SIX WEEKS AGO, Drew would have called crazy anyone who told him that the day would come when he would be happy to go to sea. He was certainly happy to be done with the Lower Keys Sponge and Fruit Company, and to have seen the last of Doris, who was an evil man. In the past week, Doris had not missed a chance to scold and humiliate him for sloppy workmanship. Drew never cleaned the roots thoroughly enough to please Doris, or he didn’t clip the rough edges of the sponges quite right, or he mistook inferior breeds for the coveted Yellows and Sheepswools, requiring Doris to re-sort them, all the while cursing Drew for being the most useless little turd he’d ever known, a boy of such woeful abilities that he surely would never amount to anything (as if Doris were an example of how far a man could rise if he applied himself). He hated Doris but wanted to please him nonetheless, if for no other reason than to stop the criticisms, but pleasing the man was impossible. It wasn’t that Drew could not get the hang of things; the work was so repetitive and tedious that he could not keep his mind on it for longer than half an hour before he lost himself in reveries of Boston and his mother, whom he missed at times with a physical ache, remembering long-ago winters when the sleighing season opened on Beacon Street and he snuggled beside her under a buffalo robe in the backseat of the family sleigh. Her warmth, the snug robe, and the horses blowing steam in the frosty air all combined in his memory to afflict him with longing, both for her and for the lively cold of a Boston January, which seemed, in Key West’s swelter, as distant in time and space as a star.