Another knock at the door. I sat on my cot and touched my scratchy face. Catherine liked to make Sunday-morning love when I hadn’t shaved the night before.

It shouldn’t be so bright and sunny and seventy degrees today. It was winter. On this day, I wanted, craved, gloom, cold or rain and solitude and was besieged by sun and visitors.

Another knock.

I had unplugged my phone.

“Lewis,” came a voice from the other room, beyond the closed outer door.

Others had come. I hadn’t bothered with the No. I had sat silently in darkness and dusty sunlight through the closed blinds. I had come to Sarasota to escape from intimacy, friendship and connection. But they had found me.

People had slowly come into my life.

Sally Porovsky, the social worker whose heart broke daily for the children she tried to help and the system too often failed; Flo Zink, the foul-mouthed recovering alcoholic with a pile of money left to her by her departed Gus; Flo, who had taken in Adele, the teenaged mother with an unerring ability to find but not sift troubled sands; Ames McKinney, the laconic lanky seventy-year-old motor-scooter-riding fugitive from a Wild West that had probably never existed; Dave, who owned the DQ franchise and spent as many hours as he could on his boat in the Gulf of Mexico welcoming the sun that turned him a mahogany nut wrinkled brown. They had all come to my door in the last few days. They had all given up when I didn’t answer.

But the knocker this morning had been at it for almost fifteen minutes.

The first knock had awakened me from a sleep that had started in darkness. I thought it had come from the television set, which was quiet but running on AMC. Edward Everett Horton was looking at me with startled eyes. Or was he looking at Helen Broderick? Horton wasn’t knocking on a door.

I had stumbled from bed, found the yellow sheet, pulled the Sharpie pen from my muddled desk drawer and made my only communication with the outside world in the last seventy-two hours.