Jason paused and looked grave. “Now comes the part we always waited for. This is the part where Grandpa comes in. You see, he was the first person to board the Castagna from the lifesavers. They were all afraid that the frozen line thrown on board would not hold the weight of heavier men, and so he was sent on board to chop the frozen crew from the rigging. Grandpa said he’d never forget the terrified look in the eyes of a frozen crewman as he went toward him with his ax. The crewman was literally frozen stiff and couldn’t move anything but his eyes, which rolled back and forth with this terrible fear as he watched Grandpa chop him loose. It was a tough job in bitter cold to get them all loose, and in the case of the helmsman, Grandpa couldn’t get his fingers free from the ship’s wheel so he chopped away the section in the man’s grasp. Years later he heard that an antique dealer who collected all things nautical had a wheel alleged to be that of the wrecked Castagna. Grandpa said he alone of all people would be able to identify it as such, which he did, for a six-inch piece was missing, just as he had cut it away thirty years earlier!

“Of the survivors, one died before they got him to the Marconi station, and the others, in horrible condition, were bundled up, packed in snow, and put on a train to Boston for the hospital. A year later, the body of the captain was found, still frozen, near Nauset Harbor. My grandfather, every time he told me the story, would say of the rescued men that they were a fine-looking lot, despite what they’d been through. They looked like men who had sailed all their lives. They were bronzed and weatherbeaten and bearded, but wiry and strong or none of them would have survived; they looked like sea-rovers. That’s what he called them, sea-rovers, and it’s always stuck in my mind.”

“What a story! But why was that ship called Castagna, of all things?”

“That’s the one thing I never asked my grandfather. We’ll have to go to your Castagna; maybe they’ll know there.”

“What will they know? It’s up in the mountains, and the people there have never even heard of the sea.”

“Well, then, it’s just serendipity—just something, as I told you, to connect you and me.”

“What a story, Jason,” she repeated, and as she looked at him she thought, In terms of men, a Jowers man was the perfect aesthetic.

That night, for the first time, they slept together and made love in Agostini’s little house up in the hills overlooking the sea. And he said, as they lay there, “Tina, come back with me at the end of this trip. Come back to the States with me and stay with me.”