•      •      •

IT WAS FOUR o’clock. I was on my own. I thought of going back to find Joanie on the beach. I flipped open my briefcase and then shut it, and got up and showered and left the bungalow.

I stopped by the Tiki Bar for a last drink. Jimmy, the bartender, was there, washing the bar off with a hose. The woman from the boat came, and we said hello. I hadn’t seen her since the bonfire that night.

She was wearing a bikini and had a slim leather belly bag clipped around her waist. She wiggled her ass onto the next bar stool and lit a smoke and said, “Jim, what do I want?” He shoveled ice into the sink, waiting for her to answer. She said, “Rum-and-Coke, my favorite.”

“I’m going back to Baltimore on Sunday. I miss my cats,” she told me. She’d been here at least a week. She said, “They bill this place as a singles’ resort, but I didn’t see any singles here. Just me. And a couple of Swedish guys in G-strings.”

I said, “How many cats?”

“Two. They’re probably dead by now. My sister’s been feeding them.”

I was thinking about Diane. The perfume smell of her hair, the velvet softness of her baby skin. We got so close. She was floating all around me.

“I bet they’re O.K.,” I said. “Don’t get depressed.”

“I’m sick of this Tiki Bar,” the woman said. I thought about Diane and Rick—what was she doing? I pictured them fishing and talking and doing whatever else you do on a boat. Diane and I were in some new place together, and I thought of how it had to keep being new, or else we were doomed. More people came. Here I was, sitting around, depressed. That’s because you are a loser, I said to myself. I sipped my daiquiri. It tasted like ice cream. The woman from Baltimore was staring at me. She tapped her cigarette, waiting for me to say something else. I had nothing to say. I stared out at the water as the time passed in long sips. Out beyond the beach, I saw the cruiser pulling back into the harbor.

I said, “Hey—you like lawyers?” She asked why. “My cousin Walt is a lawyer. He’s good-looking. He lives in Baltimore.”

She said, “Really?”

“He has his own firm. He’s loaded.”

“Wow.”

Walt had a lisp. He talked like Popeye. But he also had muscles and owned a house on two acres in the suburbs.

“Walt’s a great guy,” I said. “He’d love you.” She smiled and put out her cigarette. “I’ll call him when we get back.”

She gave me a business card from her belly bag. “Something to look forward to,” she said.

Diane and Rick came back. They’d seen dolphins, they said. Diane looked beautiful. I wanted to hold her and touch her again. Rick had caught three fish. He was carrying them in a cooler filled with ice. The long one he called a “dagger fish.” He didn’t know its real name. His jaw was cocked in a big smile. I stared at his straw-colored curls.