Jacob Have I Loved

Content Warning: These chapters depict a 14-year-old girl developing romantic feelings for a man in his seventies.

On the clear blue morning after the hurricane, the Bradshaws and other islanders survey the aftermath. The ground floor of the Bradshaw house has layers of mud sticking to every surface after the water recedes. The streets and shoreline are also flooded. Louise and the Captain use Louise’s small skiff to go and check on the Captain’s house. However, as they go through the marsh toward the shoreline, they realize the house is gone. The storm washed it out to sea.

The Captain sits in the skiff, stunned and looking “like a little boy trying not to cry” (131). Louise kneels to hug him to offer comfort. However, in that moment she becomes hyper-aware of his physicality. She fears that “anything that made a person feel the way [she] felt at that moment had to be a deadly sin” (132). She looks down at the Captain’s clean, strong hands and is reminded of the hands she has seen in Pond’s lotion ads, where a male hand places an engagement ring on an elegant woman’s hands.