“Here’s to us,” he said, “and fuck the mortgage.” He was all smiles, and our happiness continued. Later in the evening, I found out they were a lot more than that five hundred dollars behind; they had debts at home, too. It was painful. Probably all he needed to avert disaster was some sane advice, a speck of financial insight. I could give him that. I told him to call me before he made any god-awful decisions.

We drank and ate till midnight and went swimming naked while the ladies crawled around looking for shells by the light of the moon. The next morning, we rode with them to the airport, through that beautiful countryside. I was looking at everything, and it was so nice, because we were leaving.

LINDA’S DADDY’S LOADED

MY WIFE CALLED me at work to say she saw our neighbor in his garden. She was standing in our garden—our house is way up on a hill, you don’t realize how high it is until you’re up here—and she could see him down there in his fenced-in yard, in shorts and a baseball hat, reading the newspaper. A woman came out of the house in a towel, Linda said, and she took it off and spread it on the ground and started doing exercises on it. Linda said it was weird. The woman wore a bikini, and every once in a while the man looked over at her and said something. He kept lifting one leg, she said, crossing it over the other. The woman sat up and brushed her hair and took off her top, rubbing lotion on her shoulders, and the man got up and lay down next to her and they started making out.

It was hard to see, Linda said, but she could imagine it. I pictured her in the flower bed, with her gloves on and her gardening shirt and her straw hat and sunglasses and her special knee pads, with the little shovel, and the void look of half recognizing something happening outside her that she wanted or that had somehow grabbed her. And so there she was, sucked in, and she said to herself, What should I do? Should I stop looking? Should I call Mike at work? And then she thought, What if they stay there all day? Then, Linda said, the man rolled off the woman and you could hear them both laughing. She said, “Do you think I should invite them over?”

“Is that why you called me?”

She said, “Why don’t we ever do that?”