We know we need to get out of the house. We rent a car and drive to the beach, to the Rockaways. The shore is cold and windy on the day we’ve chosen, but it’s gloriously empty. The sunlight is yellow in the early afternoon and the pale water dissolves into pale sky where there should be a horizon line. A reads a book and I sit a few feet away, scooping sand with my feet and chatting on the phone with a friend in California (even though I feel like I should be reading, too, because reading a certain number of pages counts as a certain number of reps).