Andy stepped into the companionway and poked his head into the cabin. "We’re good," he said and looked over the cabin top. "I wouldn’t mind taking a look at Plymouth."

"It’s over a thousand yards to the beach."

Andy nodded, eyes on the distance.

"Steal some fruit, will you?"

Mitchell turned onto his side and fell into a dream sleep that imprisoned him on Death Row. He was sitting on a bench in the grey light of a cell and turning a gold band round and round on his finger, then pulling it to the joint and shoving it back. He had no wife or children, no one to inherit it. He was scheduled for execution in the morning. A guard unlocked the barred door and Mitchell’s mother and father walked into the cell and sat beside him.

"It’s tomorrow," Mitchell said and he was anxious to the point of breaking down. "They’re going to burn me."

"No," his father said. "They’re going to collapse your body."

Mitchell was running across an open field of clover. Running hard. Running...

He opened his eyes and the dream vibrated in his body like a solitary hammer blow. It’s always been like this he thought. The dreaming. Choreographed with meticulous and sometimes beautiful detail. Fears dramatized, an occasional truth revealed. I have no secrets from myself. None that I know of.

A big boat’s diesel engines grew loud inside the cabin and then faded. Its wake and the wakes from other boats in the channel rocked the hull. On deck the cockpit was soaked in late afternoon’s golden light. Mitchell was wondering how Andy had fared with the dinghy when a brown paper bag cleared the transom. Andy climbed over the stern pulpit, he scooped up the bag and crossed the cockpit and climbed below.

"That must’ve been some row," Mitchell said.

Andy laughed inwardly, eyes aglow. He reached into the bag and pulled out a fat yellow-red peach.

Mitchell was staring at it. "Beautiful," he whispered.

Andy tossed the peach onto Mitchell’s berth and then emptied the contents of the bag onto the galley counter. Big peaches and fat plums, tomatoes, garlic, a thick head of green lettuce, carrots, a cucumber, red peppers and onions.

Mitchell was genuinely awed. Forming his fingers around the peach he took a huge bite and crushed the succulent pulp inside his mouth. "The credit card?"

"Yuh."

Andy stowed the groceries. He found a local jazz station on the portable radio then pulled the tool box out of the quarter berth and set it on the galley counter. He concentrated on the stove.

Echoes of diesels subsided as another wake rolled the sloop. Mitchell bit into a plum. "Big boats around here."

"Whale watchers," Andy said. "I think I’ve got it."

"What?"

"The stove. I used a rubber washer from the scrap stuff. I don’t know how long it’ll hold but I’m getting pressure."