Sharkey did not say what was he was thinking: I have no family, and even when I did have the Colonel and my mother, I did not have that kind of love. The power of this family behind May was something he had never known, and drew him to her, and it made her marvelous. After a few weeks of surfing with her and carrying her board and watching her drive away, she was still resolute, self-possessed, wholly herself—a rarity in his experience. Always eager to see her, bewitched by her body and her beautiful face and her resourcefulness on her board, he wondered if he was falling in love.

He’d always thought how women assessed him, and other men, with the woman’s question “Is he the one meant for me?” Because he’d always felt, even in the recklessness of the North Shore, that the women wanted more, wanted a partner, or a baby—for them the sex was the beginning of everything. For Sharkey, for most men he knew, it was something accomplished, a done deed, of always going home alone, sex as something final, a kind of cure.

But he began to think, Maybe she’s the one meant for me—his future—and he loved her for resisting him. Her resistance was like an element in their courtship.

Still, they surfed, he sometimes met her at work, and he saw her off as she headed back to town many evenings. In his mind, she was driving into the unknown, and so one day at the beginning of February he asked again about her family.

“Maybe you get a chance to see them,” she said as she poured a gallon jug of fresh water over her head and let it splash over her body as she shook herself and tossed her hair.

“I’d love to.”

“Maybe New Year’s.”

“It’s over,” he said. “That was a month ago.”

“Chinese New Year,” she said, blinking water out of her eyes. “The Year of the Rat. I’m taking the week off from work. Staying in town—no surfing.”

“Party time?”

“Family time,” she said, and the suggestion of intimacy gave him a pang. “Family dinner. Wong ohana.”

“I envy you.”

She stood straight, hands on hips, still dripping. Her eyes were on him, but she was not looking at him; the eyes were unfocused, gleaming with the fluidity of intense thought—a calculating gaze that was like blindness, droplets from the water jug glinting on her long lashes.

“I never invite anyone before,” she said, and licked some drops from her lips, and shrugged. “Okay.”