He was about thirty years old, with hair that looked as though it hadn’t been washed since he’d shaved, which may or may not have been this year. He was wearing a denim shirt and grease-stained overalls cut off below the knee. Whatever part of me wasn’t being offended by the sight of him was recoiling from the smell of him. I tried to close the door, but he was already attempting to push it open, his eyes as large as Ping-Pong balls and just as bouncy, looking over my shoulder, off to the side, down at my robe, and into the house. “Where’s Grizz?” he started asking. “Grizz, you in there? Grizz, I gotta talk to you.”

I screamed, “Get out! Get out!” He kept pushing against the door before stumbling once, regaining his feet, and stepping back, but he kept one strong arm on the door, preventing me from closing it.

“I gotta see Grizz,” he almost whispered. “Please, okay? Please tell Grizz I gotta see him.”

“I don’t know any Grizz,” I said, “and if you don’t get the hell out of here I’ll call the police!”

“Come on, lady …” Now he looked more hurt and confused than frightening, more panic-stricken than angry. He looked away and bit his lip, and when he removed his arm from the door I slammed it, slid the deadbolt in place, and walked to the living room window, where I watched as he turned and stumbled down the steps. He wandered off toward the canal, stopping once to look back at the house. If he comes back, I told myself, I’m calling the police.

I didn’t need to. The telephone rang almost as soon as I plugged it back in, and I nearly jumped out of the damn robe. It was Mel. “I called twice this morning,” he said. “I was about to ask a squad car to check and see if you were all right.”

“Well, I was and now I’m not.” I told him about the man in the denim shirt, demanding to see Grizz.

“Who?” Mel asked.

“He kept asking for Grizz,” I said. “Who the hell’s Grizz?”

“There’s a guy …” Mel began. Then, “I’ll tell you later today, maybe tonight.”

“Tell me now, damn it.”

“Not here. Not over the telephone. I’ll meet you at Tuffy’s at noon.” His voice changed, became softer. “Jesus, Josie, what you must have gone through last night. I read Hayashida’s report. Maybe you should think about staying with your sister for a while, go out to Vancouver.”

I told him I wasn’t going anywhere, but I wouldn’t mind a few more patrol cars passing by at night.

MY FATHER SOMETIMES SANG AN OLD COWBOY SONG whose lyrics said something about a new world being born at dawn. You do not understand that idea until you encounter horror in the darkest moments of the night, the world that exists half-dead or temporarily so around three a.m., and a few hours later walk into a bright summer morning by a lake that’s all sapphires and diamonds, with people and dogs playing on the sand and cotton-ball clouds sailing across the sky. Nothing as brutal as what I had witnessed beneath the lift bridge could have happened on a planet like the one I entered through my garden door that morning. It must have happened in another world, one that’s in endless darkness. The world on the beach strip that day was born with the dawn, like the new world in the song my father sang.

I had dressed in red chinos, a white T-shirt, and sandals, and my first step into the garden gave me a floating sensation, a sense that life really did continue and was even worth living, despite the terrible things people did to each other. This feeling lasted about three steps, or until I saw the door of the garden shed still hanging open as it had last night when I returned from spreading Gabe’s ashes on the water. I slammed it shut and twisted the metal closure, promising myself that I would buy a good padlock later that day. You won’t need it now, I thought. Not since the bridge descended on that poor man’s head last night, assuming he was the pervert. But I would buy one anyway.

On the boardwalk, among the children, the dogs, and the Frisbees and within sight of the boats far out on the lake, I began to regain that New World at Dawn sensation, and it grew stronger when I passed the picket fence separating the Blairs’ garden from the beach. Jock Blair was bent over roses near the house, blue-grey smoke rising from his pipe. Maude sat in a chair with a kerchief around her head and her eyes hidden, as always, behind her sunglasses. Seeing me, she smiled and raised a hand in greeting. I called good morning to her, which brought a nod of her head and a wider smile.

Jock turned at the sound of my voice and smiled, although his eyes avoided mine. The complex crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened and his face, already the colour of ripe watermelon, grew more crimson. He had the whitest hair I have ever seen and wore plaid cotton shirts winter and summer. He was a shy man whose demeanour appeared threatened by the glance and voice of a younger woman. He loved roses. Once, I emerged from the back door to see him tending ours, the ones near the garden shed. “Rust, lass,” he said, and he pointed to some black stems. “Best you stop it in its tracks.” When I thanked him, he nodded and blushed and hurried away, back to the boardwalk and then to his garden, where I heard Maude scold him for being so forward, telling him I was more than capable of caring for my own roses, and ordering him inside to fix some tea and eat one of the warm scones she had baked just for him, the kind he liked, with currants inside.

I wondered what it must be like to spend fifty years of your life with the same man and still take pleasure in his company. Was it truly bliss, or was it like being one of conjoined twins, a relationship you accepted because no means existed of breaking it?

I used to talk like that with Gabe, saying I was obviously not a romantic, an idea that made Gabe laugh. “Your problem,” he would say, “isn’t that you’re not a romantic. It’s that you’re too romantic, and it scares you so much you try to deny it.”

I would reply that he sounded like one of those two-bit popular psychologists on television, and if he knew so much about me, maybe he should give me a full report, which would help explain a lot of things, including why I made so many stupid mistakes in my life.

His answer would be to stretch out an arm and squeeze me. “You’ll work it out,” he would say. “You’ll work it out yourself, and then you’ll understand better than if I told you.” There are times, usually in the corner of my soul where it is always four a.m., that I wish Gabe hadn’t been so trusting of my ability to work things out and had explained some things in detail for me. Because he had been right. When I worked things out and understood what he meant, they were harder to reject than if he had told me himself.

It was half a mile to Tuffy’s. The beach and the boardwalk were crowded, as they are on every late-summer day. Walking among people and dogs, I felt safer from the creep who had appeared at my door looking for Grizz. What was behind his desperation to meet somebody named Grizz? Money? Protection? And why my house? Although I caught him sneaking a glance at other parts of my body besides my face, I didn’t consider him a real threat to drag me inside and attack me. Nor did I find him pitiful. Whatever, whoever he was, I didn’t want him back. He could find Grizz somewhere else, and I hoped he would. Somebody that desperate needed relief.

TUFFY’S ONCE HAD A SIGN mounted over the tavern door that said we were here before you were born. The sign is long gone, lost among various renovations performed by its several owners. Nobody seems to lose money running Tuffy’s, but there isn’t much to be made from it either, based on the number of people who have owned the place over the years. Each new owner changed the layout, the staff, the menu, the paint on the wooden siding, and the faded sign dangling over Beach Boulevard. Heaven help them if they ever change the name.