Then he was alone, and looked inside the house through the big window on the empty lanai. But he saw nothing but a thin man, gaunt-faced with falcon features, in a stained T-shirt, one blue tattooed hand raised to his mouth for a hit on a sparkling doobie. The man’s face was creased, his neck leathery, his hair spiked and going gray, his mouth half smiling in puzzlement, the lips cracked and stung by salt, the long upraised fingers also sea-soaked and pink and pickled, holding the burned-tipped joint—a weatherbeaten man peering back at him from the inner room, a stranger, his own reflection.

Then he knew why no one recognized him: he was sinewy, too watchful to be trusted, lurking like an outlaw, an idle predator, not hungry but hopeful and alone, a nonentity but old. His skin was blackish and blotchy in places, and the tattoos on his hands and arms were no longer blue but grayish and porous, his skin tissuey from decades of waves slapping it, of sun scorching it. He was a scarecrow haunting the party, a wraith among the pretty girls and golden boys.

The man in the mirror of the window was crowded by gesturing boys, hooting, whistling.

“He’s here!”

“Yo!”

“Aloha!”

And he saw, still reflected in the window, the slight, smiling, crop-haired figure of Garrett, garlanded with leis, and his pale lovely wife, wearing a crown of blossoms, advancing behind him across the lanai, greeted by Franco.

“Here’s our hero,” Franco said.

But entering the house, Garrett looked aside and saw Sharkey standing by the rail of the lanai—he had backed away from the window and the cheering boys.

“Shark,” Garrett said, and reached to bump fists, but before Sharkey could meet him with his own fist, Garrett staggered, surrounded, and was pushed into the house, the young surfers following.

In an unexpected hush, the music shut off, Franco began to speak, praising Garrett, provoking bursts of laughter and some boyish hoots; and then Garrett, to applause, haltingly thanked Franco and the partygoers, who cheered as he introduced his wife. The awkward enthusiasm, the inarticulate hollering, were like a tribal rite, but a happy one, of simple celebration.

“Really happy to be part of the paddle-out,” Garrett was saying. “Though I never knew him.”

Franco interrupted, saying, “Hunter was one of us. He’d understand why it’s taken us so long to pull this thing together. How many years, eh? Try wait, doc! But we’ll give him a real sendoff, with lots of aloha.”