Connie’s feet made a sucking sound as she walked in the wet, dense sand at the shore line. The way Dan had said “a short walk” made her self-conscious. Already Connie thought about turning around so as not to hold this man up any longer. But she was intrigued by what he’d said about his son Joe stealing his truck, taking off for California, e-mailing to ask for money.

“Tell me about Joe,” she said. She felt embarrassed that Dan had, apparently, already told her about Joe and she had no recollection.

“Oh, man,” he said. “We’re getting heavy, deep, and real right away?”

“I’m sorry,” Connie said. “But I hear the clock ticking. And I really want to know.”

“Joe,” Dan said. “Joe, Joe, Joe.” He was staring out at the water, and this gave Connie a chance to study him. He was so handsome that it made her a little queasy. She liked his short, clipped hair, the brown and the gray; she liked his blue-hazel eyes, the scruff on his face, his Adam’s apple, the supple, tense form of his runner’s body. Dan took care of his body, Connie could tell. He was going to make it last, and at their age, there was something very appealing about that.

“Just saying the kid’s name makes me anxious,” Dan admitted.

Connie knew this feeling. God, did she! Every time Connie thought or said the name “Ashlyn,” her blood pressure rose. Every time someone else said the name “Ashlyn”-especially someone like Iris-Connie felt like she had a gun trained on her. She was excited to have this phenomenon described by someone else.

“Joe was named for Nicole’s dad,” Dan said. “So, from the beginning, it was like he belonged to her. Only her.” Dan stopped, picked up a round, flat rock, and skipped it a dozen times across the shallows. He grinned at Connie. “I am an excellent skipper of stones.”

“Indeed, you are,” Connie said. It seemed like he was trying to impress her, which was a good sign.

“If you believe in things like that,” Dan said. “That a child can be more aligned with one parent than the other just because of how they’re named. I’m not sure I believe it, but I don’t know; all three boys were inordinately fond of their mother. On some level, I understood it. She was their mother, and she was very nurturing. She was a nutritionist by trade. She worked with the commonwealth on state-mandated school lunches, and locally she worked with the private schools and the Boys & Girls Club and the Boosters. She made sure there was fresh fruit for sale at high-school football games. It sounded ridiculous, but somehow she made it work. It would be a clear autumn afternoon, and next to the snack bar that, by tradition, sold hot dogs and Doritos, there would be a wooden basket of red, crisp apples. Somehow she got the funding for a juice press, and one of the old-timers from the retirement community would be there turning the apples into juice.” Dan shook his head. “The kids loved it; the parents loved it. Nicole was written up in the paper. A local hero.”

Connie smiled. “So your kids loved her even though she made them eat spinach?”

“They ate spinach for her, they ate kale, they ate okra, for God’s sake. I used to try to sneak them licorice and Milky Ways, but they would never eat candy. ‘Mom would freak out,’ they said. I offered them Fritos and Happy Meals. My middle son, Donovan, said to me once, ‘Filled with trans fats!’ Nicole had them brainwashed; they were her… disciples, and not just about food. About everything. No matter what I did, I couldn’t compare. I had a flexible work schedule so I made it to every single one of their ball games, but the only question they asked when they scored the game-winning basket was, ‘Did Mom see it?’ It used to drive me bonkers, and when I complained to Nicole about it, she accused me of turning our parenting into a competition, which wasn’t healthy for anyone.”

“So then she got sick…” Connie said.

“Then she got sick,” Dan said. “And it was a complete crisis. We didn’t tell the kids any more than they needed to know, but they clung to Nicole even tighter. And during the first battle when it looked like we might lose her”-here, Dan stopped talking and drew a few breaths-“I thought that maybe the boys had intuited that illness would claim Nicole, and they were jamming all their love in while they still had a mother to love.”

Oh, God. Sad. Tears stung Connie’s eyes.

“I mean, Charlie was only four when Nicole got diagnosed, so basically from his earliest memory, he’d been in danger of losing her.”

“Right,” Connie said.

“This is a long way of saying that all three boys were closely aligned with Nicole-but especially Joe. All three kids had the predictable struggles with Nicole’s illness. But the problem with Joe happened when Nicole got diagnosed the second time, with cancer of the liver. The prognosis was bleak. It was, well, it was fucking terminal was what it was, and Nicole knew that, and Joe and Donovan and probably even Charlie knew that. Nicole had always been into holistic medicine and alternative treatments. But the pain with liver cancer took her by surprise. She got a doctor’s prescription for…”

“Marijuana,” Connie said.

“Marijuana,” Dan echoed. “And I’m not going to lie to you. I was surprised Nicole would even consider it. She was such a health nut. She did yoga. Even after the liver diagnosis, I’d find her in downward dog, and she drank these revolting shakes with wheatgrass and God knows what else. But for the pain, she smoked weed. Pure, medical-grade ganja. So her last months with us, she was always high.” He cleared his throat. “That might have bothered me in and of itself. But what really got me was that Joe started smoking it with her.”

“He did?” Connie said.

“She allowed it,” Dan said. “She encouraged it.”

“Encouraged it?”

“She was lonely. She wanted to be less lonely, and having Joe with her in her sick room smoking with her made her feel less lonely. Never mind that the kid was only seventeen, a senior in high school. Never mind that smoking dope for him was illegal. They were communing on a ‘higher’ level-that was her joke. She made it sound okay, she made it sound beautiful. But for me it was not okay, and it was certainly not beautiful.”

“No,” Connie said. “I imagine not.”

“It led to some pretty destructive conversations at the end of Nicole’s life. She was so worried about the boys. They were her sole focus. What about me, I asked her, your husband of twenty years? She said, ‘You’ll remarry. You’ll find another wife. But the boys will never have another mother.’ ” Dan looked at Connie. “I can’t tell you how that hurt me. I was being dismissed. The boys were her flesh and blood; I wasn’t. I was cast as some kind of outsider, and then it occurred to me that I’d always been an outsider.” Dan picked up another stone and sent it skipping; it hopped like a bean in a hot pan. “The dying can be so fucking righteous. At some point, Nicole passed into this place where she felt she could say whatever she wanted, no matter who got hurt, because she was going to…”

“Die,” Connie said.

“Die,” Dan said.

Nicole died, Dan said. (Connie was interested by his tone of voice. He said it like he still couldn’t believe it, which was how Connie felt about Wolf.) Donovan and Charlie handled it okay. Joe did not handle it okay. He continued to smoke dope in the house, in front of his brothers, and Charlie was only twelve. Joe had “inherited” a huge stash from Nicole, Dan said. Dan hunted all over the house for it but couldn’t turn it up. There were fights. Dan was angry about the marijuana; Joe was angry at Dan for picking fights with Nicole about the marijuana.

“She was dying and you were yelling at her,” Joe said.

“What she did was irresponsible,” Dan said. “Letting you smoke.”

“The marijuana was for the pain,” Joe said.

“Her pain,” Dan said. “Not your pain.”

Joe continued to smoke-though, in a small concession, not in front of his brothers. He had been accepted to Boston College, but after Nicole died, he decided to defer a year. He talked about going to California and working on a campaign to legalize marijuana. Dan told him that no way in hell was Flynn family money going to be spent subsidizing a drug odyssey in California. If Joe wanted to go, that was his choice, but he had to pay his own way.

Joe’s answer to this was to steal Dan’s pickup truck while Dan was out on his boat. He put it on the ferry and was halfway across the state of New York before Dan figured out what had happened. He could have had Joe tracked down and arrested, but Dan knew Joe was in possession of marijuana, and despite his anger and his hurt, he didn’t want to see his kid go to jail.

“And so that was it,” Dan said. “He’s gone, he’s in California, he contacted me the one time for money. He sent a goddamned e-mail. I said to myself, If he has the stones to call and ask me for money, that’s one thing, but I will not answer a goddamned e-mail. But then, of course, I did.”

“Does he talk to his brothers?” Connie asked.

“He might, but they don’t tell me. In our house, his is the name that shall not be spoken.”

“But you’d welcome him back?” Connie asked.

“In a heartbeat,” Dan said.

They had turned around at the part about Nicole being prescribed marijuana, and now they were headed back. Connie was afraid to ask what time it was. She didn’t want this walk to end.

“Do you feel better, telling me?” Connie asked.

“You know?” he said. “I do. You may be the only person I’ve told the story to that way-start to finish like that. That’s the problem with growing up in a place like Nantucket and still living here. Everyone feels like they already know what happened because they were right there watching it. Most people think Joe is a pothead who stole my truck and lit out to California to live a life even more liberally oriented than his mother’s had been. But those people bother me because it wasn’t entirely Joe’s fault. I’m to blame as well, and Nicole is to blame, although no one wants to blame Nicole because she’s dead. I haven’t had a chance to step far enough away from what happened to see it clearly.” He laughed sadly. “That’s the problem with an island.”

“I guess,” Connie said.

“So tell me about your daughter,” Dan said.

“Isn’t one tale of woe enough for one day?” Connie said. “No, I would tell you but I don’t want you to be late for work.”

“Work can wait,” Dan said. He sounded like he meant it, and Connie felt something unfamiliar bloom inside her. Wolf had been the most wonderful man she’d ever known, but those words-Work can wait-had never once crossed his lips. Now, if Wolf were here to defend himself, he would point out that power washing and caretaking and lobstering were not the same as being a nationally renowned architect.

Connie ceded this point to him silently while still feeling pleasure about being put first. “I’ll tell you another time,” she said.

“No, tell me now. Please,” Dan said. “Otherwise I’m going to feel like I failed. Like I didn’t allow you to climax.”

Connie froze, shocked. Had he really just said that? The idea of her and sexual climax in the same sentence was much more foreign than it ought to have been. But not wanting to call attention to that fact, Connie laughed.

Dan said, “I’m sorry. That was very inappropriate.”

She said, “You caught me off guard. But I like that.”

“I like that you like that,” Dan said, and he took her hand.

They had about a hundred yards of beach left before they reached their shoes, and they were holding hands. Just a little over an hour before, Connie had been sure she was being given the brush off in aisle ten, and now they were holding hands. And Dan had made a joke about bringing Connie to climax. She wasn’t sure she had the concentration to proceed.

“Okay, remember what you said about naming Joe after Nicole’s father and then feeling like he belonged to her? Well, in my case…” Here, she drifted. She was about to revisit emotional territory she had decided to abandon decades ago. Why go back? Well, on the one hand, Dan had been achingly honest with her, and she wanted to reciprocate. But, on the other hand, she didn’t know if she could be achingly honest. “I got pregnant with Ashlyn by accident. Wolf and I had been dating for less than six months, and he invited me here to Nantucket for a week, which turned into two weeks. And I’m pretty sure that Ashlyn was conceived in the back of a pickup truck at the Madequecham Jam.”

“No way!” Dan said. “You were at the Madequecham Jam? What year are we talking about?”

“Eighty-two,” Connie said.

“I was there,” Dan said. “I was definitely there. How’s that for weird?”