Mother could have wandered down to the Ocean Street docks once in a while to wave at you as the East Chop took on passengers, but that would have taken her considerably beyond the edge of her carefully constricted world. She didn’t go to the beach anymore, or even to the bus station, as I said before. But she still walked down Main Street in the dark to her job at The Butter and Egg Man, joked with the customers, stayed up all night working, and finally ended the day counting her tips in the sleepy early afternoon. Then she bought a little food and some bourbon and cigarettes and walked home. She’d seen the ocean. She didn’t need to see it anymore. She could smell it through the open window. She didn’t feel comfortable walking along sidewalks she wasn’t on intimate terms with, crack by crack and weed by weed.

Back at the apartment she had begun a sort of art project. She got the idea when she noticed that a collection of bottles, cigarette cartons, and sardine tins on the kitchen table reminded her of a city skyline. After that she kept her empties and arranged them into a permanent – but incessantly revised – tableau of vice, or necessity, as you will. There were bottle skyscrapers, hard-shell cigarette packs stacked into apartment blocks, white chewing-gum-wrapper sidewalks and black matchbook streets.

You missed the City of Necessity, Jake. You hung back a little, perhaps in indecision, sailing back and forth a few times each day, but finally you joined the merchant marine to see just how round the world really was. Mother was not surprised at all.