She seemed amused. “I don’t know what Max has told you. I didn’t grow up like he did.” She’d grown up in Manhattan Beach, she said, which was just south of L.A. “It was just Mom and me. Or really just me; Mom was always working.”

“She was an actress?”

“She was, once. We lived up near Hollywood when I was born, with my father, but they split up when I was still in diapers, and we never heard from him again. He was some kind of technician, a lighting guy or a camera guy, I don’t know. I never knew him. She moved us down to Manhattan because it was cheap. She was a bank teller—the kind who takes your check through a pneumatic tube and sends you back a lollipop. We lived in a shitty bungalow. Our neighbors were oil workers. But it was near the beach, and that’s where I spent all my time, if I wasn’t in school.”

“See, I can’t imagine that,” Henry said. “That sounds like paradise.”

She laughed. “It’s not. There’s refineries up and down the shore. It’s not the part they show in the movies. But I did love the water.”

There had been no one to look after her when she was a child, she said. Her mom’s family was from upstate New York, and she was estranged from them. So Alma roamed the beach alone and mixed herself up with the crowd there—surfers, sunbathers, bums, roughnecks from the refineries. “People are mostly nice,” she said. “Some people aren’t. I took care of myself, though. I made friends. I had a boyfriend for a long time, this surfer, Sal, before he enlisted. No one messed with me then.” She went to the public school but was terrible about cutting classes. She dropped out entirely when her mom got sick. She’d been in the tenth grade. She did odd jobs, sometimes a couple at a time. She worked at an ice-cream stand on the Manhattan Beach Pier. She lied about her age and was a cigarette girl at a nightclub, because she’d heard if you were charming enough the men would give you everything they had. And it was true. She took care of the rent and groceries.

“You’re from another world,” Henry said. He had to pee, but he didn’t want to get up and break the spell. She had slumped down in the chair again, ankle up on her knee, and was idly massaging between her toes. She had long, elegant toes. “Really,” he said. “My life is so boring compared to yours.”

“It isn’t to me,” she said.