A big old yam-colored galoot, Buck thrust one callused hand my way, “Come aboard, son. Bout damn time. Put her there.”

It was clear that Grace had told him next to nothing about her sad history with Clyde, with Dix, and me. This alone kept my meeting Buck relatively meaningless and therefore cordial. I hadn’t come all this way to talk to him.

Buck’s innocence made the rest of our afternoon possible. He grinned through pleated skin so sunned it’d thickened to the surface of an inner tube. His huge and able hands were constantly moving, straightening lines, smoothing tarps. The head—raw, noble, outsized—looked like some battered, lichened bust of Justinian. If not brilliant, Buck was plainly civil and surely durable. Like Clyde, he stood about six one. This made me feel both queasy and at home. Lullingly familiar, to be pivoted, seasick like this—between Buck’s sleepy Clyde-like goodwill and Grace’s lazy buzz of scintillating flirtation. She was already doing that to Bethany, who kept disloyally giggling about something. Not, I hoped, me. Not quite yet.

Buck said he soon planned to “take us out.” But first he rigged my girls with hot-pink life preservers. Not two minutes later, his crew of three arrived. The timing, I must say, was perfect. We were quietly under way in less than four minutes. I could see how well his staff knew More Trouble.

Three freckled boys the color of honey-baked hams today wore French sailor shirts. Grace’s idea of celebrating? Was this her nautical equivalent of my candied-apple Jag? Having three young strangers in charge made the brisk sail possible and thoughtless. Their presence also kept our talk more general and therefore more bearable. Two crew members must have been a few years older than our girls. Once More Trouble slid past the jetty, these kids all freely visited and talked. The prettiness of them, stationed in silhouetted clumps against the brilliant blue-green, gave our day at sea an extra glamour. I felt calmed despite my eighteen years’ resolve to force Grace toward some logical conclusion: to explain herself. At last, a full-frontal apology might be nice. For killing Clyde, for permanently shipping me away at eight. One “I’m so, so sorry, son.” Was that too much to ask?

I’d hoped our girls might sneer a bit at Grace and her gift of five-dollar caps. But Deirdre and Sara wore those with great pleasure, kept adjusting the brims’ angles all day, getting the tilt over one eye ever more fetching. (And our girls took the things home as the prizes of their trips; they later wore them to costume parties, kept the caps up in their rooms at least till college. You never know what flashy haberdasher’s knickknacks a kid will take to.)

If Grace acted overfamiliar with our daughters, she stayed slightly formal with my wife, and that, today, seemed wise. Grace flattered Bethany by saying how much she looked like “the youngish Katharine Hepburn.” The “-ish” made such praise more acceptable. (Grace hadn’t overheard that very compliment used on herself.)