At noon the tide turned, and the small boats in the harbor swung on their lines like a congregation rising to its feet. He watched from the bluff and tried to remember the last time he had prayed in earnest. The wind off the water was warm for October. A gull cried once and was answered by nothing.

He had come back to the coast for a funeral, and he had stayed because there was no one waiting for him anywhere else. The house his aunt had left him was small and white and full of furniture that had belonged to people he had never met, and every morning for a week he had woken in it and lain very still and tried to decide whether he was at peace or only tired.

The town was called Hessel's Reach, and it had been dying politely for thirty years. The cannery had closed when he was a boy. The Methodist church had closed the summer he graduated. The school had consolidated with the next town over, and the boats that still went out went out for tourists now, and the tourists, on the whole, were kind.

He walked down the bluff path with his hands in his coat pockets and the salt wind moving the dry grasses on either side of him. At the bottom of the path the old breakwater curved out into the harbor, gray and patient as a sleeping animal. A heron stood on it, perfectly still, watching the turning water.

His aunt had been the last of them. His mother's people, all gone. His father's people scattered to four states and not one of them on speaking terms with him for reasons he could no longer reconstruct. He had a daughter in Portland who answered his letters once a year, and he had told himself for a long time that this was enough, and he was beginning, here at the edge of the continent, to suspect that it was not.

The pastor at the funeral had been a young woman with a kind face and a careful voice, and she had said the things one says, and she had said them well. Afterward, in the small fellowship hall, she had taken his hand in both of hers and said: Your aunt spoke of you often. She prayed for you every day of her life. He had not known what to do with this. He had thanked her, and he had walked out into the parking lot, and he had stood for a long time looking at his rented car.

Now, on the breakwater, with the tide turning beneath him, he tried the prayer the way a man tries a key in a lock he has not opened in many years. The lock did not give. The key did not break. He stood there with the heron, and the wind, and the small bright boats, and he waited.

When he had been a boy in this town his grandfather had taken him out at slack water and had taught him the names of the bottom — the channels, the bars, the patches of eelgrass where the flounder slept. Slack water, his grandfather had said, is the time to listen. The tide is making up its mind. You can hear it if you keep still.

He kept still. He listened. The water turned beneath the breakwater with a long, slow, almost human sigh, and somewhere out beyond the point a bell buoy began its patient tolling, and he felt, without warning, the first warm prick of tears at the corners of his eyes, and he did not wipe them away, because there was no one on the breakwater to see.

He would stay through the winter. He did not know it yet, standing there with the heron, but he would stay. He would open the white house every morning and let the sea light into its rooms. He would write the long letter to his daughter that he had been carrying, unwritten, in his chest for eleven years. And by the following noon tide, when the year had turned and the boats had been hauled out for spring, he would, in his quiet and stumbling way, have begun to pray again.