This short, short story was published in Portland Magazine in September, 2025.
Apology Accepted
By Bill Stauffer
It was before six in the morning. I was asleep in the room I shared with my brother.
“Your boat’s gone,” Dad said, getting his face right up into mine.
He shook my body under the thin cotton sheet. I propped my forearm over my eyes, crusty with sleep.
“Wake up! Your boat’s gone.” He searched my face for coherence. Only one day with the boat and it’s gone?
My boat. A fourteen-foot runabout with an ancient Evinrude outboard. Hours spent waxing the deck’s faded aqua blue fiberglass back to its original brightness. The dirt and mold scrubbed from the white vinyl bench seat. In 1981, Eighth grade involved washing dishes three hours after school and eight hours on Saturday to save up enough money. I still don’t know how my mother agreed to it.
“How?” I asked.
“Probably untied from the bow cleat. Told you to practice your knots more.”
It could have been anything: stolen, set free by a jealous middle-schooler, or Dad pulling one over on me.
“You’re joking.”
“Hurry up. Let’s go look for it. I told you to check your knots.”
The sun was still making its way up over Islesboro and the bay was calm. We rowed out to Dad’s boat, a 1960s era wood hull Lyman with a Chrysler inboard and lever steering. It was prone to sinking which is why Dad’s only rule on my buying a boat was that it had to be fiberglass.
I pretended to be unconcerned but could feel my despair tightening around my face. Dad seemed confident, but maybe he just looked forward to pointing out the result of my shitty knots. He choked the engine and pumped the throttle — not rushed but also not stopping to light up a cigarette.
“Which way do we go?” I asked.
I could tell he’d already thought this through. “Winds were light and variable overnight and the tide is just starting to come back in. We should start south, toward Lincolnville,” he said as if repeating the automated VHF weather voice he listened to all the time.
I pictured the boat already floating past Matinicus Island on its way to Ireland.
“Besides, if it went north, it would just wash up in Belfast or Searsport.”
It was still too early in the morning for the southerly chop and we glided past Kelly’s Cove, then Temple Heights, and Ram Island off to port.
Just before we reached Lincolnville, I sat slumped in my seat not caring that I hadn’t brushed my teeth. Dad pushed the throttle a little more, tempting the engine to backfire. I pictured a different summer — no mackerel fishing, waterskiing, or camping on Warren Island. All those washed dishes, for what? Most of all, how disappointed Dad was going to be in my failure to properly tie off my boat.
“There,” he said, not pointing, keeping one hand on the throttle, the other on the steering.
Stopped by a row of mussel nets, the boat sat calmly, as if she had no intention of going any further.
As we got closer, the bow looked dangerously low in the water.
“That’s odd,” Dad said.
He pulled up beside her, careful not to get his propeller tangled in the nets, and killed his engine.
The pendant still sat around the cleat and the painter’s bowline knot – my bowline knot – was still tied securely around the loop, all of which was still attached to the heavy mooring.
Dad dug through his wooden tackle box. He pulled out a rusty fillet knife, climbed onto the bow of my boat, and began sawing away at the line. It took me a few seconds to understand what Dad got right away, that the mooring chain wasn’t long enough for the tide. My boat’s first night on the mooring was spent lifting the mushroom anchor right off the bottom and floating south.
When the knife cut through, the line went quickly under, and the bow jumped out of the water almost sending Dad into the bay.
Still straddling the bow, Dad tapped out a cigarette from a pack of Benson & Hedges.
He lit up, inhaled, and blew a column of smoke toward my knot. “Had nothing to do with your knot. That bowline was absolutely perfect.”
I looked at the white line around the cleat, no longer under the heavy tension of the mooring.
He took another drag, squinted in my direction, and exhaled into a smile, “But the harbormaster sure needs a lesson on chain length and tides.
I wish I could still remember Dad’s face, sitting on the bow of my boat, smoking that cigarette, offering his halfway apology. But the image that sticks in my heart is that of his mischievous and adventurous, unshaven and tan face, leaning over my bed, waking me out of an unknown dream, smelling like black coffee, somehow sweet, not bitter – it’s a memory, after all.
Bill Stauffer 