Four heads hang low over the starboard railing. No, these kids aren’t seasick. They’re not even at sea. In their crack-o’-dawn daze, they’re merely entranced by the waters licking the pilings of the ferry slip in Woods Hole. It’s a Toto-I-don’t-think-we’re-in-Brooklyn-anymore moment. This much they know: they’re on a trip to the place where the brand new blockbuster movie they just saw was filmed.
    
“Could Jaws eat this boat?”
    
I’m afraid not, I tell Kevin. And no matter how many times I tell them the killer shark is named Bruce, they’ll have none of it.
    
The idea of Jaws is no more wondrous to these pre-teenagers than the idea of travel. Until the wee hours of this morning, when they scrambled into the wide back seat of a Lincoln, they’d hardly ventured into the world beyond the Brooklyn Bridge. Were it not for a ferry reservation that my parents suddenly couldn’t use, Brooklyn is where they’d still be.
    
Not five days earlier, I’d dangled the reservation before the nose of my boyfriend Mitch. Alas, he’d promised to hang out in the city this weekend with his goddaughter Brenda. “Well, heck, let’s take her with us!” I proposed, and the floodgates opened. By Friday morning, we had Brenda, her brother, their cousin, and the cousin’s buddy in tow, and we were headed to Martha’s Vineyard – where we had no place to stay, by the way. On Labor Day weekend.
    
The whistle blasts the kids out of their hypnosis. The pier slides away – no, the boat slides forward! – and the Old World soon fades to white in the morning haze. All eyes turn toward the promised land. I alone fathom the promise of doom.
    
We call on every Oak Bluffs rooming house I can think of. “So sorry, dear.” “Gee, I’m afraid not.” The proprietors speak with compassion, but their eyes inform me they think us fools. My cargo of sightseers has ceased to chatter and giggle. They sniff trouble. I am fresh out of prospects when, turning onto Tuckernuck Avenue, I spot an old handyman – probably of the sprightly age I am today – unloading a ladder from a weathered pickup truck. He looks kind and, more important, he looks knowledgeable.
    
And sure enough, he knows a lady who rents a small guest cottage behind her home on Masonic Avenue. She’s just closed the cottage for the season, but . . . you never know. So we follow the man to the house, where he pleads our case to a gray-haired lady at the door while we cower in the car. Mrs. X gives us a once-over from behind the screen. Her brow is furrowed; her lips are turned down. Mitch and I are “foreigners” with New York plates and an outlandish story. But then there’s that back seat full of wide-eyed innocents. . . .
    
Lo, Mrs. X’s charity prevails, with the aid of the healthy premium we offer on the rent.
    
Ignoring our coos of gratitude and humility, she leads us around the back of the house to our narrow cottage in the pines. It has three tiny bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen with an old restaurant stove that resembles a locomotive. The furnishings are sparse, the beds sag, but all is immaculate – for the close of the season – and we are in four-star bliss. Even if Mrs. X is not. Maybe it’s just the sag of her eyelids, but she seems more weary than angry. She explains the tenant do’s and the don’ts and retreats. We resolve to tiptoe around her for the duration.
    
Over the next twenty summers or so, I rarely drove down Masonic Avenue without thinking: I should stop and say, “Hi, Mrs. X. Remember me? The crazy young woman who showed up on your doorstep one Labor Day weekend with her boyfriend and four kids, one of whom wet the bed...?” And then I’d think of an excuse to drive on. But no opportunity is infinite, and near the turn of the millennium, I would read in the Gazette the obituary of a retired widow from Boston who lived on Masonic Avenue. The name didn’t trigger a memory, but the sagging eyelids in the youthful photo did. To the grainy image, I silently shared:
    
Thanks for saving a holiday from disaster for four green and worthy adventurers. Adventurers who went fishing for the first time. Who proudly incinerated their bony little catch on your grill. Who biked roads free of bus fumes and broken glass. Who dreamed of finding Jaws in every pond and harbor. Who voluntarily weeded your garden. You seemed to like that. Who were awed by your stove and your tales of running the Boston eatery where it came from. You seemed to like that, too. Maybe they’ve held onto their taste for adventure. Maybe they’ve passed it on to their own children.
    
Maybe Mrs. X had long since forgotten our assault on her September respite. I sort of hope not.