“Hardly,” Johnny said. “I’m paranoid and mean. Ask anyone who knows me. Professor Deveaux? Am I not caustic? A moocher? A sot?”

“All of those,” I said.

The young man helped himself to the Scotch. He plugged his mouth with the bottle, gulped twice, lowered it, and gasped. He swabbed his lower lip. He said in a rusty, charred voice, “Water, water, water!”

Almost immediately, Johnny was drunk and throwing the paper trash that had remained in my wastebasket out the office window.

He said, “I’ve finally reached a saturation point with women. But for you, Paige. I know it’s momentary, but, lordy, look at your leg!”

“And I have another one,” I said.

“I know! But I don’t know what to do. Eat them or take pictures or something!”

“Too bad age will soon ravage you,” the young man said and followed with a sigh.

When Johnny had thrown out all my trash, he went away and came back toting a filled plastic sack of his own.

“You can’t!” the young man said.

“Cambridge is a hole. I’m getting even by filling it,” Johnny said.

“How else are you getting even?” asked the young man.

“Look, who are you?” I asked him.

Johnny unloaded his trash sack by holding it out the window, upside down. A newsletter flew. I heard the thunk of a half-eaten apple.

“Surely no one could blame Raf for fleeing,” Johnny said as he brushed bits of paper from the sleeves of his suitcoat. “Anywhere but here.”

That evening I ate in a restaurant in Boston Harbor, aboard a ferry that parked there year round.

There was moonlight. There were thrashing winds batting newspapers and whipping boat-ride ticket bits into squalls.

The sea washing up had a rainbow skin and floated wobbly stripes of reflection from the ferry’s lights, the table candles, the moon.

I smashed a tab of butter onto a hot tear of bread in my cupped palm.

The ferry, the drive from Houston, sleeplessness, Raymond, Raf, his letter . . . I was swaying.

The old South Shore hotel where my mom was manager- caretaker was forty minutes from Boston in the least traffic, with another twenty needed to navigate the lanes that wound through Hampham and then the town of Wasnascawa. The roads got skimpier for the world’s end village of Cape Head, where stood the Seahorse Inn.

Houses crowded the bayside artery and blocked the rainy wind on the way out of Hampham.

At the tip of Wasnascawa I crossed over to the peninsula’s ocean side and went toward the headlands. Here were two miles of naked beach, tidal marsh, acres of boat-parking space.

The surf crested high and white and toppled with a roar that was everywhere in the air.

At the inn, I went up a slate walk to a red door with a brass knocker.