In Joe Rock’s recurring dream, he is a sailor — as he was fifty years prior — on the night watch, except he is the only one awake, and even the pilot is not at the wheel. Every time Joe Rock has this dream, he wakes up in panic, and one day, he wakes up certain that he will die soon.  Joe Rock decides to make the final rounds in his Massachusetts town, visit his wife Margaret’s grave for the first time in two years, and then visit the Club. At the cemetery, he studies his name already chiseled into the stone, right beneath his wife’s name, as if in preparation for his impending death. He imagines himself being buried next to her although it is December and he knows he could not be buried immediately because of the weather.  Joe Rock then leaves and goes to the Merrimack Lunch. There, a young worker named Emil says hello and asks how long it has been since he last came to have a meal. Emil promises Joe Rock that he looks great.  After speaking with Emil, Joe Rock leaves again and goes to the Club. He remembers the last time he visited, which was two years after his son Jackie’s death. He saw Jackie’s ghost in the ballroom of the Club taking a puff from a cigarette and smiling at his father. Joe Rock yelled at him out of fear, telling him not to smile. When Joe Rock hears footsteps in the present day, he thinks to himself that it must be Jackie again. However, it is a Puerto Rican woman with a sick daughter. Joe Rock begins to sob, and the woman, panicked, tries to comfort him. In a letter to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth — Joe Rock’s sister’s daughter — explains that she is a relative of Joe Rock and she has heard that the profit made by his collection of poems is now being put into a trust fund for “needy artists.” She is upset that she will not be receiving any of the profit, despite being one of Joe Rock’s relatives, and says that Joe Rock was only briefly a poet, so the money in the fund should not be limited to artists. She also speaks of Joe Rock in the past tense and says that he was never the same after losing his wife and son.  Finally, the voice of the late Jackie Rock explains his relationship with his father and says that there was never a moment that he didn’t love him, despite their arguments. Jackie says that after he died, he had to visit his father as a ghost, but even then, they argued.