That was not what she wanted, yet she felt she’d made progress, and in trying to explain to him the impasse—the stalled life, the bad luck (she resisted calling it karma)—she’d clarified it for herself; found the words for it. Explaining it to him was a way of explaining it to herself.

But the next morning he was out of bed as she was just waking.

“Big day,” he said.

“I thought we were going to talk.”

“Yes. Definitely. But I’m going out first. Surf’s up this morning. Dropping this afternoon. Outta here.”

With that he was out of the room, heading to the garage to strap the board on his car. And she felt winded—defeated. That was his life, one evasion after another. I’m not into sitting around, man. He would never face the fact of what he had done; he would never understand the effect it had had on his life, that it had cast a shadow over it, and he would live the rest of his life in that shadow, his narrowing existence of bad luck and delay and aborted hope. If she stayed with him her own life would be no better.

One of his earliest stories ended with his saying, “So you get on a plane. You have great karma—you’re stoked, looking forward to the flight and the vacation. You’re totally in tune with your karma. But what you don’t know is that the pilot has bad karma. And he crashes the plane.”

It had touched her at the time, and she’d smiled. “I never thought of that,” she said. Now it seemed like a dire warning.

Olive packed for the second time, filled two suitcases with her clothes, emptied the bedside table of her books, murmuring in his voice “Outta here.” She was late for work but put all her things on the lanai, intending to pick them up later. Her last glimpse of them saddened her because the things themselves looked sad: the two old bags, the battered cardboard box, a small deformed valise—she saw her whole life in a compact pile. It seemed a negligible accumulation of clobber, and she recognized herself in their bumps and surface damage. She reminded herself of her age—thirty-eight, still capable of childbearing—and thought, I’m portable. Everything she owned in the world could fit in the trunk of her car. She was sad, she was happy, and then she saw herself as though in a movie, a dramatic moment glimpsed from a high camera angle, a valiant woman, moving out to begin again. She wanted to dislike Sharkey, but when she considered him and what had happened, she felt only pity.

Still, goodbye. Outta here. Jolly well done with him.

Seeing Luana in the cafeteria with another woman in scrubs—a doctor, wearing her stethoscope like a badge—she waved, and backed away. But Luana beckoned and introduced the woman.