I sometimes asked myself what he was getting from us, what he was hoping for. That seemed like the right question, but the answer was tricky. I had a realization about him on the second Sunday of his stay. On Sundays Lucas and I always cleaned the house, dividing up the chores, and that Sunday, Cole offered to pitch in. He cheerfully dusted. He vacuumed. He said he preferred not to do bathrooms.

“I prefer not to do bathrooms, too,” Lucas said.

I said, “Someone has to do them.”

“I don’t even live here,” Cole said.

“Fine.” Lucas held up his hands. “I’ll do them.”

All morning it rained. The inside of the house was dim and cool. When I gathered up shopping bags in the afternoon, Cole said, “Grocery shopping? I’ll come.” And he slid off the kitchen stool and fell into step beside me.

I backed the car out of the garage and Cole watched from the doorway, then darted toward me through the rain. It was a rust-colored 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit. He eased into the passenger’s seat. “I wondered if you ever drove this thing,” he said.

We passed Mr. and Mrs. Grendle next door; I saw them through their kitchen window. Did they see me? Did they worry, seeing me with a strange man suddenly after so many years?

The rain drummed on the roof of the car. The grocery store was a mile inland, part of a knot of ugly boxy buildings where South Street intersects with Hatch. The store was called Hiram’s Bounty, a name Cole found amusing.

I had been terrified of Hiram, not because he was mean, but because he’d had a tracheotomy and spoke with a mechanical voice through a little box attached to his throat. That voice seemed to issue straight from a nightmare. He’d died maybe twenty years earlier, and someone else owned the store, but the name stayed. That was the unspoken agreement among islanders: we will do our utmost to keep time at a standstill. The same sand will sit on the same shore for a million years. Hiram’s Bounty will forever remain Hiram’s Bounty. Children won’t grow up. Parents won’t die. At least that was supposed to be the agreement. My antiestablishment parents were never good at following the rules.

“Where’s the shopping list?” Cole asked. He held a shopping basket firmly at his side. The place was small and cramped. All around us, multicolored packages were stacked precariously on tall shelves. You had to climb up step stools to reach the tops. I had the impression of children’s blocks rising in castles on the verge of tumbling down. It smelled like childhood, too, like the inside of a refrigerator.

“There’s no list.”

“How do you remember what you need?”

“I just know.”

“How do I know what you need?”