Sally was flat broke when she first met him.
She had been working small jobs around the city- whatever came up.
Once or twice she worked as a cleaner in a couple of schools, or occasionally waitressing or sweeping up the hair in the barbers.
But nothing ever lasted long.
Sally was living with her friend Marina in a small flat in Brooklyn. At first Sally found it exciting, and she used to joke with Marina that they were living right out of the novels she loved to read- or the plays she studied in junior high. As if any second Eddie or Catherine would walk into the apartment straight out of act one.
But mostly Marina was too stoned or drunk to get the references- and even if she was sober, which never lasted long, she would normally just hiss between drags "this ain't Red hook honey, this is worse."
If it wasn't the guy from the flat above, or the man from the dry cleaners- Marina would have some random stoner in the bedroom most nights.
"Where's Alfieri when you need him?" Sally would ask herself as she bedded down on the sofa.
But she didn't really mind. The flat was airtight at least, and from the sofa Sally could see the moon.
But two weeks before she met him, things slowly deteriorated. She lost her job at the barbers- and Marina got evicted from the flat.
"what'll we do honey? What'll we do?"
But Sally new full well what Marina would do. She would move in with one of her drugged up mates- and most likely never resurface again.
But Sally couldn't let that happen to her. If her parents knew what had become of her…..if Rich knew what had become of her….they would be ashamed.
It was on a typical rainy New York afternoon, one where the sky seemed so full of clouds it seemed solid, that Sally decided enough was enough.
She was curled up on her usual seat in the coffee house on 7th, reading a paperback that had been left along with a stained mug. It was a book of poetry.
Sally loved literature in junior high- it was an escape. She only had to open a book and suddenly she wasn't Sally Jackson, the girl raised by her unloving Uncle, she was anybody she wanted to be. She enjoyed it so much; Sally really believed she could study it at university. But then Rich's cancer came back….
She just happened to flick from back to front, when she settled on a poem she had never read before. It was by Tennyson.
Normally Sally liked contemporary poems, but something about this caught her attention. It was about the sea….
And suddenly, the swirling onslaught of memories was too much to control- and Sally was slamming her loose change on the counter- and running out the door- onto a busy new York street.
She had to get there; she had to go to Lake Montauk.
It wasn't much, but to Sally lake Montauk was the only place she had ever felt real. The only place she had ever felt alive.
Before the accident and before her parents died, they would take her to the same cabin that was set just into the woodland that bordered the dunes and the golden sand of the beach.
She was only young and the memories were hazy- but they were memories all the same.
Hailing a cab, Sally tried to smooth back her hair and regain her composure. As the traffic whizzed by and a few fat drops of rain landed on the cheeks- she told herself firmly to calm down.
How could she just leave now? She had nowhere to live and no job.
Just as she was turning away from the road, an image of her father laughing and smiling as he sang an old sea shanty and throwing a log into the cabin fireplace seemed to dance before her eyes
And it was as if that memory was a real moment. A real stitch in time that could be sown back into her life- if only she could get to the cabin quick enough she would see her father stood there. Welcoming her home.