“Actually, I didn’t go home. I went to Kenny Costa’s house because he had cable.”

“Well, I went home. That’s what I always do, I guess. My mom was home, but it never occurred to her I was supposed to be at school.”

“You bring up shit I haven’t thought about in years. You always do that! You remember everything.”

Those memories were like anchors tethering me in place, keeping me from floating into an increasingly turbulent sea. I didn’t understand if the turbulence I felt was inside me, or out there in the world. But I felt it, that storminess, every minute.

I reached for his hand, flipped it over on the table, and ran my fingers over his wrist, the bones and tendons, the blue-green veins, the skin as soft as water. The only place on his great body leftover from childhood, hairless and tender.

I heard his breath accelerate. He leaned toward me. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. I dug my fingernail into the soft flesh of his wrist, just a little, heard his breath respond. I remembered how powerful it felt to have so much control over his body. “Come on,” he said. “It’s been too long.”

I shook my head, and he pulled his wrist away from me.

“I’m trying to remember stuff about my mom,” I said. “I think maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought.”

“Everyone feels that way,” Eddie said, a little terse. He stood to leave. “We all feel bad about the dead.”

I added to the list: 3) stop feeling bad about the dead.

Jim Cardoza came out of the Ferry-All office when he saw me return to the booth. “You’ve been looking pale,” Jim said to me. He noticed these things.

“Don’t worry about me, Jim. I’m fine.”

I wrote on the list: 4) find more letters.

“You seem awfully dependent on this job, that’s all,” Jim said, when I lifted my head.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It ends in a couple weeks, that’s what’s wrong. You’ve had your head in a cloud.”

In the winter, no one needed information. The tourists disappeared, the booth closed down, and starting in October, I collected unemployment for six months, like the waitresses, cooks, dishwashers, and housecleaners. Usually I liked this time. Lucas and I did projects around the house. We built fires in the fireplace and curled up in front of it and read the novels Elijah West recommended. We slept long, ten-hour nights. But now I couldn’t imagine being home all day with the two of them—Lucas and Cole. The house, big as it was, would feel miserably claustrophobic. I would forever be brushing past Cole in hallways, sitting next to him on the wicker couch on the porch. I was instantly dizzy, just thinking about it.