Sharkey was grateful and relieved and expectant. In all that time, the month or more of giving May his full attention, of avoiding his old girlfriends and his surfer buddies, he had dropped out of his circle of friends—had chosen to surf with May at breaks where he was sure he would not see them. But he was happy in his concentration. It was how he imagined an old-fashioned love affair, his spending time with her, carrying her board, wooing her in his way. And this adjustment, resisting himself, he was impressed by her example—the way she had fended off all other men. It had strengthened him but also isolated him, in the way love does, by his need for her, that nothing else mattered and no one would understand. It was a rare thing for him—he could not remember a time when he’d felt so insecure. And that other fact, that keeping her distance as she became more important to him, the knowledge that he had no one else.

He saw that what he was living through was nothing that he’d known before, not his picking a woman, singling her out, and snatching her—the woman flirting or waiting to be chosen. This was a dance, during which he and the woman circled each other, whispering, interacting, assessing, not touching but existing in a vague companionship and surfing together, the basis of a future. May did not flirt, she did not confide, and so she had power.

That May had a whole family magnified her, made her seem decent and protected, a world away from the North Shore anarchy of Sharkey’s recent years.

She was gone for almost a week. He suffered this absence and discovered the helplessness of a lover, in thrall to a Chinese fox-witch. And then she called.

“Meet us at the restaurant,” she’d said. “It’s more better we don’t show up together. My father so strict. He trusts me, but he don’t trust anyone else.”

So Sharkey drove to town, murmuring so shtrick, forty miles in his peeling VW bug, to the restaurant she’d named, Hee Hing’s on Kapahulu. Self-conscious about the condition of his car—the dents, the rusty roof rack, his sponsors’ bumper stickers—he parked a little distance down the street under a kukui nut tree. He walked to the restaurant on the hot cement sidewalk, the sun bearing down on him and slowing him as he squinted in the glare, hating the side streets of bungalows and small shops, the whole neighborhood paved over.