Deer Island is up the road from Doherty's house on Point Shirley. You can only drive so far out to the guard house where they stop you. If anyone tries to run the barricade, the cameras take a picture, sending a ticket through the mail. On the island there is: a sewerage treatment plant, a conference center, and a park with a trail people can walk or run. When Doherty was growing up the plant was much smaller, wedged into the far side of the island, and the former Suffolk County House of Correction stood closer to the houses. Native Americans were isolated out on the island after the white settlers brought diseases to the new world. When they finally tore down the crumbling prison, the tribes wanted the land back as their sacred ground, but the state took it instead to expand the treatment plant. By then the prison was past the point of being simply being old and overcrowded. Its closing was a relief to those both sentenced to do time there, and the guards. A huge hill engulfs where the prison once stood — not even hinting at a foundation remnant.

In Doherty's town there are three neighborhoods: the centre, the highlands, and the point. Mostly small and low are the majority of the houses on the point, because in the early 1900's, most of them were cottages. Wealthy people from Boston arrived on the Narrow Gauge Railroad, renting for the summer or residing in one of the grand hotels. Only one hotel remains in the highlands. The owners run a popular restaurant with a few rooms upstairs for bed and breakfast guests.

Decades later, fishermen and their families took over the point, winterizing those cottages. From then on, Point Shirley has always been their town's most independent neighborhood. There is a separate church, a hall and association with a parade on the Fourth of July, and for many years an elementary school. When Doherty was in sixth grade the town closed the school, busing those kids to the centre for the rest of the year. The empty building was then sold to a guy who promptly turned it into condos. Giving up their own school was a nightmare, and those point neighborhood kids stuck together; continuing on with their tradition through both junior and senior high.

The point is perpendicular to one of Boston's Logan Airport's runways. Planes scream on the flight path past Yirrell Beach, fly over the houses, landing across the water. If Doherty sits on the sand and looks straight up, he can see their wheels coming down in great spindles. The sewerage treatment plant on Deer Island looms, and way out in the distance, lighthouses flash to each other, helping freighters and oil tankers pilot out of the harbor. On the beach sticky briars grow over by the seawall, there are clam shells as big as Doherty's hand, and the sand is rippled from the tide.

Sometimes walking home from school on the point's main drag of Shirley Street, cars would stop with people asking him for directions to the prison, because they were going to visit an inmate. Every time this happened, casually Doherty would back up as far as he could, before saying a single word. For despite reassurances from parents and teachers, only debtors and non-violent offenders were housed on Deer Island, the town children knew it was far from the truth.

After Doherty got his working papers at fourteen, his first job was on the point, washing dishes and clearing tables at The Barnacle. Back then Doherty always wondered if the seafood restaurant had ever been anybody's house. The dining room was a virtual cave with its dark paneling. The chief decorations were fishing nets draped at the top of the doorways and buoys on the walls, including a few plastic crabs and lobsters with forlorn, if not beady eyes. The floor was a depressing, shoe-scraped, gray linoleum.

Square, formica tables were arranged in straight rows, easy to put together and pull apart, depending on the number of diners in a party.

Often the restaurant was packed with point residents heading out for a fish fry. The restaurant staff consistently saw the same families and older couples who lived streets away. Occasionally the townies made appearances. Townies being defined as those residents from one of the other neighborhoods besides the point of at least fifty years or more, and despite their veteran status, they were still considered outsiders by everyone living on the point. Now and then the Barnacle had customers with shorter years of town residency stopping in for a meal, but Doherty never saw any out of towners at The Barnacle. No one else knew it existed.

The usual shift started at four in the afternoon and ended around ten, or on the weekends at eleven. Friday nights were the busiest and the best for tips. Everyone on the kitchen staff wore white caps, tee shirts, and drawstring pants. Even freshly laundered they always reeked of grease and fish. Sometimes when the planes were tearing up a different runway, the prevalent sounds were waves crashing at high tide along with the sailboats' masts clanging their symphonies.

Doherty's main goal consisted of improving his jump shot to eventually land a spot on the varsity basketball team. Hours flew by at The Barnacle despite the challenges of constantly lifting dishes in the slimy and exhausting, moist heat, then running back out front to clear tables. On the back steps, the guys took their breaks smoking Marlboros from the red and white, hard boxes. That's where Doherty got his education in alcohol, cars, and women. Sitting with a warm soda, he'd drink up any words of wisdom these guys had. Which wasn't much. The stories were plentiful. Some of them were a particular sad kind of funny, many graphically sexual, and a few well, only gross for the sake of being gross. By Doherty's count, ironically Monk had the most lays. Ack was definitely the winner in the gross-out category, although Lucky beat them all. His tales were different in the weirdest, but most genuine of ways.

"Got that name as a kid working in my uncle's deli," Lucky said. "After a run in with the meat slicer that took off most of my left pinky, yeah, my uncle kept telling my ma, how I really got off lucky. That I could've lost the whole hand. 'Yeah the kid's damn lucky,' he kept telling everybody who came into the store. And I've been stuck with that name ever since.