After a bit, John called over to her, “Awful hot out here. We oughta try and make it out earlier tomorrow. Six or seven o’clock. Beat the heat.”

Alex said, “Sure.” She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “Daddy, do you like them?”

John glanced over his shoulder at her. She was still facing away, out across the water.

“Who?”

“That other family,” Alex said. “Mr. and Mrs. Daly. Rae. Kimmy.”

“Oh.” John reeled his line in, pulled at a string of brown seaweed that had attached itself to the bait, and recast. “Mm-hm,” he said. “Do you?”

He watched over his shoulder again as Alex’s round buzz cut tipped back and forth, left to right. “I like Kimmy a lot,” she said, “though she annoys me a little bit sometimes.”

“How so?”

“I don’t know, she’s just . . . silly sometimes.”

John laughed. “What’s wrong with silly?”

“There’s a difference between funny and silly. Don’t you think so? I like funny people. But sometimes Kimmy’s not funny. Sometimes she’s just silly.”

John knew exactly what she meant. He didn’t want to encourage a judgmental streak in Alex, but he also couldn’t help the swell of pride he felt at the idea that his daughter was not and would never be a silly girl. He could imagine Alex saying things like, “Oh, get a life,” to girls who were late to class because they were too caught up doing makeup in the bathroom, or when they cried because the boy they had a crush on didn’t return a call.

“I do like Kimmy,” Alex said decisively. “I’m not sure about the rest of them, though.”

They fell quiet. Several minutes later, Alex reeled in her line and examined the worm. “It’s dead now,” she said. “And most of the blood’s drained out.” She dangled it over in John’s direction. “See?”

“Yup.”

“No wonder I’m not getting any bites with this floppy old thing.” She removed the flimsy worm remains from her hook and reached into the Styrofoam cup for a fresh one.

John said, “You can do another one or two, but let’s not waste all the good bait today if we’re not gettin’ a single bite. Like that guy said, today just might not be the day.”

Alex rejoined John on his side of the pier. She swiftly and methodically attached a fresh worm to her hook. Mashing, knotting, stabbing. Slime. Guts. She wiped her dirty fingers on her thigh. Her skinny legs dangled over the concrete. She cast her line.

After a bit, Alex said, “A predator is like a bear, right? Or a shark?”

“Yup.”

“Somethin’ that hunts somethin’.”

John nodded.

“So, humans are predators?”

John considered this. “I’d say so.”

Alex gazed out over the water and bounced her line.

The art gallery was a bust; it featured the work of only one artist, who had a special talent for producing watercolor sunsets that were indistinguishable from one another except for the placement of a few faraway and poorly rendered seagulls.