WHAT DID I DO, WHEN I wasn’t working? My days off were lazy and without purpose. I couldn’t remember when I had ever had so much free time. In high school, I’d loved dragging a chair down to the beach and setting it up at the water’s edge so that the waves washed over my feet, but I had done that once so far since I’d been home and it felt like a mistake. I remembered why I’d avoided visiting my mother the past four years: everywhere I could see my father. I looked out to the jetty and saw him there, standing barefoot on the cold rocks and casting his line out into the ocean. He’d taught me how to hold the other end of a drag net, the two of us stepping in time in the shallows. We picked the flopping minnows from the black netting and plopped them into our bait bucket, and I felt the pulse of the little fish in my hand.

One good thing came out of my boredom: I had taken up drawing again. I found myself sketching these images from my girlhood—the minnows gasping on the shoreline, bright shocks of seaweed that washed in on the tide. I liked making the loose scribbles, the meditative act of slowly, through line and shape and shading, distinguishing what something was versus what it was not.

Across the street from our porch, where I was sitting with a pencil and notebook in hand, an older woman backed her long silver Cadillac into the driveway. I’d seen her before, in passing—gathering the morning paper in her giant sunglasses, swaddled in a navy bathrobe—but we hadn’t spoken.

“Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo?” she called. “Could you help me lift this?” I crossed the street, blood rushing to my head from laying still for too long. “Thank you so much! I just bought all of these plants and someone at the nursery helped me lift the bag of potting soil into the car, but I didn’t even think about what it would be like to lift it out again. I don’t know why they only sell this stuff in fifty-pound bags.”

I didn’t want to admit it, but even I had trouble heaving the bag out of the trunk. I used to go to exercise classes almost every morning in the city, but I had fallen out of shape quicker than I wanted to admit. “Where should I put this?”

“Oh, inside the garage, please, dear.”

I dropped the bag and shook my arms to relieve the strain.

“That’s perfect, thanks again. Can I offer you a glass of iced tea? I just brewed it.”

“Oh, I’m okay, thank you.”

“No, really. Come in, I insist. Just one glass.” She put a perfectly manicured hand on my arm. “Now, your mother tells me you are here for a little while? From the city?”