It was beastly hot. There was sweat in his eyes. He pulled a bandanna out of his back jeans pocket (yes, a real red bandanna—Delilah teased him, but he didn’t care) and wiped his face.

There was someone sitting in his chair. Andrea.

He was speechless. But not surprised. Somehow he’d expected her. The other day he’d spied a beat-up black Jeep Wrangler in the parking lot and his heart had sung out a short, sweet tune because he thought it was Andrea’s—but then he realized that Andrea no longer drove a Jeep. She hadn’t driven one in over fifteen years. He was losing his mind.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey, Peach,” she said. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts. Her dark hair was in a ponytail. There were flip-flops on the floor, but her bare feet were tucked under her bare, tanned legs. Andrea’s legs were her best feature; they were very strong, taut, powerful. They weren’t sexy to look at, maybe, but they were sexy for sex—she used to tense and kick and fight him off. He remembered this instantly and it embarrassed him, and then he thought about how her showing up here in this dim, sultry room was like the beginning of one of the porn movies Delilah tried to get him to watch to spice up their sex life. He felt a surge of energy. Entirely inappropriate. He forgot all about the corn.

She was sitting in his chair, so there was nothing for him to do but stand. But he couldn’t stand. It was too hot and he was too rattled by this unexpected visit. He pulled a milk crate out of the shadowy eaves, flipped it over, and sat down at her feet.

They had been a couple for twenty-six months. From May of 1990 until July of 1992. They had met on the steamship on a chilly, miserable, slate-gray day. They had each bought a discolored, overcooked hot dog at the snack bar and were standing together at the ketchup dispenser as the boat lurched like a drunk through the chop. Jeffrey was feeling a little green; he was a man of the land, not the water. He thought maybe his stomach needed food, hence the hot dog, but the ketchup managed to make the hot dog seem less appetizing instead of more. He smiled weakly at Andrea. She was beautiful, raven-haired, robust, surefooted even as the boat rocked. She was confident, a queen. She regally inhaled her hot dog before Jeffrey could even wrap his properly in a napkin.

“Is it your first time on this boat?” she asked. She seemed genuinely concerned for him. He must have looked as bad as he felt.

He nodded. He handed Andrea his hot dog, staggered to the men’s room, and vomited in the toilet.

When he emerged, she was sitting on a bench holding his hot dog gently, like it was a child in her custody.

“You want?” she said.

He shook his head and discreetly (he thought) sucked on a Life Saver.

She said, “Okay if I eat it?”

He nodded.

She said, “Do you talk?”

He whispered, “I do not feel well.”

She beamed at him. “You do talk!”

He was an ag student, newly graduated from Cornell. She was three years out of BC, a championship swimmer, and this summer she was to be Nantucket’s head lifeguard. It was her third summer on the island. Jeffrey had a deed to a farm left to him by his grandmother’s unmarried half-brother—a great-uncle he hadn’t seen in years.

“I thought that kind of thing only happened in the movies,” Andrea said.

“Me, too,” Jeffrey said. The deed to the farm from Uncle Ted had come as a whopping surprise. Jeffrey’s parents had been astounded. Ted Korkoran had been the only son of Jeffrey’s great-grandfather’s second wife; Ted was a bit of a black sheep, declaring himself homosexual and as such escaping duty in World War II. He moved from Fredonia to Nantucket in 1950. He and his partner, Caleb Mills, bought a farm and worked it together. They had cows that supplied 70 percent of the island’s milk, they had chickens for eggs, pigs for bacon and ham. They slaughtered turkeys at Thanksgiving, and made their own goat cheese long before the public had cultivated a taste for it. Jeffrey had heard these stories from his grandmother, and Jeffrey would see Uncle Ted and his friend Caleb every summer at the Korkoran family reunions, Ted and Caleb as sober and grouchy and properly masculine as all the rest of the Korkoran men. But then Caleb got mysteriously sick and died—this was in the mid-eighties, and it was all kept very quiet—and Uncle Ted stopped attending the reunions. And then, five years later, Uncle Ted died and left his farm to Jeffrey. No one could figure out why. All Jeffrey remembered were Caleb’s recipe for baked beans with brown sugar and Uncle Ted’s dead eye in horseshoes. Ted had left Jeffrey the farm because he received a Christmas card from Jeffrey’s mother every year. He knew Jeffrey was an ag student at Cornell, a farmer-to-be in need of a farm.

And here was a farm.

Andrea listened as she polished off the second hot dog, and then a soft pretzel dripping with yellow mustard. She had been an English major at BC; she loved sprawling family sagas. She came from a large and storied Roman Catholic background herself, complete with closeted priests and nuns living in the basement and undercover cops and Mafia ties.

“And when you get a free century,” she said, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

Meeting Andrea had been all bundled up with Jeffrey’s meeting Nantucket. He set eyes on the quaint gray-shingled town first, then took in the scope of the farm that was now his. A hundred and sixty-two acres of fields—his! A greenhouse and barn, tractors, combines, plows—his! A dilapidated little house that had not been cleaned out and hence still contained the day-to-day detritus of a lonely bachelor. Andrea was there with him when he first set foot in Uncle Ted’s house. She saw the dishes in the rack by the kitchen sink, the pie-crust table that supported a rotary phone and the King James Bible, the two single beds side by side in the house’s only bedroom. On the bedside table was a photograph of Ted and Caleb in front of the barn, holding chickens in their arms like babies. Andrea was there because she decided before the steamship even docked that Jeffrey needed her help. What he was doing—seeing the farm for the first time, taking inventory, and uncovering the life of the man who had left it to him—was not something he should do without a friend.