“I want to sleep here.”

“You can’t very well sleep on the table.”

“Can too. And you can sleep in there.” She pointed inside the forepeak. “Or in the bathroom,” she said.

There was a compartment with a toilet inside between the saloon and the forepeak.

“You want me to sleep in the bathroom?”

“Yes!”

She was sweating from the heat, red in the face. Locks of hair had come loose from her braids and hung over her eyes, she didn’t care, just pushed them to one side.

“But there isn’t room.”

“You have to sit on the toilet all night.”

“The captain’s orders,” I said.

Afterward, when the sun was low in the sky, we sat in the cockpit, facing each other on the benches. Her feet didn’t reach the floor, so they dangled freely.

Lou stroked the woodwork of the bench with her hands, thinking. “I’m patting the boat.”

“I’m sure it likes that.”

“Nice boat.”

She kept stroking it, lovingly. But then she stopped suddenly. “Ow!” She held up her right hand, so I could see her little white palm. A splinter was lodged in her flesh next to her thumb. “It hurts!”

I took her hand; the splinter was in deep.

“Take it out!” she cried.

“I don’t have anything here. We need a pair of tweezers.”

“Take it out!”

“We’ll go back. To the first-aid barracks. They’ll have what we need.”

“I don’t want to! Take it out now!”

“Lou, you have to go down the ladder.”

“No!”

I tried to persuade her.

I coaxed, I cajoled.

Finally she started climbing down the ladder, after a fashion, but she didn’t want to use her right hand and tried to hang on using just her fingers, whimpering incessantly.

“It’s just a little splinter,” I said.

“It’s huge. Huge!”

We left the boat without putting the tarps back on and began walking down the road while she hollered. It was a dumb boat. She was never going back. She even hated it.

“Shitty boat.”

“It’s not the boat’s fault,” I said. “It’s just that nobody’s been taking care of it. We can see if we can find some oil. Then we can polish the benches and oil them. Or varnish. Maybe there’s some in the shed. Then the splinters will disappear. And then it will be completely smooth.”

I realized that I liked the plan. I wanted to return tomorrow, I wanted to work on the boat. But Lou didn’t want to.

She kept howling, dragging her feet down the road, stopping constantly, asking me to wait but when I waited and called “come on” in my nicest voice, she didn’t come. She just stood there.

And I had to walk back to get her, leading her by her left hand, while she held her right hand up in the air demonstratively. The entire time she complained about how much it hurt, in a voice ever increasing in volume.

“You have to carry me. Carry me!”

And I was losing my patience as well. That was enough now, enough. I drew a breath, as if air in my lungs would calm me. It didn’t help. My cheeks were hot, my heart was pounding hard, and Lou wasn’t quiet for a single second.