The Book Boat swayed gently as I secured the kayak and clambered on board. No, she’s the Melville, I reminded myself. That would take some getting used to. I gazed around the stern well, checked the security of the mooring lines, scanned the buildings walling the Lagoon. As best I could see, everything looked shipshape. But what next?

I got it that Daniel had given me the keys to tie me down. He read me well enough to know that assigned a task, I’d stick around. Even if only to raise the alarm, come fire or theft, and hope enough sleeping Joes could be roused in time to save his boat.

I perched on the stern locker, getting my bearings. The barge’s tall tiller creaked companionably at my back. It was both strange and natural to feel the deck move beneath me, the constant faint roll of a tidal harbor remembering the sea. Like I was. The sea, and so much more. This old boat was keelless, wide-bottomed, stable enough in smooth conditions but poorly fit for rough water. Haiku, on the other hand, was a seagoing vessel. My father’s idea, I recalled now. He bought it just before his company downsized and relocated to Montana, like so many were doing. Haiku was to be our escape hatch, the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Great Lakes, when life in Manhattan was no longer bearable.

Bearable. By whose definition? Like, what would either of my parents have thought of life in a den? From my seat in the quiet stern, their faces still eluded me, but now I could summon up the bellow and wail of their arguments: the job held for him out there, but how long? My mother didn’t believe the job promise: Montana was a dust bowl, the whole Midwest was on fire, we could live on her salary. My dad’s hands in the air: Your clients are all leaving! Then what do you do? Two problem-solvers facing the unsolvable.

When words finally failed and he took off, emails arrived, smug at first then increasingly tentative: the work was still part-time, he’d find a place to live soon, he’d send money next month, use this train ticket, take this bus, whatever. I cried when my mother deleted them. After a while, they stopped coming. Was he dead or alive? Would I ever know?