Part 2

Two Months Ago, June

Chapter 1

ANTHONY

ON THE TOP deck of the ferry from Point Judith to Block Island Anthony Puckett watched a group of bachelorettes drinking from plastic tumblers. They wore identical skintight tank tops—white, of course, bachelorettes always wore white—that depicted a pair of cowboy boots with the words Ride ’Em Cowgirls above and Jennie’s Last Rodeo below. Each tumbler was printed with its girl’s name in large block letters: ASHLIE, LEXIE, SADIE, etc. (It seemed to be a rule that to attend this party your name had to end in ie.) He didn’t know what was more depressing: The ie factor, or the cowgirl hats each girl wore, here in Rhode Island, so far from Texas or Nashville or anyplace where such a hat might be warranted. Or the orange juice he could see through the clear plastic of the tumblers, which meant they were drinking screwdrivers, the most unimaginative drink of all the drinks.

It was all depressing. Everything was depressing. Not to the bachelorettes, though. They were laughing, laughing, the way you do when you’re young and carefree with a weekend ahead of you.

On the other side of the deck, at a safe distance from the bachelorettes, a little boy about Max’s age sat pressed into his mother’s side. His mother was on her phone, scrolling mindlessly through something, paying the boy no heed.

Don’t think about Max, Anthony told himself fiercely. He wouldn’t think about the way Max’s face transformed when he was about to ask a cosmic, loaded question. For example: If God made everything, who made God? (Anthony’s parents were staunch Catholics, and Anthony’s mother, Dorothy, was indoctrinating Max on the sly, a fact that made Anthony’s estranged wife Cassie’s normally yoga-calm blood pressure rise.) Or, another example, when Anthony hadn’t turned the channel from the nightly news fast enough, allowing Max an accidental glimpse of the aftermath of an ISIS bombing in Turkey: Why is there evil?

Anthony couldn’t answer either of these questions properly. (Neither, it should be noted, could Dorothy.)

Anthony wouldn’t think about Max, and he wouldn’t think about Cassie, and he wouldn’t think about Glen Manning, Cassie’s smarmy art dealer with whom Anthony was positive she was sleeping. He wouldn’t think about his future—financial and otherwise—which was as murky and inscrutable as a churning ocean. And he definitely, definitely wouldn’t think about his father, Leonard Puckett.

He closed his eyes and dozed. When he felt the ferry slowing he opened his eyes. They were approaching land. He took a deep breath and surveyed his surroundings. Buildings were coming into relief, a jetty, a dozen or so moored sailboats. To approach a place you’d never been before and to have the privilege of approaching it by boat—well, he supposed there was some sort of magic in that. He head-wrote that sentence, and then deleted it. It wasn’t very good.

He’d told nobody where he was going, and he didn’t expect to run into anyone he knew. Cassie certainly hadn’t asked: she just wanted him gone. Nobody he knew vacationed on Block Island. They all went to Nantucket or the Vineyard or the Hamptons. It was a stroke of luck that an ancient uncle of a college friend had a Block Island cottage for which he needed a house sitter.