They drank some of Uncle George’s brandy. In the house instructions he’d left for them on the dining room table he told them they could help themselves to his liquor cabinet, but if they drank more than half of any bottle he expected them to replace it, and he provided them with the address of the liquor store on Washington Street. “We should leave exactly half of every bottle,” Henry said, and Effie laughed. This Uncle George, Aunt Lizzie’s widower, lived in Philadelphia and wasn’t a blood relation. Effie had never had much to say about him, aside from the logistics of the trip and when the cottage would be available. Henry had the sense she didn’t like him very much.

She made the haddock for supper—it stuck to the pan and crumbled to pieces, but it was good—and afterward they turned the radio on, found a hits station that wasn’t too fuzzy with static, and danced in the den to “Chances Are.” They played a game of checkers, which Effie won handily. They passed the halfway mark on the bottle of brandy.

“What’s he going to do, bill us?” Henry said.

“To hell with King George,” Effie said. “Bottoms up.”

On Tuesday the sun came out and the streets and squares in town were spangled with light. They walked out to see the lighthouse, which stood near the point, on the other side of a wetland. This spot, according to Henry’s understanding of the town, marked the southernmost tip of New Jersey. Ahead of them lay open ocean, to the left of them lay open ocean, and off to the right somewhere, on the other side of the peninsula, lay Delaware Bay. Now that the sun was out, the sea was royal blue. “Just think,” he said, pointing to the horizon ahead, “about ten thousand miles down that way is Antarctica, or South Africa, or something. We could just swim and swim and never see the end of all that water.”

When she didn’t answer he looked at her and saw that she was frowning. She’d been grumpy that morning. They’d both had too much to drink. “That’s not right,” she said. “That way’s west.”

He felt a prick of annoyance. He’d only been trying to put a little wonder into things. “How is that way west? It’s ocean as far as you can see.”

“No, it’s Delaware,” she said. “You can see it with binoculars—I’ll show you a map when we get back to the house.” She pointed off to the left of where they were standing. “That way’s south. If you swam that way, you’d run into Antarctica or South Africa or what-have-you. Actually, I think you’d run into Venezuela first.”