A match scraped. I looked over and saw Dottie bent into the serious business of lighting a marijuana cigarette. The comic novelty of Dottie’s getting buzzed had worn off long ago.

She exhaled in a gasp.

The view from the climbing road was of toy boats rocking on the churned-up bay, two winking lighthouses. Wasnascawa, far below us, was a smudge like an ashes and oil-chalk sketch.

“We’re on shaky ground,” my mom said, holding her breath, her voice strained hoarse.

“So don’t hog it, Mom,” I said, and Dottie took my remark dead level. She passed me the cigarette.

I steered up a spiraling Cape Head street, coughing myself red from the smoke.

Built into the hillside were an abandoned filling station, the one-room post office; the gambrel-roofed house that was the library; a Catholic church called Our Lady of the Angels; and on top of the land mass where the road dead-ended, a stone watchtower.

I parked there and we looked at the sea and distant sky where there was a flock of snow clouds. A gust of freezing rain splattered away the view.

We drove out of Cape Head village and down between lines of leaf-stripped trees onto the Point Road and out the spur of land where the inn perched.

“I’ve seen Mario,” Dottie said.

“Oh, really? How is he these days?”

“Fine,” she said. “He comes up on the train from Providence and we eat somewhere or he just visits with me.”

“Wait, stop. Dad Mario? I just heard you. You’re telling me you’ve been dating Dad?”

“Seeing him, yes,” she said.

Dottie seemed to focus on the cawing gull that paced along beside the car.

I turned up a dirt driveway and went through a gate in the trestle fencing, under the carved sign—THE SEAHORSE INN—swinging wildly from a post.

Ahead, the main house looked both simple and vast, with its steep, low-hipped roof and three chimneys. Annexes and new additions sprawled. Well away stood the Dutch barn that Dottie used for a garage.

“Are you taking him back?” I asked her, but she was gaping lovingly at the inn.

She said, “Privacy.”

The dirt drive had potholes and puddles. I charged instead up the sodded hay-blond lawn, past the weather- blackened monumental anchor stuck there. The yard was frozen mineral hard.

We went into the inn through a delivery entrance, into the taproom, where the floor was uneven, a pegged wood. There were ash ceiling beams, and a walk-in fireplace, its mantel blackened from smoke.

It was Friday afternoon, so I faced three days of waiting for Raf, but the Seahorse made the best site for a waiting ordeal.

“Tote in your luggage. I’ll fix us drinks,” my mother said.

“This is all of it,” I said, meaning the long duffel strapped over my shoulder.