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away.
    Betty straightened up, dug into her pocket for a cigarette, shook one out of the box, and lit it with a match, also from her pocket. She blew out a long stream of smoke with a satisfied sigh.
    â€œYou will have dinner with us tonight, won’t you?” She turned to Susannah. “I figured you’d be tired, and you won’t have much food in the house, unless you bought something in Friday Harbor.”
    Susannah put a hand to her forehead. “Oh, my God. I didn’t even think about food. How stupid can I be? I’ll have to go back to Friday Harbor tomorrow. So, yes, thanks, we’d love to have dinner with you. That’s very thoughtful.”
    â€œGood,” Betty said.
    Susannah turned to help Jim unload, feeling both disoriented and strangely at home. They stood on a floating metal dock, with a ramp leading up to a long wooden pier that jutted out over the water in a sheltered bay. A small flotilla of motorboats, dinghies, rowboats, and sailboats bobbed around them, tethered to buoys in the bay. Many of the boats were painted bright colors—yellow, crimson, royal blue—in stark contrast to the blue black water, the muted greens and golds of the trees and shrubs, and the pale white driftwood logs clustered along the shoreline. A faded red pickup truck was parked on a gravel road at the end of the dock. Just up the road sat a log cabin with a green tin roof, a wide porch, and two big windows facing the bay.
    â€œThat’s the one business on Sounder,” Jim said, seeing Susannah look up toward the cabin. “The Arctic Laundromat, which also serves as our post office. My wife, Fiona, ran it for a while; now Frances Calvert, one of the other islanders, oversees it. It’s the heart of the island. Parties, community meetings, dances, baptisms, weddings, funerals—they all happen at the Laundromat.”
    â€œWhy the ‘Arctic’ Laundromat?” she asked.
    â€œI’m a poetry fan. There’s a poem I love called ‘Anna, washing’ about the first woman to open a laundry in Alaska. Her place was called the Arctic Laundry.”
    Susannah wasn’t sure what she had expected of Sounder’s residents, but she hadn’t anticipated a poetry-loving farmer/teacher and his Lauren Bacall–like mother.
    â€œThe Arctic Laundromat,” Susannah said. “Those are funny words to say in the same breath. I never pictured laundry as a priority in the Arctic. In the tropics, maybe, where everyone sweats so much. A Tropic Laundromat would make much more sense.”
    â€œTrue, that,” Quinn said, one of the slang phrases he’d picked up that drove Katie crazy because it had been cool two years ago and Quinn was just using it now. Susannah glanced at Katie, who, indeed, had stepped away from Quinn and looked like she wanted to push the whole lot of them off the dock. Susannah could feel the anger and impatience emanate from Katie like shimmery waves of heat from a hot sidewalk.
    Betty leaned toward Quinn. “You know how to fish?” she said.
    â€œA little,” Quinn said. “But I always let them go.”
    â€œAh, don’t be a sissy,” came a voice from the other side of the dock. “If you don’t kill ’em, something else will.”
    They turned to see an old man floating in a bright kelly green wooden dinghy just yards away. He was lean and muscular with weather-beaten skin, bushy gray eyebrows, and eyes of a bright, piercing blue. He had a red bandanna tied Gypsy style over his head. A black Labrador stood in the boat behind him, nose pointed toward the shore.
    â€œHey, Barefoot,” Jim said. He lifted a suitcase from the back of the boat and handed it over the side to Susannah. “Meet the Delaneys. Susannah and her kids are going to be renting our cottage until June. They’re here from the East Coast. This is Barefoot Jacobsen, a longtime islander.”
    â€œHello,” Susannah