Raf drove me and Fredo into Hampham to replenish Dottie’s personal refrigerator and the hotel stock that the storm victims used. We bought candles, lamp oil, batteries; pounds of coffee, rice, beans, and flour. We bought baguettes and eclairs at the bakery, and fish fillets and sweet peppers at South Shore Market.

On the ride back to Cape Head, I said, “Raf, we don’t have to get a divorce.”

“All right. I wasn’t thinking we did, but all right.”

“I’ll be around,” I said. “And you can visit, and stay or not. We just won’t be an act; we’re breaking up the act.”

“All right,” he said, and blew air out his cheeks.

“Nothing’s expected of you, so there’s nothing to run from. No reason to lie or hide what you do anymore.”

“I know.”

“Of course, this is both of us. You can’t expect anything from me.”

“I’m sorry to cut in here,” Raf said. “But way out there on the bay, that spouting thing? You think that could be a whale?”

Dottie wok-fried the fish we bought, and now the four of us gathered for supper. The group’s personality was different, though. We concentrated on eating, tearing through the meal.

To fill air, I talked about quarks, and Barny, the physicist. I said that must have been something, finding a whole new layer, the deepest level of matter. “A thing less than a millionth of an atom in size,” I said.

Raymond didn’t speak at all. I saw in his eyes what I sometimes saw in Raf’s, that he was already off and traveling. I’d catch him studying me, and I could see that he didn’t want to go, in some ways, but that in all ways, he needed to.

Dottie and I shared a joint. We were in the sitting room off the lobby, with candlelight twinkling on the cherry wood and on the tall ships’ portraits and on the plasticky flanks of the big fish mounted over the mantel.

For a frozen few moments, I thought my mom looked as though she were mourning something and that her head was lowered in sorrow. I heard crying. The moments, suspended for me and set off in brackets from time flow, ended when the crying shaped itself around a gull somewhere in the distance.

In my sleep, I had pictures of back roads crunchy with salt, sawtooth warehouse roofs; and last of Connie, Raymond’s dog, falling seven stories, exploding in starbursts and dust where her shadow had been, leaving a steel trash can in a papery crumple.

Raymond booked an eleven-o’clock flight out of Logan, and Raf did a gallant thing, insisting he had leg cramps from his dawn run on the beach.

“You two go alone,” he said. “I don’t want to anyway. It’s a goddamned gruesome drive.”