Walter Rhodes watched a man get out of a trumpet-orange rag-top Jeep in the hayfield in front of his farmhouse. The engine-idling bass drum kicked one-two, one-two, one-two… Wind blasted the old man as he drew near, with muscular tan legs sticking out of khaki shorts, biceps pushing at the short sleeves of a faded red T-shirt. The guy had to be in his 70s, carrying a magazine in his right hand, walking toward Walter’s screen door with a side-to-side gait that said I don’t fall or stumble. Sea legs.

My father died this year. No one who knew us would have said we were close. He and my mother divorced thirty years ago, shortly after I had left our New Jersey home to pursue my life. Not long after that he remarried suddenly and settled in a small coastal town in Maine to restart his own life.

This is chapter one of Brian Daly’s Toil & Trouble, a novel about “a high-school sophomore who thinks he’s put the Macbeth Curse on his school’s production of ‘The Scottish Play.’ He’s the author of Big and Hairy, a middle grade novel. He also wrote the screenplay adaptation of that book for a Showtime Original Feature starring Richard Thomas. Look for a staged reading of Brian’s new musical comedy Come Out Swingin’! at the Lyric Music Theater on October 2.

I ran from Large Print as quietly as I could. Thankfully, a line at Circulation started buzzing as I got to Reference. Surreptitiously extracting my mobile, I pushed the answer button as I strolled with imaginary purpose to non-fiction.

Peter Ross Perkins and I met in 1953 in New York to serve aboard the U.S.S. Hornet, the eighth ship to bear that name. She’d been launched 10 months after the seventh Hornet was sunk in World War II, but she, too, had seen much action in the war. Now, recalled from retirement, she was ready to serve during and after the Korean War. She was to be launched in all her renewed glory from Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.

Jimmy, an old friend of her husband’s, showed up with a goat in the back of his truck and his arms crossed under his ridiculous mustache. The goat, he explained, had shown up at his job site near Robinhood Cove.

Through a wall of window hazed by breath and sweat, I watch floodlights on the ski lift towers convert falling snowflakes into orange embers. The trails are ribbed like children’s corduroy and the green shadows of the woods fan out before the roving headlights of the groomers. It is a scene designed to incite desire. And like all calls to physical passion recklessly luxurious.