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the time she reaches the clearing where her house stands, the moon is setting on the horizon, out past Harbortown. The sky is pale. She walks faster in order to be home before her daughter wakes.
    Inside, she takes off her coat, hangs it behind the door, puts the envelope in the drawer of the table the man made for her. She has to press it flat to get the drawer closed. Why, she wonders, would a carpenter who has never been out on the ocean decide to build a boat and sail away from Small Island? Especially one who has been frightened of the sea since his only brother drowned.
    The answer must lie somewhere in the story of his family, she thinks. But where? It’s such a tangle. After the man’s brother died, their mother, the best seamstress on Small Island, raged, drank and beat her husband and anyone who tried to pull them apart. One night in Harbortown it took three men to get her off him and drag her back to her house, where she passed out. The husband followed, yelling the whole time, then passed out next to her with his arms around her. No one could understand why he stayed. Finally she threw him out, and he built a house on a bleak finger of land called Gallagher’s Point, where the wind is sosteady and strong that there are very few houses among the pines, stunted and twisted, that cling to the cliff. People say he has a woman up there, but no one goes to visit.
    When the mother isn’t drunk, she is still a seamstress who can sew anything. She makes embroidery more elegant than anything else on Small Island, a tradition passed down to her from her mother and her mother’s mother. Even when she drinks, her hand is steady, but ultimately she reaches a point where the work blurs and she blacks out. After his brother died, she shunned the boy. People on the island felt pity, but they didn’t want to have much to do with him. He was bad luck. Despite her shunning him, he is much like his mother in one way: He has hands that can make anything.
    When the package arrives, the woman is working in the general store. The bell over the door rings, and the postman steps in. They get a lot of mail in the store addressed to General Delivery, Harbortown, Small Island . Only the well-to-do, like Valter, have their own postal address. Mail comes on the steamer from Big Island once a week, except in the dead of winter, when the ice is too thick to cut through. The steamer anchors in the harbor and a lighter is rowed to the stony beach carrying mail for the shop and orders for customers, things not found on Small Island. Many on the island cannot read or write,and she helps them with their letters. It has always surprised her how well the man who was sick can read. It was something his mother taught him.
    â€œHere’s one for you,” says Finnarson. The postman has the Small Island look: narrow and wiry, drooping mustache. He holds out a package along with a pile of letters. The package is small and square, tied with twine. It has come all the way from another world: the Mainland, near the capital. For a moment, the sight of the package freezes her.
    â€œ One for you, I said. ”
    â€œ I hear you, Finnarson. There’s no reason to shout. ”
    â€œI wasn’t shouting.”
    Finnarson is sweet on her. She is even-tempered, accepting Finnarson’s timid advances in good humor. When she and Valter were living together, she was invisible to men. Now they seem alert to the slightest change in her, as if they can smell it, the way dogs do. It tires her.
    Normally she would stop and chat for a while with Finnarson. Not today. She takes the letters and package without a word, sets them down and turns back to what she was doing before the postman entered.
    Finnarson stands still, startled by her rudeness, then turns and clumps out and down the wooden sidewalk, the bell ringing behind him as he wonders: What in the hell is wrong with her?
    She takes the package home in her coat. It stretches the