Though they’d been together only six weeks, she was now part of his life; the accident had created a bond, it was something they’d struggled through, a shared experience of sudden death. Because of this he knew how she’d react. He had learned from his mother, from his solitude, that it was possible to hold long unsatisfactory conversations with people he knew well—even though they might be absent. He had one of those frustrating dialogues this morning, rebutting all the arguments he’d heard before, the times he’d been sick. He often felt that Olive became her true self when he was ill or out of sorts—“a bear with a sore head,” as she said—because it put her in charge, and in a position of strength she mothered and manipulated him in ways that made him frantic to get well.

“I’m going surfing.”

“That’s the last thing you should be doing.”

“It’ll make me feel better.”

“It’ll set you back. You need rest.”

“I need action—the Miki Dora way.” And he nodded. “Miki once said that no problem is so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from. Great surfer. I had one of his long boards. Da Cat.”

“Go back to bed.”

“You’re so bossy.”

“Because you’re such a stubborn plonker. Look, I’m a nurse. I know what I’m talking about.”

“And I know what’s good for me.”

“Always the narcissist. But you look ropy, like something the dog sicked up. The dreaded lurgy.”

“I can look after myself.”

“You need rest, maybe medicine.”

“I hate medicine. I avoid it. Medicine makes people sick. You’re a nurse and you don’t know that?”

And more, sparring and nagging, and Olive wasn’t even in the room. She was six miles away at Kahuku Medical Center. Yet he was playing out the dialogue, responding to her, as he pureed a mango smoothie and changed into his board shorts and T-shirt and then threw handfuls of pellets to the geese. While they pecked and squawked he sat and drank the smoothie, still murmuring in reply to Olive’s objections.

The glare made him unsteady. He had to put on his sunglasses and stretch again before he was able to hoist his board onto the roof rack, and even so the simple task seemed unusually laborious. But this was the cure. He needed to surf, and if this lifting of the board was harder than normal, the reason had to be the new car—the SUV was higher than his old car, the new roof rack sat on different towers and bigger clamps; it was more of an effort to hoist the board at that angle.