Beneath a Persian blue comforter patterned with scattered nosegays of mauve, magenta and dusky pink roses, Skye lay on her side in the darkening bedroom. Her eyes scanned the familiar room, moving from the walls, painted a light cornflower blue, to the framed reproductions of Degas’ Dancers at the Barre and Two Dancers, to her tea-green angora sweater, draped carefully over the back of a Victorian carved walnut side chair that had once belonged to Arden (who had needlepointed its seat with a spray of pale blush roses, blue bells and Easter lilies on a powder blue ground when she was scarcely older than Skye was now). With a softened gaze, her eyes came to rest on one of the counterpane’s printed bouquets.  She watched it intently, without blinking, waiting to catch the precise moment when, in the half-light, distinct hues disappeared, leaving only values of grey: a world with no color, nothing but the play of shadow and light.  Losing herself in rapt anticipation, she forgot, for a moment or two, the strange, unyielding knur of hunger in her abdomen–like a soiled, damp dishcloth wrung out and left to dry into a stiff, twisted knot.

        Reminded, suddenly, by his phone’s vibrating in his pocket, that he hadn’t yet picked up the message from Arden, Rennie groaned audibly, “C’mon, you old fleabag, you.  Let’s go face the music.”  Talisker pushed ahead of him as he entered the unlit vestibule. He called out, but no one answered.  He felt his way down the hall into the kitchen, where the radio was playing softly.  In the room—barely illuminated by a single window beyond which shadowy dusk, a recalcitrant guest, waited hesitantly—he found a note written in Arden’s elegant, rounded script:

        ”Gone to pilates.
         Soup on stove.
         Aran babysitting.
         Skye in bed.
         Feed dog.
         Take out garbage.
         Put clothes in dryer.”

He lifted the lid on the stockpot that was set onto one of the back burners of the stove: inside was a thick pool of puréed green vegetable (what was the story he had read as a child about the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River”?).  He replaced the lid, noticed, in the dim light, an opened half-bottle of wine on the counter and poured himself a drink.  He thought about the little fairy cakes Aimée had set beside him and wished, with an unexpected and incongruously profound sense of loss, that he had at least tasted one of them. He sat on the floor, the dog lying beside him, and took a sip of the Shiraz.

        ”Parce, Domine,” the hushed voices on the radio intoned.

He lay down, resting his head on the sleeping dog’s belly, and shut his eyes.

        Parce populo tuo:
        ne in aeternum irascaris nobis.

        Talisker nudged his hand and leaned against his leg as Rennie stood looking at the front of the house, thinking about how he had tentatively touched the newly painted deck, just as his father had gently tested the surface of the boat, to be sure it was dry.  If he hurried, he had calculated, it would be possible, before Arden and the girls arrived home from the cottage, to purchase and lay down some sisal carpet. Leaving a crestfallen dog at home (it was too hot to let her stay in the car), he had dashed out to the hardware store and had returned with a large roll of the carpeting and a basket of bronze chrysanthemums, harbingers of autumn.

        After quickly laying the sisal and placing the mums at the edge of the porch, he had sat on the front stoop and had taken a sip of Kilkenny.  ”Well,” he had thought,  ”if it’s not exactly yare, it certainly is shipshape.”  He had felt a welling of excitement when he saw Arden’s Audi pulling into a parking spot down the street.  Carrying baskets of produce from the country, she, Skye and Aran had been greeted by Talisker, who had bounded down the steps to welcome them.

        ”Oh, you stink!” Skye had exclaimed.

        Arden had come up the pathway, had stopped to consider Rennie’s handiwork and, with a look on her face of resigned disapproval, had sighed, “Well, you just couldn’t resist being ‘creative,’ could you?   Can you at least manage to get the things from the car?  I need a bath. And a glass of wine.  That is,” she had added, eyeing his bottle of ale, “if you’ve left anything to drink in the house.”

        Rennie’s father had shown him how to prime the model, once it was mostly completed, and had let the boy try his hand at varnishing and painting.

        ”All it takes,” John had told him, “is a concentrated gaze and a steady hand.”

        After varnishing the deck and mast, they had applied strips of masking tape to define a clean edge around the hull; then Rennie had painted the rudder, centerboard, cabin and bottom half of the sloop a shiny wagon red. He had coated the hull above the boot top with a glossy white.  After determining that the paint was no longer tacky, his father had, with one swift, sure stroke, edged the white hull with a thin line of red. Finally, they had attached miniscule brass fittings, rigged the jib and mainsail—

        So hoist up the John A’s sail
        See how the mainsail sets

—and affixed to the side of the ship’s cabin miniature life preservers (Rennie had painted them, using a brush with bristles as soft and fine as the fur on a cat’s underbelly, the same red and white).

        When it was finished, they had swaddled it in a plaid stadium blanket and taken it, on one particularly golden Sunday afternoon, to town.  In the Common, the trees were ablaze with autumn color: “Proof positive,” John Aitken had observed to his son, “that God really does call out to us from a burning bush.”   Then they had carefully unwrapped the model, had set it gently into Storrow Lagoon and, beneath a cobalt sky, they had silently watched the gleaming red and white sloop bobbing in the water that was islanded with fallen yellow leaves.

     A few days into the project, Rennie’s sister had put on a record with the Beach Boys singing “Sloop John B.” Rennie and his father had gleefully sung along, altering the lyrics ad libitum (and so adding to the general, and atypical in their household, hilarity):

We come on the Sloop John A…

Each time he shouted out the surrogate “A,” Rennie would double over in laughter, finding the substitution—the ship they were assembling was the John Alden and his father’s name was John Aitken—deliciously apt.

…My father and me
Around a New England town we did roam
Drinking all night
Got into a fight
Well I feel so broke up…

Asserting that the Kingston Trio’s rendition was irrefutably superior, John had emphatically intoned “break up” when he sang the refrain, contributing to even greater amusement as father and son would feign sparring (“Okay, okay” Rennie had excitedly giggled, “time to GET INTO A FIGHT!”) in anticipation of the disputed phrase.

…I want to go home.

     One Friday night, though, early in the autumn of their year Stateside, Rennie’s father had arrived home with a gift for him, a large, rectangular box wrapped in kraft paper.  This was notably uncharacteristic: his father wasn’t an impulsive man, he rarely gave presents (except for crisp bills tucked into Hallmark cards that were left, discreetly and predictably, on the recipient’s nightstand on birthdays and holidays), and he had never singled out Rennie, a middle child, for anything.  But the arrival of this unanticipated gift marked the advent of a new postprandial activity.  Each night, after his wife had cleared the dinner dishes, Rennie’s father had carefully spread the day’s newspaper over the surface of the dining room table and set out pieces of a wooden model boat kit (the contents of the mysterious box).  While he set about measuring, marking and cutting the basswood and mahogany that would be used to make the boat’s frame, keel, transom, deck and planking (he had, before Rennie was born, single-handedly built the family cottage—long since sold—in the Ottawa River valley), his son sorted through a trove of nautical booty, making neat piles of deadeyes, stanchions, rudder hinges, rails, nails, rings, eyebolts, chain, belaying cleats and tiny cast metal life buoys and anchors.

    Rennie had been born in the early sixties, yet his father, even in the mid-seventies (even, Rennie conceded, into this new millennium), was—with his starched shirts, pressed suits and silk ties—the embodiment of the fifties. When Rennie was young, his father had been reserved in both manner and habit, getting up at five each morning, showering, making himself a boiled egg and toast and then, redolent of Palmolive soap and Old Spice after-shave, disappearing into a job that had something to do with “finance” in “the city.”  He had returned home most days after the sun had set, but—an abstinent man who had once considered going into the ministry—he had not, as his associates had done, poured himself a large whiskey and soda before sitting down to a full dinner (replete with warm biscuits!) that his wife had spent the better part of the afternoon preparing.  After having a single helping of dessert (Aileen Aitken, a homely but gifted baker, was renowned for her scrumptious sweets: wild blueberry buckle, cinnamon apple crisp, peach praline crumble, strawberry-rhubarb pie, sour cherry cobbler), he had retired into the living room, settled into an overstuffed, delft-blue velvet easy chair and had taken up one volume or another of Ariel and Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization.

     Arden would be arriving home in two days and, he had figured, there would be just enough time before that to paint the porch deck and the two Adirondack chairs that he had found discarded at the side of the road earlier that summer.  Putting the finishing touches on the baluster’s post caps, being careful not to let any of the glossy red paint drip, he had been reminded of the wooden model ship that he and his father had built together when the family lived, the year he was eleven, in the States. Although Rennie wasn’t someone who by nature ascribed a relative value to his respective joys and sorrows, envisioning—as so many people do—his life as a line graph on which each emotional peak or trough has been meticulously charted (“I was happier in Second Grade with Miss Smith than I was in Fifth Grade with Mr Crandall”), his restless mind most often settled into something akin to repose in remembering the hours that he spent cutting, shaping (and reshaping), bracing, filling, sanding, painting and rigging the John Alden sloop with his father.

     The next morning, he had been awakened early by Talisker’s licking his hand.  He had brewed himself a mug of strong Assam tea and hewn a thick slice of dark, nutty Celtic loaf, which he had toasted and slathered with soft butter and fine-cut lime marmalade (with Arden and the girls away, there was no one to reproach him for his petty indulgences).  He had carefully studied the notes Arden had left for him, indicating precisely what should be red and what cream, while he shared his breakfast with the dog; then he had set about the day’s work of coating the railings of the balustrade, the plinth and capital of the pilasters and the ornate fretted center bar spandrel, the twelve-light grille and the frame of the screen door with glistening Rectory Red paint.  

     On arriving home, he had spread out a tarpaulin on the porch floor, set up a ladder and then, after carefully cutting in the edges of the beadboarded ceiling with Dimity, he had poured some of the thick cream-colored paint into a pan and started coating a small area with a roller that he had brought up from the basement.  After finishing one section, he had climbed down, drunk some of the now-tepid coffee, moved the ladder a bit, ascended once more and continued painting.  When the ceiling was finished, he had brushed the glossy double-cream paint onto the brick molding enframement of the door; the frame, sash, muntin and sill of the window; the bowed balusters and the shaft of the pilasters. Taking only a short break for a light supper, he had painted into the stillness of the summer night.  At last, so tired that he could paint no more—and there was, besides, no more paint left in the tin, he was lulled to sleep on the living room sofa by the crickets’ a capella, the dog stretched out on the floor next to him.