“I’m a stuntman.” He showed her a small scar on his collarbone she hadn’t noticed before. “This is from when I worked as a double for Evel Knievel. My motorcycle flipped once, twice. I thought I’d nailed the jump, but the stagehand, a new guy, he moved the ramp. Just a quarter of an inch and bam, lights out. I was in the hospital for over a week.”

She couldn’t imagine Mitch taking a greater risk than jumping off the hotel diving board. He was as calm as the current in Honey Creek.

“There’s nothing I won’t do,” he said.

Sherri took a drink. “But why does Evel Knievel need a double? I mean, doesn’t he do all the tricks himself? Isn’t that the point of being a stuntman?”

“Bobby likes me to try the tricks first.”

“Bobby?”

“Robert’s his real name. Know what he said to me? He said, ‘If I couldn’t be me, Mitch, I’d be you.’”

“That’s funny!” She imagined Val rolling her eyes at Sherri’s weak response.

Mitch said Pete Townsend had signed his guitar and he went to high school with Jerry Lewis’s kid. His father was some kind of movie producer. He had five brothers, and he was in Galveston because one of them had married a girl from there. Her father was in the oil business, and he was so rich that he’d rented out the entire Opera House for the wedding. The rest of his family had returned home to California, but Mitch had decided to stay for a few extra days to buy a new car, a red Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer. Before she knew it, she was sitting in the passenger seat, and they were cruising Sewall Boulevard. Strollers lazily ambled along the sidewalk. The waves crashed against the abandoned Pleasure Pier, which had been decimated by a hurricane; it was just a hunk of piles with rusting steel beams. Gulls nosedived for fish. Mitch reached for Sherri’s hand and slipped it under his jeans as he drove.

“This is the life,” she said. “We were meant to meet each other, don’t you think?”

“Sure, babe,” Mitch said. She’d never been called “babe” before.

She found his tan skin, clean, angular surfer’s good looks, and carefree manner incredibly appealing after Sam’s squat bluntness. How was it that men could be so different from each other? Mitch seemed wonderfully untouched by tragedy in a way that Sherri couldn’t fathom. Her short life had already been steeped in loss: first her father, then her mother. Mitch hadn’t even lost a dollar.