Body-image garbage out of the way, it’s time to rename the boat. The part I was really looking forward to. What I have in mind is like when Michelangelo painted one of his critics getting his tiny penis bitten off on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or like the guy who did the artwork for the home video cover of The Little Mermaid and made one of the spires of Triton’s castle in the shape of a huge cock. I go through frame after frame of footage putting the new name on the old boat—Lolly, my grandmother’s nickname, the only name I ever called her. Everyone else called her Violet. As a joke, it’s totally private, entirely my own. Kind of a prank, kind of an ode.

The repetition is making my mind wander. Jenny’s dead, long live Lolly. Out with Jenny, in with Lolly. Jenny off, Lolly on. When the boat turns away and appears to the camera at a coy angle, the letters need to shift too, Lolly on a red carpet looking at the cameras over her shoulder as her fans swoon and scream at their TV screens. She was never Grandma to me, or Granny or Nanna—always Lolly. Maybe I tried to say Violet when I was little and couldn’t manage. I’ll have to ask my mother, when I see her next, when she comes for me.

It’s been almost four months since Lolly died. What started as soreness sprinted ahead with a power that didn’t belong to human tissue. It was just an odd pain at first, a sore left breast. And then it turned red and sprouted streaking tendrils that reached out to her armpits, and her throat swelled up. But just as suddenly it went away and life went on. She worked in the garden, grinning and cooing at the furriness of bees in the lilacs or the discovery of an arrowhead in a turn of the soil. But it came back the next week. I was on the couch staring into a book one night when I heard her go, hmmm. The sound when just one question sounds like a million, a monster with too many identical heads. The next morning she went to the Oceanic for Gretchen to have a look. They said they needed to keep her there overnight for tests, whatever tests they could manage with the equipment they had on hand. And she died the next day, Sunday. Violet.

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly in every frame, on and on. My eyes are sore but I’m working faster now. It is starting to seem important—something like pride is welling up. It looks good, as if it had been that way all along.

“Oh, would you look at that.”

I jump as if guilty. I hadn’t heard Mrs. Tyburn come in, too absorbed in the playback, checking the smoothness of the text between frames.