Andy climbed into the cockpit with a winch handle stuck out from the pocket of his aqua shorts. Mitchell studied his cousin’s threadbare red tee shirt with its dissolved logo. Designer sunglasses. The new deck shoes looked awkward on his feet but the waterproof wristwatch with trigonometry functions belonged there on Andy’s wrist. He strapped Mitchell’s hand to the tiller then unclipped the boom from the backstay and stripped the ties off the mainsail. Its long folds tumbled into the cockpit and onto the cabin top. Mitchell sat admiring the purposefulness in Andy’s hands. He remembered having hands like that.

"What do you say we motor to Watch Hill Passage then sail over to Block Island when we're out of the Sound?"

The anchor came up without a problem. "I came to sail," Andy called.

Mitchell smiled. "He's got balls."

At the mast Andy hauled on the halyard and the gear rang out after years of disuse. Mitchell’s hope ascended with every square foot of the triangular Dacron mainsail unfurling up the thirty-eight-feet to the topmast. "Deal me in," he said and steered south into a sun-smacked iron-blue ocean.

Andy dragged the genoa bag from the cockpit locker onto the deck and to the foredeck. He hauled out the big sail and hanked it on the headstay. Then he laid the sail’s nylon sheets aft along both deck rails to the winches. There isn’t a doubt in his mind Mitchell thought, watching Andy walk to the mast again, surprised by his deftness at rigging the sails. They had done this only in their heads with open books so it was a hell of a reassurance to think they might actually have the savvy to make it work.

Wind spanked the tall sails and the sloop’s great body was suddenly urgent, desperate for deeper sea. Mitchell steered by the wind. "So how does it feel to be a sailor?"

Andy trimmed the sails. "I'm hungry," he said.
    They tacked and jibed throughout the morning, finding their rhythm and working the sloop east into Fisher's Island Sound between the purple coastline and green forested hills on the big humped island. Channel markers guided them past the masthead of a sunken wreck. On deck Andy watched it with troubled eyes, his fingers entwined on top of his head as the sloop’s wake churned black water around the slackened shrouds on the doomed jut of aluminum.
    "Omen for the faint-hearted," Mitchell said and looked across the water to the hazy coast. "That’s Stonington. Merrill lived there."

"Who?"

"A poet whose father had the brains to let him write."

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing. This heat."

Annoyed, Andy walked off to the foredeck.

"Better that than his thoughts on the bottom of the ocean," Mitchell said.