Pete is still standing out there on the dock. It’s been about ten minutes. Maybe he’s meditating. Maybe he likes this macabre industrial marina. Maybe he thinks he needs to be my security guard. Or see if his colleague’s lonely wife might be interested in giving him a little action because he’s having an extended mid-life crisis. His black shoes like beetles outside the porthole. It hits me I know nothing about him, or what he is actually capable of. There’s no phone on board and no gun. I feel a panic attack building. It’s been building for a long time. My life is over.

At the table I make a plan: I’ll start the boat. Right. The wheel and the throttle are outside — so I can get the boat running, but it will be tied to the dock with the engine going and us not escaping. Us: I’m thinking about the boat as my companion now, something I’m responsible for. The shoes are still there. I look through a drawer in the galley and pull out a knife. Armed.

Pete keeps standing there and I keep looking at his feet. And then I see that letter from Tara and think again about our road trip through the United States. At the washroom stop on the interstate, Gail had rolled her eyes. She couldn’t believe the way Tara was behaving, how childish she still was. I was furious and asked why she had let her come along in the first place, which made Gail feel bad. Sorry. It’s just that Tara never really had any friends, and it’s so pathetic you can’t help but pity her.

We went back outside and Tara was leaning on the car between the front and back doors. She asked me where I wanted to sit. The back, I said. That’s where she was going to sit. I see, I replied. I opened the door anyway and got snug, leaning on the cooler with my feet out the window. Gail ran back to the washroom for paper towel and Tara leaned in the window and hissed, “Why do you always have to have your own way?”

I shook my head and shut my eyes. Maybe I’d get lucky and she would explode before I imploded. I don’t know what happened to her grandma’s girdles but she was wearing a unitard under all her clothes to slim her body, to try to keep all the bitterness and insecurity from leaking out her pores.

We stopped in Boston for the evening. Most hotels were booked so we were lucky to get a ritzy hotel room and not have to sleep in the car. Tara grabbed a bed for herself, saying Gail and I could share. Gail took a shower and came out in lacy underwear. Tara whistled and Gail frowned — even her patience finally thinning. Tara looked at me and said it was just that the two of us were too fat to wear stuff like that. But I’m not fat, I said. I remember the strain in my voice, how I wanted to yell, If I have fat, it’s my fat. Leave my fat alone.