Bob makes calls at the pay phone while I sit on the curb soaking up the late-November raindrops. Picking my thumbnail, I listen to him tell me his friend Pete, a doctor who works at the clinic, will pick me up and take me to a jazz concert at the high school. Bob says he’ll feel better knowing I have some company for part of the evening. I won’t have to be alone in a new town. I can get to know the local community. And then I can go to the boat and Bob will be back to take me out for breakfast. I say nothing. It’s easier to just go with the flow. Plus I won’t be able to concentrate on my dissertation in that mildewed dirty boat anyway. Bob asks me to be positive. This is my job, being positive. The cold winter rain pelts down.

I remember when I was seven years old, on a mandatory Sunday visit with my parents to family friends in a trailer court down in the Valley. My father sat there nervously counting my mother’s drinks while I watched her light smoke after smoke with her curled fingers. The family friends showed slides of old people. There were no other kids and the afternoon droned on and on and on until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran out the door and down the small street and got lost among the rectangles people called home and slid my new red coat down a white vinyl wall. In a crumpled pile on the ground, I cried and thought about my good-smelling room back home in the log house, with my neat shelves and tidy bed covered in my patchwork quilt.

That was the first time I met Samuel. He looked out a window and saw me. I remember he held up a picture in his window, a picture of a forest. Maybe it was just a bunch of trees but I saw it as a forest. When we met later, in high school, I told him I remembered the picture. He never said a word, only smiled. When my mother found me shivering on the ground that day, he wasn’t in the window anymore. My mother said I had to be a polite girl or else or else or else. From then on, I hid in the backyard every Sunday until they stopped forcing me into the car. I always swore I wouldn’t ever go anywhere I couldn’t leave.

I’m sitting on the Snapper looking at all the books, but I can’t read them because I’m on guard duty. This industrial park where Bob has the boat tied up is the perfect setting for a horror movie. I turn the transistor radio on and it’s Prince singing “1999” again. The boat rocks. A loud knock. I turn the radio off. As I stand up the lantern swings. The slightest motion rocks the Snapper. A man who must be Doctor Pete yells hello and I slide back the hatch.