“You look really cold,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“Come on, let’s go sit inside.”

He took her hand and led her back to the enclosed lower deck of the ship. Tish almost sang with joy when the door closed behind them, cutting off the wind and leaving her under the hot air vent from the boat’s furnace. She shivered, warming up. Most of the other passengers were here, seated on benches by the windows, soaking up the view. Finn found an open stretch of bench on the starboard side, where the boat looked out on the lake, and the two of them sat down.

“I’m going to get another beer,” Finn said. “You want something?”

“No, thanks.”

She watched him head up to the bar. His dress clothes looked a size too large, as if he had dropped weight since he wore them. He was in his late forties, like her, but he wore his age hard. She noticed a tremor in his hands. A yellowing in his skin. He was ill. She wondered if his shaved head was voluntary, or whether he had lost his hair to some kind of cancer treatment.

When he came back, he noticed her eyeing his bare skull. “I was losing most of my hair anyway.”

“The shaved look is trendy now,” Tish said.

“You don’t have to say that. I figured bald was better than having a forehead that went halfway up my head. My hair used to be so thick it was like an Afro, but I started finding blond curls on my pillow in my twenties.”

He popped the top of his beer can.

“So how are you, Finn?” Tish asked.

Finn drank down half the can on his first swallow. He wiped his mouth with the cuff of his shirt. “How am I? I guess you can see how I am.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Self-inflicted wounds,” he said. He held up the beer can. “This is the enemy. Back then, I was mostly into grass and coke. Not that I have to tell you that, huh? I finally kicked drugs and took up booze instead. The docs say my liver is hoisting the white flag.”

“But you’re still drinking.”

“If I’m going to die, I’ll die happy,” Finn said. “I’ve been in and out of rehab for years. I’d get sober for a while, but I couldn’t kick it. A few months ago, they said the damage was permanent. So what the hell.”

“You shouldn’t give up.”

“I don’t think of it as giving up. It’s more like suicide for dummies. If I had any guts, I would have killed myself years ago.”

“Finn, for God’s sake,” Tish said.

“What, does that shock you? I’m sorry. Laura never wanted to see me as a lost cause, either. She was the only one who ever tried to help me.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like this.”

“Hey, at least I’m not blaming anyone but myself anymore. For years, I blamed my mother. Even after Rikke and I got out of North Dakota, I figured that I was who I was because of what my mother did to us. That didn’t change anything, though, so I started blaming Rikke. It was all her fault that I couldn’t stand on my own two feet. I even moved away for a few years. But after another stint in rehab down in the Cities, I realized the only person that fucked me up was me. So I came back here. Nothing changed.”