and he laughed at his own jokes before he finished them. I trusted him the way you trust a floor. After Dad died, everything came to me. The lake house, a two-story brick building on Main Street in Davidson that my father bought in the eighties where Ida Bell has run her bakery on the ground floor for twenty-two years, and an investment account my parents had built slowly, one careful year at a time. Altogether, Janet told me it came to a little under seven million dollars.
I quit my job at a property management firm in Charlotte and took over the Davidson building myself. I knew leases. I knew signatures. I could find a missing initial on page eleven of a contract in about four seconds, which makes what happened to me even harder to explain. There was one more thing in that kitchen. In 2016, someone broke into the boathouse and stole Dad’s outboard motor. Afterward, my father, who had never locked a door in his life, became briefly focused on security. He had my oldest friend, Frank Delgado, help him put a small camera up in the corner of the walk-in pantry, pointed at the shelves and the back door. I used to tease him about it. Dad’s little camera, I called it. I assumed it had died years ago, the way all gadgets do. I had not thought about it in a long time.
