It wearied him to think of the jokey negotiating. Worse, it shamed him to think of how easily he’d had sex with girls he’d met casually on the beach, whose names he never knew—and one in particular, a pale Japanese tourist who’d murmured, “Hurry, mister!” because she had a bus to catch. He was aware that since he had won the Pipeline Masters the previous year girls sought him out, and not only for his glory. He always had pakalolo, he had money for beer, he had a car, and one of his sponsors was a sportswear company: he had surf gear, he had free stuff. In return for sex the girl would get a rash guard or a board leash.

May did not want anything, nor did she want to be touched. And she had a job. She was a rare bunny.

“I seen her,” Skippy said. “All the guys wen’ try her. She so straight, brah. You get less.”

“I don’t care if I get less.”

“You get more less.”

“Maybe I don’t want much.”

“Everybody want something,” Skippy said, almost pleading.

“Just a friend,” Sharkey said.

The simplicity of a friend, the purity of it, the relief—wanting nothing from her but companionship. She had promise as a surfer, and he would help her any way he could. She’d been cautious with him on the beach, but she’d been daring, at moments reckless on the wave, her moves exceeding her control. She was not strong, but she was sturdy and small, with a low center of gravity. He’d started that way—independent, a bit defiant, hard to convince, determined, untrusting. He too had hated to be touched.

She did not show up the next day. Sharkey waited on the beach, assessing the young surfers on the head-high waves. Skippy walked toward him, swigging beer. He finished it and crushed the can in his hand, squeezing it flat.

“You looking for the surf bunny?” he finally said.

Sharkey was always astonished by how keen-eyed and shrewd an apparently illiterate local surfer could be—louts, as he’d heard them described by haoles from town. But with animal cunning and a kind of hunger they could read your mind.

“Da tita,” Sharkey said.

That was what she was, a sister. That was the ideal. And he thought, Maybe that was why I said, “I want to meet your father,” perhaps in a fit of prescience, of a yearning to see a whole family, to join them as a brother and a son.