Page 93 of Wayfarers

lifting our voices to the sky together,

warming each other under a blanket of stars?

What a fellowship that must be.

I imagine it seems in that moment like there’s nothing

we couldn’t do if we approached everything

with the same togetherness—end hunger;

world peace; equality for all. The list of things I want

from my new life just grew by one.

Knox

“Okay.” I squint at Sylvie’s phone. “Next right.”

“This one?”

“The one after this.”

“I think we’re in kind of a crappy location. We were lucky to get anything at all”—we bump and judder over the washboard road—“this time of year.”

“Did you not reserve us the penthouse campsite?”

“Stop.”

“With a champagne bucket and a butler.”

“Stop. I don’t have a credit card. I had to reserve cash-on-arrival. Also, how is it you think it’s the ‘Errors Tour’ but you know about penthouse suites with champagne buckets and butlers? Your knowledge of the world is wildly inconsistent.”

“I think you know the answer to that by now.”

“Books, huh.”

“Books.”

“You read a real variety of stuff.”

“Any port in a storm,” I say.

“Any—?”

“Port in a storm. Haven’t heard that phrase? It just means, like, you’ll take whatever you can get in a pinch. Any book I could get my hands on, I’d read.”

“I kinda surmised that. It sounds like a very old-timey, Moby- Dick–ish phrase.”

“You know, I actually don’t think it is in Moby-Dick.”

“Which of course you’ve read. Was it in the penthouse butler book?”

“Not that one either. Not that I even remember which one it was. I read a lot of romance novels.”

A few seconds of silence as Sylvie stares down the road ahead, illuminated by headlights, dense blackness on either side. “So I’m a port in a storm for you,” she says finally. A teasing lilt to her voice.

“Well, now see, when you say it like that it sounds negative. You’ve definitely been a port in a storm. You’re not just any port in a storm. I’m saying ‘port’ and ‘storm’ so much the words are starting to lose their meaning in my head.”