e grass. Small cumulus clouds blew out to sea.

Joe sat on the last beach before Diamond Head, a place where he and
Sally and Kate had often come on weekends. An older man--the age Joe
was now--used to park his car and carry a rubber raft to the water. His
dog would jump into the raft, and the man would push it out, swimming
slowly, until they were a hundred yards offshore. He would climb into
the raft and write in a notebook while his dog rested and kept watch.
The deeply tanned man and the black raft floated up and down, a dark
silhouette on the glinty ocean. Occasionally the man paddled to keep
from drifting too far down the beach. Probably 80 now, if he's still
alive, Joe thought.

"Time to get serious." The words appeared like a banner in Joe's mind.
To his surprise, he had told the woman at the San Juan Yacht Club that
he was a poet. The words were true as he spoke them. He had defined
himself, for better or worse. Whether he wrote stories or poems didn't
matter--he could do both. What mattered was to get to work.

Isabelle was on to something with the patchwork quilt. The faces and
feelings that he described were important, but--as patches. He needed
to carry his writing further and work on the quilt. Isabelle? He shook
his head feeling a slight flush. She was a sharpie, no doubt about it.
She got right to him. But she was well down the alcoholic road. She
didn't have to work. She didn't have children. Joe couldn't see what
would bring her back. It wasn't the drinking, so much, that put him
off. It was the lack of pride or purpose or will power that the
drinking implied. Just as well, he thought, that there was an ocean
between them.

"You could define adult life as the struggle not to drink too much," he
said to Mo at Hee Hing's the following week. He was telling her about
Isabelle, leaving out the sex.

"There's too much to do to feel awful all the time," she said.

"Quite right. But some people don't get hangovers; they're just a
little fuzzy in the morning. Ingrid was like that. I can't take it.
Tea, that's the stuff," he said, drinking from a small round cup. "So,
what have you been doing?"

"Oh, the usual," she said. "I've been over to Kauai a few times. I got
a decent shot of the cook at Tops."

"Jade Willow Lady," Joe said.

"Yes. I'm framing a large one for my next show--whenever that is."

"I'm anxious to see it. I forgot to tell you: after we talked last, I
checked out graduate schools an