He probably knows it too, I never could. All I do is tuck into a bottle every night. He knows I don’t blame him for anything. One time he sent me a text message saying, Saw dolphins in the bay! And I thought my whole body would clench around that phone, I gripped it so tight. I didn’t put it down for hours.

My second tumbler is usually the one that gets me sad, and then I come into the third and get warm. I get some peace and quiet. Everything after that just deepens the glow. Out here on the porch, I focus on my feet against the rough wood. If I blink fast enough, the empty lot across the way looks like a beach, disappearing into nothing. It gets me dizzy to think about all the people I’ve been, the hard groaning of my throat through all these years of talking, shushed once more by the gin heat rolling down its passage. I start blinking. The whole world looks frantic, like it’s flailing, but the gin makes liquid patterns in the dark behind my eyelids and blooms like water where there isn’t any for miles.

When I was young, our beach got flocks of crabs that only stayed a few days, like common colds, after the tide exhaled their hard scuttling bodies across the sand. They drilled dark points into the whole shore. These were the holes of their leaving. There was a stranger who came up and said: They won’t bite. He said: They only pinch and only if you hold them wrong. He showed me how to squeeze their pincers just so. I shook my head. I didn’t want to. What does it feel like? I asked him. Just like a seashell, only squirming, he said. It won’t hurt you. He smiled his lips were salt-speckled his teeth were the color of burnt cookies. Not what does it feel like for me, I said. What does it feel like for the crab? He wasn’t old or young. He came every summer. I knew he had a daughter but she wasn’t my age. His red hair was so thin I couldn’t see it on his arms, just glints of light. Oh, he said, we can’t know about that.

My head shook faster, back and forth, ears full of seawater sloshing between them. No. His hair got thin around the top and his scalp was like a big shell too. He uncapped his hand next to my shoulder and let the crab go. It scuttled down my arm and then the rest of me, bony fingers tapping my skin. Not so bad, he said, was it?

Dora had promised she would come look for barnacles but then she hadn’t. The beach was full of people and now it wasn’t. I think it wasn’t so bad, he said. I think you’re only pretending. He stood behind and reached his hand around my thigh and dug his fingers under the elastic of my swimsuit. It was the one-piece with the green stripes. Shhh. I wasn’t surprised. Why wasn’t I surprised? I couldn’t see his face but I could hear him breathing. His breath smelled like beer and sandwich meat gone sour. I felt his voice again: Shhh, hissing like waves.