"It's about Joy, a thirty-two-year-old atheist and a PhD student of philosophy who lives with her small-minded mother,” I say, focusing my eyes directly on his. “Joy doesn't have a leg because she lost it in a childhood shooting accident. A Bible salesman comes to see them and her mother believes that he is good country people, as they say. Then he invites Joy out for a date and that's when things get, let's just say interesting.”

He raises his eyebrows and takes a step away from me.

“Are you surprised?” I ask.

“Yes, to tell you the truth I am. Pleasantly.”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“It’s pretty obscure,” he says with a pronounced shrug.

I fold my arms across my chest and raise my chin in the air in defiance.

“Did you bring it up to teach me a lesson?” I ask. “Maybe make me feel bad, or stupid even?”

He shakes his head. When I look into his eyes, I can’t look away. There's something in them that pulls me in, even convincing me that he didn’t mean it that way at all. It was a genuine attempt to make a connection.

“While they are on their date, the Bible salesman persuades her to go up in the loft and to take off her prosthetic leg,” he says. His words come out smoothly, naturally even. “He then shows her the inside of one of his Bibles that contains a bottle of whiskey, condoms, and cards with naked women on them.”

“When she says no to his advance,” I finish the story for him, “the Bible salesman tells her that he collects fake legs and takes off with hers.”

“What do you like about the story?” he asks.

"Who said that I liked it?” I ask him.

He smiles.

“You have to.”

“I have to?” I ask.

“You know it so intimately and innately that they must've made an imprint on your soul,” he says.

I gaze into his eyes. I have lived for twenty-five years and not once have I ever spoken with another human being about the existence of a soul. Yet here is a stranger, a simple worker on my father's yacht, who speaks of it as if it's second nature, as if it's as real as gravity.

“I think what I like about it, and what I like about Flannery O'Connor's work in general is her sense of irony,” I say. “It's comedic. The title of the story is Good Country People, and that's exactly what her mother thinks the Bible salesman is. And yet he is the furthest thing from that. And even she, with her advanced degree, is someone who should know better, but she doesn’t. It’s almost funny. But then again, my own mother thinks I have a perverse sense of humor.”

“I think we might have that in common,” he says.