At first, with the long days of sunlight, there are picnics on the warm, bright beach. Women and children walk in the ocean and it feels nearly warm against their legs, so rare a feel, so luxurious that there are no complaints.

But suddenly it is realized that the moon no longer pulls water back and forth with its love and will. The tide goes out and seems to stay out longer.

One morning Aurora says to Ruth, who stops by on her way to town for supplies, “It’s still out. It’s not right. It just doesn’t seem right. Look.” She pulls back the curtain. “I just did the laundry a while ago.” Her clothes hang on the line, limp and already dry. “It’s like the silence after a death out there.”

“There was a death,” Ruth reminds her mother. Everything is still. “There were two of them.”

“You know what I mean. It’s eerie.”

Ruth tries not to think of Marco. Instead, she remembers the old man from the white houses who said there would be a drought. He is a prophet and she did mark his words, as he asked, writing them in her diary. Now she looks around. With the stark clear light, the flaws on all the houses have become revealed. A cracked window suddenly cries out for repair. Worn paint is revealed as it now peels. A house has settled with age and seems to be sinking. There is dust on siding, warped wood under the trailers. Although these things had once seemed dim or normal, now they stand out in clear detail calling for attention. And the plants Aurora has tended so carefully she now waters and still they wilt.

Ruth knows there will be a drought, perhaps a long one. The old man said to be ready. She fills drums with water and stores them on the boat and at her mother’s home. She buys dry ice for the fish. She buys towelettes that are premoistened for washing. Aurora watches her daughter shop. “Aren’t you being a little premature about all this?” she wants to know.

“It was predicted,” Ruth says. “He said to be ready, and I will.” She is already tired from the heavy lifting she did on the boat earlier, before she walked from the marina up the hill to her mother’s house that day.

“The water is too warm,” Dimitri tells Ruth when she is out walking on the marina. She still has luck because she is salmon fishing. Other fishermen return with small lots of fish. Worse, some have empty nets, winches unused, troll lines reeled in. Their boats are clean, rubber aprons unused and hanging on hooks. Everything is clean. But soon it will be time to go out for the fish coming down from the north.

Only those who go very far out to deep sea return with their ever-thinning takes of silver and yellow fish, but there are fewer of the bluefin tuna than in the past, not enough for the businesses they have built over generations. Old Vince, who has been around a long time, swears, “Someone put a curse on us. I can’t imagine why. But it’s a curse all right. I know one when I feel one.”