I looked at Rachael, since she was the next one up in the chain of command, and she nodded.

So I said, “Thanks, that will be great.”

Jennifer said, “We start at 9 A.M., punctually.”

As she went out the door she turned around and blew me a kiss. That made me kind of feel funny but not in a bad way.

When Jennifer was gone, Rachael said, “Now that’s an answer to prayer! You see, you don’t have to be embarrassed!”

I agreed because now I had been invited back into the society of polite humans who had forgiven me for throwing up at dinner and were even sorry for me and had not said that my octopus had made me sick but had provided me with a scapegoat, food poisoning, just as Isaac had been spared when God provided Abraham with the ram caught by its horns in the thicket.

Chapter 12

THE ROWBOAT THE BAZLINTONS HAD RENTED was not really a boat at all but was actually two, ten-foot-long, cigar-shaped pontoons fastened together by benches bolted across them at right angles. One bench faced forward and had a nice rounded back to it so the passengers could comfortably sit, three abreast, and look at the scenery. The other bench had no back. The person rowing sat on it to row.

Between the benches it was open. You could look down and see the water sliding green-blue between the pontoons.

These “rowboats” were just for people on vacation. No fishermen ever used them. They had numbers painted on the sides so the Banini could keep track of who had what and how long they had it and if their time was up, or if they had forgotten that their hour’s rent was due at four-thirty and came back at five instead and had to be charged for the extra half an hour. If the people being charged extra were Germans, they would compare the time on their watch to the Banini’s and argue that his watch was wrong or that he had put their departure time on his blackboard wrong, or that he had all the boats’ numbers on it incorrectly. The Banini would wait for them to stop explaining his mistakes to him, then just ask for the extra fifty or one hundred lire all over again, very politely but firmly, until he got his money.