She handed the paper back. She looked tearful, her lips tremulous. Her fingers were thin, the skin loose and crepey; her fingernails were long and lovely, pink, pearly, like polished shells, and she wore an enormous glittering diamond ring.

“I didn’t mean those things I said.”

“You were upset.”

“I wasn’t upset. I’m a bitch.” She said it ruefully. “Max was kind.”

“That’s what I discovered.”

“All that trouble you took to find out about him,” she said. “Max would have done that.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then kiss me,” she said.

He leaned over to kiss her cheek, but she held his head and grabbed his hair and kissed him fiercely on his lips and forced them open and moaned hungrily into his mouth. When she was done, leaving the sweet creaminess of lipstick on his tongue, she rested her head on his shoulder and sighed.

“You remind me of him—you laughed like him,” she said. “A free spirit, reckless as hell. But a good heart.”

“Yes, I know him now,” Sharkey said in a tearful whisper. “I’m so sorry he’s gone.”

Sharkey woke buoyant, motionless, as though floating on his back, then with a whiff of the sea from the lanai realized where he was. He smiled at the ceiling. Remembering that his flight to Honolulu was not leaving until late that evening, he slipped on his board shorts and hurried out of the hotel, waving away the man in the white uniform and gold braids at the porte cochere who saluted and said, “Taxi?”

“Not today, chief.”

He crossed the main road and walked toward the pier, descending from the narrow cliffside park to the beach just beyond the pier. He kicked off his flip-flops to feel the heat of the sand rise from his soles to glow in his legs. The surf was hardly more than a foot, and yet it chuckled and beckoned as he flexed, preparing to enter the water at the break he knew as Bay Street.

Stretching, canted sideways, he saw three small boys seated near him, watching the novice surfers, unsteady on their boards and toppling into the waves. The boys sat crouched in attitudes of exclusion, three explicit silhouettes, stark against the whiteness of the beach, a coating of sand sugaring their arms and legs.

“Hi, guys.”

The boys twitched at his voice and looked warily at him, as though bringing him into focus, but said nothing.

“Why aren’t you out there catching waves?”

One boy laughed, averting his gaze; another said, “That’s hard, man.”

“You good swimmers?”

“Pretty good,” the biggest boy said.

“Then you can do it.”

They all laughed and, still seated, swayed, showing indecision, then leaned away from him.

“I’m Joe. Tell me your names.”