She said, “Okay then.”

We rode in my dented old truck up Commonwealth Avenue, across the Boston University Bridge, and parked in a dirt lot on the other side of Memorial Drive. At the boathouse I used my key in the lock and then turned off the alarm inside and led her down a set of stairs into the concrete-floored, high-ceilinged bays where the long white shells lay on their racks and you could smell sweat and damp concrete and the river. “They used to be made of wood,” I said. “They were beautiful.”

But even made of carbon fiber, they were creatures to look at: sixty feet long, twenty inches wide, a foot deep, with quarter-inch-thick hulls and V-shaped aluminum riggers, and inside, intricately curved ribs and sleek seats on tracks and pairs of sneakers bolted in.

Janet ran her hands over the bow of a boat named Leila Sophia. She flipped the gate of one of the riggers gently back and forth so that it made a click-clack sound that echoed in the bays.

“They can go as fast as twelve miles an hour,” I told her, “which seems faster on water, much faster, and with eight oarsmen and a coxswain it can be seventeen or eighteen hundred pounds going across the water at that speed, no motor.”

We walked around to the other bay where the smaller boats were kept, singles and doubles and fours. She ran her hands over those, too, played with the oarlocks, peered up underneath them to get a sense of the way the ribs and seats were fashioned.

I hadn’t yet opened the big red garage door that led out onto the dock. Friend or no, keys or no, alarm code or no, I wasn’t supposed to be there at that hour. The head coach then, whose name was Jacques Florent, had been my coach ten years before, and sometimes I came in and helped him organize the two-thousand-meter races on Saturday mornings in May, or did a repair for free on the dock or on one of the weight benches.