Today she’s eating lunch. Tuna salad again. The breeze is riffling the tops of the trees. Two yards over, the neighbors are painting. Steve, the husband, leans a ladder against the side of the house and it sways and clanks menacingly.

She takes another bite, chewing slowly, and watches out of the corner of her eye as Steve bends over to pick up a paintbrush, then straightens. Steve is a salt-of-the-earth type. He grew up in Harwich, out on the Cape, where his dad ran a boat repair shop and his mom raised him along with three brothers: rowdy, ruddy-cheeked boys who all settled nearby after high school and immediately set about having children. Sometimes they come to visit. She’s met them all separately but still can’t tell them apart in their sameness. They’re all broad-shouldered, with the weatherbeaten skin of someone who grew up on the water.

There are so many different ways to be homesick, she’s discovering. There’s the obvious kind: the textbook definition where you miss your parents and your home This is the kind she felt when she was 12 and spent three weeks at Camp Watama on Lake Wentworth in New Hampshire. Her tentmate was a girl named Cammy Mason from Short Hills who wore sparkly eyeshadow and liked to brag about how she had already watched Dirty Dancing with her older sister’s friends. Cammy’s brash confidence made her feel small and inexperienced and homesick for her two best friends still preferred to play board games and watch old episodes of I Dream of Jeannie when they had sleepovers.