Peter Lane lives alone on a shanty-boat drifting the river, whittling wooden trinkets with his jack-knife and dreaming of the adventure he'll never quite chase. He's a thin, wiry man with an alarm clock he treats like a philosopher, a man who values solitude but aches for connection. When George Rapp arrives wanting to buy the boat, Peter refuses with quiet stubbornness the boat is his home, his only refuge in a world that feels increasingly vast and indifferent. Then comes the storm. A woman and her child appear at Peter's door, and what begins as an act of shelter becomes something else entirely: a test of whether a man who has chosen solitude can still choose compassion. Ellis Parker Butler writes with gentle humor and deep tenderness about the small heroisms of ordinary people, the way loneliness can transform into love, and the river itself as both setting and metaphor for a life in motion. This is a story about what it costs to open your door to need, and what you might gain in return.
