Eventually I start to even out some, and as we wind our way through Salem, he points out everything he thinks I might be interested in. There’s the House of the Seven Gables, a dark, spooky-looking house that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of the same name; Pickering Wharf, with a walking path that takes you past a restored old ship on your way to the lighthouse; and Burying Point, an old graveyard where several groups of people are picnicking. He shows me the Witch House, where Emma gives tours, and asks if I want to see the new skate park that was put in earlier that year, but I quickly decline the offer. The only thing more pathetic than me on a basketball court is me on a skateboard. I can barely manage the bike.

Eventually he runs out of places to show me and we begin official business. Our first stop is a brown clapboard house near the shore that is currently having its exterior renovated. Simon stops to talk to the men carrying out the job, and I help him plant a FOR SALE sign in the postage stamp of grass out front. The next house is a smaller, newer-looking place, with an ugly stucco exterior and a half-dead lawn, and Simon makes a bunch of calls to some local yard companies to get someone out to treat it. Stops three and four are him checking on the interior, and I jump in to help him with some light yard work, pulling weeds, watering flower beds, that kind of thing. By stop five I’m starting to wonder if we’re going to be out here all day. The air is as thick as mashed potatoes, the only relief an occasional breeze that wafts up from the shore. I try not to look at it. Some days the ocean makes me feel better; on others it makes my soul hurt. My mom once told me she must have been a mermaid in a past life. Why else would the ocean feel like home?

“One last stop,” Simon says. “This is the one I told you about earlier. I got a call from a potential new client last night who wants to put her house on the market soon. It belonged to a witch.”