Husbands & Lovers

Chapter Four Mallory

June 2022

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

It’s no secret that I have an embarrassing amount of trouble recalling the names of the other moms on the PTA committee or what time I’m supposed to pick up Sam from soccer practice. But I can still picture the exact expression on Paige’s face when the lawyer read Mom’s will.

Not the part about the money. Like I said, Paige already has plenty of that. She might have been surprised about the Appalachian Mountain Club thing, but she wasn’t disappointed, per se.

Not until he came to the paragraph about the bracelet.

To begin with, we were both amazed Mom had made a will at all. Probably Paige had nagged her into it. Still, even Paige couldn’t quite believe that Mom went through with the whole process, found a lawyer and everything, witnessed and notarized and all that. We sat there in his office in Provincetown overlooking Cape Cod Bay—afoggy, miserable day—kind of numb and stiff, not quite believing what we were hearing. The house, blah blah. The remainder of cash on hand, blah blah. Personal effects, blah blah. Paige got the Royal Doulton handed down from Grandma, and good luck to her.

My gold bracelet in the shape of a cobra, set with two emeralds of approximately ⒈／⒋ carat weight each and one ruby of approximately ⒈／⒉ carat weight, has great personal meaning to me as it was given to me by my mother at my birth. I leave this bracelet to my daughter Mallory Rose, because she always wanted to try it on when she was a little girl, and I told her the bracelet could be removed only after my death.

Paige, it’s fair to say, was not expecting that.

Eldest daughter and everything, right? She naturally assumed that Mom’s heirloom bracelet would fall to her, like a royal title. And when that bracelet first arrived in its small brown package to my house in Mystic, I couldn’t even think of wearing it. I felt like a thief.

I remember how I used to stare at it for long, silent minutes, turning it this way and that, as autumn crept into winter. At night, I would take the cobra from the drawer in the bedside table and run my thumb along the scales. Sometimes, if I rubbed it long enough, it seemed to me that the cobra stirred to life between my fingers, like a genie from a lamp. A trick of lighting or mood, I guess. I would glimpse the warmth of my mother’s green eyes simmering inside the emeralds and think, Oh, I know you.

One night in January, restless and a little drunk, I slid the bracelet over my hand and settled it in place.

You’d think it might feel strange, this hard new object on my arm. But the funny thing about Mom’s bracelet, it has a way of spiraling itself to fit the anatomy of your wrist. The coils clasp you right where your skin thins to a tissue. Where your pulse beats. Where your lover kisses you. I remember I lay there staring at this snake wound around me, like a vine that had grown there, returning the thud of my heart, and for the first time I thought I understood why my mother wouldn’t take it off, never, not once, not even to let her little girl try it on.

Now I lie in my bed in the blue-and-white guest bedroom at Summersalt and watch another dawn pour over the gold scales and the curving hood. The emerald eyes glitter to life and this feeling smacks me—my brain’s beating to a strange rhythm, I’ve hardly slept all night—like I’ve never seen this bracelet before in my life.

Given to me by my mother at my birth, she wrote.

But which mother?

You’d be surprised just how many foods contain potassium. It’s a real pain in the neck because most of them are the kinds of foods kids live on—french fries, orange juice, bananas, anything with tomatoes.

And don’t get me started on phosphorus. Think anything dairy—milk, yogurt, ice cream. Then there’s salt. If your kidneys don’t work, you don’t pee much, so you have to limit fluid intake. Salt makes you thirsty, ergo no potato chips.

Of course, you weren’t eating the potato chips anyway because of potassium.

And I used to think the parents of the allergy kids had it bad.

Anyway, even though Sam’s pretty good about self-policing his diet, I like to keep an eye on mealtimes when we’re staying with Paige and her girls. Most females are big on rules, at least until they hit puberty, but Ida’s the youngest and kind of an anarchist. She used to sneak Sam bananas at breakfast until Paige found out and tossed them in the trash bin. This morning the gang’s just horsing around with the Cheerios, but while I love Ida to death and she’s secretly my favorite—I have a weakness for anarchy—you would never, ever turn your back on her.

As a result, I almost miss the story in the paper about Monk Adams’s wedding.

I first googled his name when Sam was about a year old.

It was an impulse. I told myself I’d never look up Monk again—I’d made a clean break, no looking back. Anyway, I was busy! I had a new job, a new life, a newborn. I spent my days in a fog of baby care and block prints, my nights—well, in a fog of baby care and block prints. In between Sam and work, I shopped for groceries and washed the dishes. That was all. No books, no television, no movies, no news. I had no idea what was happening in the wide world until Paige called me up one day—she’d been working in Singapore that summer when Sam was conceived, so she hadn’t yet pieced together any details—and said, Did you happen to know a guy named Monk Adams in your year at Nobles?

My heart stopped. Kind of, I said. Why?

Because I heard he’s got some music album coming out. The first song just dropped and it’s already number one on iTunes.

I remember this feeling like a car accident. The impact hit my chest and started waves of shock down my arms and legs and up my neck into my head. Even if I could think of something to say, I couldn’t move my neck or my jaw to form the words.

Mallie? Are you there? asked Paige.

I mumbled something along the lines of Oh yeah. I think he was into that stuff.

To which she answered—this I remember clearly, it was so typical of Paige—Well, you should try to get back in touch. You never know, he might remember you.

After I hung up the phone, I poured myself a glass of wine and entered Monk Adams in the Google search field.

Well, you already know what turned up in the results—Monk Adams and his debut album, Sunrise, which launched him into orbit around this ordinary earth that mortals walk. By now, you’ve seen his photograph a thousand times, so I don’t have to attempt to describe that smile, that jaw, those arctic eyes. You’ve hung your dreams on those cheekbones, you’ve imagined your arms around those shoulders. You’ve laughed and cried with him, you’ve cheered and screamed. Admit it, you bawled like a baby when he dedicated the Grammy Award to his aunt who died of ovarian cancer and urged all women watching tonight to make their appointments for that yearly exam, in memory of Aunt Barbara.

Trust me when I tell you that Aunt Barbara was worth it.

I must have spent a couple of hours reading all the stories—at that point, they were all giddy newcomer profiles, you remember them, like that fresh-faced photo shoot for Men’s Health with all the adorable anecdotes—while I finished the bottle of wine, a choice I regretted the next morning when I woke up to this new universe in which everybody knew who Monk Adams was, everybody worshipped Monk—a world not so different from the one before it, true, but this time it wasn’t just our circle of friends under his spell. It was all the people in the world. People who heard his music and saw his picture and went to his concerts.

Everybody.

I told myself I was happy for Monk. Of course I was! He’d done exactly what he said he wanted, as we burrowed together in the sand that summer, trading our secrets, beat-up guitar plucking out music from the drowsy air, except he’d succeeded beyond anything either of us dreamed of. But how could you expect that Monk Adams, wanting to defy his father and write songs for a living, wanting to bring stories to life in music, would do anything less than dazzle the whole world?

I mean, I could hardly blame Monk for being Monk, could I?

Anyway, I never searched Google for Monk’s name after that, but I hardly needed to. I kept track of him against my will, because you can’t exactly help reading the tabloid headlines as you stand in line at the supermarket, next to your son, who bears a startling resemblance to the man beaming off the cover of People magazine.

Or this photo. Black and white on the front page of the Lifestyle section of the Boston Globe.

You should understand that Boston takes what I’d call a proprietary interest in Monk Adams. He’s a local son, after all—born and raised in Brookline, prepped at Nobles and Greenough, college over the Maine border at Colby. To be fair, this is not exactly what you’d call a typical Boston upbringing, but for a guy who could walk his pedigree back to the Mayflower, he maintains a fairly convincing regular-guy persona. He wears a Red Sox hat at concerts, for God’s sake. Sitting there on his barstool as he croons into your soul.

Anyway, the Globe’s gossip page is freaking out over unconfirmed reports that Adams is marrying his longtime girlfriend in a hush-hush affair on Winthrop Island, at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, where his family spends the summer. Rumors suggest a ceremony at St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, reception at the Winthrop Island Club, a flotilla of vintage Gar Wood runabouts to ferry the guests to and from the island, which famously doesn’t have any public overnight accommodation except for a few leaky bedrooms above the bar at the Mohegan Inn.

When contacted by the Globe, the story continues, Adams’s spokesperson refused to comment.

But you all know what that means.

Paige bounds into the kitchen. I flip over the newspaper and lay it on the counter.

“Holy beans,” she says, mindful of the kids even in her excitement. “Did you hear about Monk Adams getting married on Winthrop this summer?”

At the edge of my peripheral vision, Sam looks up from his bowl of Cheerios and oat milk.

Paige glances at Sam and back to me. She’s wearing a pair of navy stretch capris and a Lululemon tank. Her face is bare, her skin’s flushed, her hair’s scraped back in a damp ponytail at the back of her head. She likes to do Pilates on the beach each morning while she’s reading the news on her phone. Don’t ask me how that works.

“Hey, do you mind giving me a hand covering the furniture on the patio?” she chirps. “I think it’s going to rain.”

The bougie new patio at Summersalt used to be our vegetable garden, back when we were kids. Now a saltwater pool flickers in the sunshine. There is an outdoor fireplace, flanked by a sectional sofa and chairs and side tables, all cushioned in shades of coral and blue. Paige sets about pulling the fitted waterproof furniture covers from the storage closet in the pool house.

“I have this idea,” Paige says.

“Absolutely not.”

“You don’t even know what it is!”

“I can guess. You want me to crash Monk Adams’s wedding to that supermodel. Whatever her name is.”

“First of all, her name is Lennox. Lennox Lassiter. Secondly, she is not a supermodel. What is this, 1999? She’s a lifestyle influencer, as you would know if you pulled your head out of the ground once in a while.”

“Paige, I don’t even know what that means.”

“Thirdly,” Paige says, handing me one end to spread over the sectional, “I’m not talking about crashing the wedding. That would be stupid and counterproductive. He would hate you forever.”

“News flash. He already does.”

“What? Why?”

I adjust the corner a final time and straighten from the sectional. Paige stares at me with her inquisitive fox eyes. I turn away and pull another furniture cover from the stack on the coffee table. “What’s this one for?”

“Dining set.”

I walk toward the long teak table under the awning, wrapped with fairy lights. “So what’s your big idea?” I ask over my shoulder.

“DNA test,” she says.

“Are you serious? How am I supposed to get my hands on his DNA?”

“Not Monk’s DNA.” She lifts the two enormous lanterns from the middle of the table and sets them on the paving stones. “Yours. Or mine, if you won’t cooperate.”

“Wait, what are we talking about?”

“I’m talking about Mom, you screwup. You know, the fact that it turns out we don’t know a single thing about where we came from? All we do is we send in our DNA to one of those ancestry websites and find out.”

Together we drop the cover over the table and chairs like a tea cozy. “No. Nope. No fucking way.”

“Mallory, come on. I don’t know what your problem is with this stuff. Everyone’s doing it.”

“You haven’t, or you wouldn’t be asking me.”

“Mallory, there’s a story here. Our story. Where we came from. Don’t you care? Don’t you want to find out the truth?”

Before I can reply, she lifts the lanterns and marches back to the pool house. I stand there on the paving stones and follow the metronome swing of her ponytail.

“No,” I call after her. “Not really.”

Paige stops so fast, the lanterns swing from her hands. “What? How can you not want to know?”

“Ever heard of this chick called Pandora and her box?”

“For the love of God, Mallory. What are you scared of this time?”

“I don’t know. Sending my genetic information to some corporation? My entire fucking genome?”

“Please. It’s no big deal. They have privacy rules in place. It’s all encrypted.”

“Sure it is. Do they tell you that on the website? All our databases are encrypted and totally one hundred percent hacker-proof?”

She starts back toward the pool house. “Hackers are after financial information, Mallory. They don’t know a double helix from confetti.”

I trot after her. “You don’t think this kind of information is valuable to somebody? The government? Pharmaceutical companies, maybe? Next thing you know, you get one of those Update to our privacy policy emails you can’t be bothered to read through before you click OK, and presto, corporate profits are booming—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. You and your Marxist bullshit.”

“What the hell, Paige. I am not a Marxist. I mean, not since college. But I’m also not about to hand over my entire DNA sequence to the capitalist pigs.”

Paige sets the second lantern on the shelf in the storage closet and closes the door. “You know what? This isn’t about your stupid conspiracy theories. You’re just scared.”

“Me? Scared? Of what?”

“Of what it might tell you. Like maybe you have the breast cancer gene or a predisposition to macular degeneration. Admit it.”

“Okay, fine. I’ve always subscribed to the ignorance is bliss philosophy. I think it’s served me pretty well. Compared to you, anyway.”

“Me?”

“Total mass of seething anxiety. Admit it.”

“You’re such a bitch, Mallory.”

“You’re such a bitch, Paige.”

Paige’s blue eyes drench me in loathing. A couple of drops smack the top of my head. The air smells warm and worried; a cloud rumbles offshore. She was right about the rain, like she’s right about everything.

“Fine,” she says. “I’ll spit in the damn vial. Either way, we’re going to find out what the story is with Mom. And do you know why?”

“Because you can’t stand not knowing?”

“Because I love my nephew, that’s why. And I want to find him a new kidney, like, before the next global pandemic.”

To get to the ocean from Summersalt, you make your way past a long, shallow tidal inlet and through some tall grass to the dunes. When we were kids, Paige and I used to roll down them and scramble back up like a pair of human bulldozers. Now a pair of mesh fences marks out a narrow path. After the squall passes through, I follow Sam up this track and down the other side, where the ocean smashes on the sand and the world is nothing but sun and salt water. To watch your kid tuck his board under his arm and stride out into this pandemonium—just as Paige and I used to do, a million years ago—is to learn what faith really means.

Before the accident—I like to call it an accident for some reason—I would say a little prayer that went something like, All right, God, just be gentle with him, okay? Gather him in your tender hands and give him back to me when you’re done. I don’t know if I really believed in God, or whether I was just invoking his name because it was convenient to pray to something instead of nothing.

Either way, I don’t pray anymore. I settle myself on one of Paige’s sisal beach mats and watch my lithe, golden-skinned son dive like a porpoise through the breakers, as fearless of fate as Monk was. I close my eyes to the sun, and if I think anything at all, any articulate idea, it goes something like, Dear Lord, haven’t you fucked with me enough already?

Paige plops down next to me in the sand and kicks off her flip-flops.

“Sent off my spit,” she says. “Should get the ancestry report back in a few weeks.”

“Sweet.”

She nudges my foot with hers. “Still can’t wrap my head around it. Why Mom would keep a thing like this from us. Do you think maybe she meant to tell us but died before she could? Out climbing ruins with Dildo?”

“You think Mom kept it from us? Please. That’s all on Grandma and Grandpa. It’s just the kind of thing they would do. Adopting a baby from Ireland and passing it off as theirs.”

“She was theirs, Mallory. She was their child. They raised her and loved her, which is more than you can say of this woman who gave her up to the Irish nuns.” She lifts her knees and hugs them. “Anyway, you don’t know Grandma like I did. She would’ve told Mom.”

“Disagree. If she’d told Mom, Mom would’ve told me.”

“Oh, is that what it is? You’re pissed because Mom didn’t tell her precious soulmate everything?”

“Shut up, Paige.”

She tosses a newspaper into my lap. I lift my sunglasses and peer into Monk Adams’s grinning black-and-white face, tilted just a few degrees, like they caught him in the middle of a joke.

“Nice photo, right?” she says.

I pitch the paper into the sand next to the beach mat.

Paige leans back on her elbows and squints at the surf. “It doesn’t matter how you tell him, okay? The fact is, he needs to know. He just does. And Sam needs him to know. And whatever happened back then, you need to put on your big-girl pants and get it done.”

The ocean seems to be holding its breath. The surface twitches. Sam’s head bobs impatiently between one slow wave and another. I push myself off my elbows and sit up.

“I guess you’re not worried about sharks,” says Paige.

“Sure, I worry about sharks.”

I throw my gaze past the breakers, where a new wave rises. Higher and higher it climbs. Sam scrambles on his board, paddles his arms, poises just so at that delicate instant when the height of water above the surface reaches equilibrium with the height below the surface.

Paige springs to her feet and shouts, Jesus Christ!

The water crumples over itself and Sam sails true along the crest, arrow-perfect like Monk used to do, and for a second there it all comes back, so that I might be living it again—the summer, the surf, Monk grinning his way out of the waves to plop down on the sand beside me and shake the droplets from his hair into my lap.

Then he’s gone.

Just Sam, popping up like a cork from the surf. Flinging the salt water from his shaggy gold hair.

I collapse backward, woozy with relief, and stare at the hot white sky.

I met Benjamin Monk Adams in a scene from a movie. I think the movie would be Dead Poets Society except that Nobles is coeducational and mostly day students, although a minority of us were what they call “five-day boarders” who went home on weekends. Every Friday Mom would drive to Dedham from Provincetown and collect me, and every Sunday she would drop me back off. Paige was four years older and starting Yale, so it was just the two of us in that car, blasting tunes, chattering like sisters.

One Sunday evening in the middle of October we pulled up outside the dorm just as Monk was climbing out of his grandparents’ Mercedes station wagon.

Mom turned down the radio and let out a wolf whistle.

“Who the hell is that?” she asked me.

Six weeks into the school year, here was what I knew about Monk Adams: One, that he was a third former—like me—and already stood an inch over six feet tall. Two, that he took all the honors classes and played quarterback for the junior varsity football team. Three, that he was the handsomest boy I’d ever seen, like a movie star playing a high school student, so far out of my league he might have lived in another state.

Four, that his girlfriend was a blond day student named Sophie, who played forward on the girls’ soccer team and had legs as long and tanned as the legs of a racehorse.

Because it was one of those October warm spells and the car was an old one—the cherry-red mid-nineties Toyota 4Runner that saw us through most of my childhood—the windows were rolled down and Mom’s voice rang right out into the clear air.

Monk’s head swiveled in our direction.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered.

Mom gave the horn a toot and waved from the window.

“Yoohoo!” she called out. “Young man! Could you give us a hand?”

The Mercedes scooted off. Monk stood right near the streetlamp, so you could see the slow, quizzical smile spread across his face. He hoisted his duffel bag on his shoulder and walked toward us.

“I am going to kill you,” I told my mother.

Mom leaned across me. “Hello there!”

Monk stuck out his hand. “Monk Adams, ma’am. Are you Mallory’s mom?”

Up until now, the sum of my interaction with Monk Adams came to a few distant, furtive, smoldering glances on my part and a single, blank thought bubble of blissful inattention on his. I don’t think I’d ventured within ten yards of him except that one time in the dining hall when I’d happened to fall in place behind Monk in the salad line, and even then he never noticed me because he was—as usual—surrounded by this crew who’d started Nobles together in the first form, while I was still attending the small public middle school in Provincetown.

I remember thinking, Oh my God. Monk Adams knows my name.

“That’s right,” Mom said. “Are you heading into the residence hall right now?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you mind giving Mallory a hand with her bag? I packed her some boots and rain gear for the autumn weather and it’s a little heavy.”

“Mom, I can handle it,” I said.

“Sure, no problem,” said Monk.

He reached for the door handle and opened the door for me.

I climbed out. My legs were so rubbery, I had to grab the edge of the door to steady myself.

“Bag’s in the back?” he asked. But he was already on his way to the battered rear of the 4Runner. He gave the window a little rap with his knuckles and Mom obligingly popped it open for him while I stood there a few feet away, mute and frozen. He reached inside and plucked out both duffel bags.

I lurched for one of them and mumbled, “I’ve got it.”

“No worries. One in each hand,” he said, lifting them both at once. “Balances me out.”

I wanted to point out that he’d already slung his own duffel bag over one shoulder so he wasn’t balanced out at all, but my mouth was too dry to dislodge my tongue, and anyway I was afraid the words would come out garbled, like I’d had a stroke or something.

Maybe I had had a stroke. I was absolutely feeling stroke-level disorientation at this point.

While I stood there like an idiot, Monk walked around to the driver’s side. “Mallory’s awesome, Mrs. Dunne. She’s in my fifth-period art class? Serious talent.”

“Why, thank you, Monk. It’s Ms. Dunne, by the way.”

Under the seedy glare of the streetlamp, I saw Monk’s grin flash wider still, if such a thing were possible.

“Ms. Dunne,” he said.

“Mallory’s always loved art. You should have seen her drawings from preschool. She would line up all her My Little Ponies and sketch them perfectly. I mean, you could see the personality of each pony right there on its face.”

“Love it. My Little Pony. My kid sister has those.” He straightened and slapped the roof of the 4Runner, such that I was afraid it might crumple under his palm. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Dunne. I’ll make sure Mallory makes it to her room okay.”

“Why, thank you, Monk. You’re such a gentleman. Have a great week!”

She craned back to me and winked. As she drove away, she waved her hand cheerfully from the window.

Monk looked at me, still smiling. “Cool mom.”

“I’m so sorry about that. Seriously, I can carry my bags.”

Monk started off toward the dorm entrance. “Naw, I got you. Mother raised me right.”

“Are you sure?” I said, tagging after him.

“Actually, it was my aunt Barbara.”

“What’s that?”

“My aunt Barbara raised me. You’re on the cross-country team, right?”

“Yes.”

“We watch you guys doing those hill sprints from the football field. Brutal.”

“Yeah, the coach is pretty tough.”

“That senior girl out front, she’s a freak.”

“She’s being recruited by Dartmouth.”

“Oh yeah? Good for her. Only way to get in anymore, right?”

He opened the door for me, and for an instant we made eye contact. Sun blind.

Then we swooped into the commons, where a bunch of kids sprawled on the armchairs, watching TV. They looked up together like meerkats.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “You all know Mallory, right?”

Nobody knew Mallory, but they all said hey.

Monk looked at me. “Where’s your room?”

“Second floor. But I can totally take it from—”

Monk Adams was already heading for the stairs with my two duffels. We stopped to check in with the RA—they were still building the new dorm with the modern key cards and everything—and proceeded up to my room, where he set down my bags under the shocked gaze of Lindsay, my roommate. She mouthed something to me. I made one of those scared, bared-teeth smiles.

Monk turned to me. “You want to pop some popcorn?”

“Sure,” I said.

Monk had a couple Costco boxes of microwave popcorn in his room on the boys’ wing. We popped a bag in the microwave in the first-floor commons.

Then we sat on the sofa and talked until curfew.

I wish I could remember what we talked about that evening. It was probably just normal getting-to-know-you stuff, where are you from, how many siblings, how do you like Nobles—all the things I know about Monk without knowing how I know it. Maybe he told me then about how much he loved music, how he played guitar and piano and wrote songs in his head while he lay in bed, trying to sleep. But I can’t say for certain.

I wish I could.

I wish I’d had the foresight to record those hours on my memory, to understand how often I would return to them as the years passed and Monk Adams no longer existed down the stairs from me, across the dining hall, dwarfing the desk next to me in AP Lit as we passed notes inside our battered paperback copies of Hamlet and tried not to laugh.

I wish I could remember every word we ever said to each other, like those people who can recall their entire lives like a gigantic library of video clips.

What I do remember is how it felt to talk to Monk Adams for three hours straight, like you were the most important, most fascinating person in the world. I remember the way his face tilted as he listened to me, his pale eyes, the dimple in his chin. I remember the size of his hands that could palm a basketball or spread across an octave and a half on a piano keyboard, and the scar on the right side of his jaw, which—I would later learn—had been split open by a lacrosse stick when he was eleven.

I remember dreaming, as I lay in bed that night, heart bouncing from my ribs, that maybe Monk Adams felt the same connection I did. Maybe he was the kind of boy you dreamed about, the unicorn boy, the boy who peered beneath your surface to marvel at the weirdness roiling within.

Maybe he might want to break up with Soccer Sophie of the Thoroughbred legs and hold me in his heart instead.

On the sisal beach mat next to mine, Paige settles back and folds her arms behind her head.

“Did I ever tell you about my Yale friend who summers on Winthrop Island?” she asks.

“You mean Lola? Only about a dozen times a year.”

“We were just texting each other, and you’re never going to believe this.”

I reach for my straw hat and lay it over my face.

“It turns out, her family’s house is just down the beach from Monk’s place,” says Paige. “Isn’t that weird?”

“Fuck off, Paige.”

“Just the day, Mal. Just one day, that’s all I’m asking. It’ll be fun.”

I lift the hat and turn my head to face her.

“Fuck. Off.”

Long story short, I’m huddled next to Paige in the cockpit of the Fjord, sipping artisan coffee from a Yeti mug as we kick across Buzzards Bay toward Point Judith. Half past seven in the morning. Sun glowing pink behind the eastern clouds. Kids raising hell in the seats behind us. A fragment of a sentence keeps repeating in my head, the one at the end of Gatsby, the one everybody knows so it’s become one of those sad, pretentious clichés. But it’s true.

Boats against the current.

I swallow back a mouthful of scalding coffee and stare through the sticky morning haze at the shore ahead on either side.

Boats against the current, my head beats on.

Borne back ceaselessly into the goddamn past.