I did not come from money, although by the time our marriage began to fall apart, people who had known me for only a few years often assumed I had. My mother raised me alone in a small house with a soft spot in the kitchen floor, working mornings at a medical office and evenings at a grocery store. She had an envelope for every household bill and a habit of smoothing the envelopes after she opened them, as if pressing a crease flat might somehow make the number inside smaller. When she told me there was no money for something, she did not dramatize it. She told me what we could afford instead, and sometimes that was the hardest lesson of all.
When I was sixteen, I began washing fishing boats at a marina south of Wilmington. That was where I met Ray Porter and Sam Whitaker, two boys with as much determination as I had and even less money. Ray understood engines in the almost unfair way certain people understand music. Sam could keep track of twenty moving jobs, three furious customers, and a missing invoice while still remembering which employee needed to leave early for a child's school play. I was the one who talked people into giving us work before I had learned the more difficult skill of making sure the work paid enough to keep us alive.
We washed boats for cash and free sodas, then started doing small repairs under the supervision of mechanics who were willing to teach us. I remember the first outboard Ray rebuilt on his own, laid across a scarred workbench while Sam and I stood over him pretending we understood his explanation of the carburetor. It started on the second pull, and Ray smiled with an expression I would see a thousand times over the next two decades. He was never happier than when something broken returned to doing what it was made to do. Sam looked at the engine, looked at our little pile of receipts, and said we ought to stop doing favors for other people's businesses and start building one of our own.
At twenty-eight, the three of us pooled our savings and rented a metal shed with an uneven concrete floor. I took a loan against the first apartment I had ever managed to buy, Ray sold a truck he loved, and Sam borrowed enough from an uncle to keep us supplied with parts for the first month. We called the business Harborline Marine because it sounded more established than three men in a shed trying not to lose their shirts. The sign was painted by a friend who charged us forty dollars and lunch. For months we answered the phone as though we had a reception department, then handed the receiver to one another while pretending the department existed.