him. “We can’t do that,” she said.

“We’ll go somewhere. I have the car.”

She looked at him a long time, judging him, he thought, and wondered on what count. How. Was she judging him for then, or for now?

“Come on,” she said, and started past him up the dock.

They walked over to the last pier. There were three fingers of docks and slips. Jimmy just followed her lead. Halfway there, he took her hand, but she let go after only a few seconds, a few steps. He sensed she was angry, but also sensed that it wasn’t entirely focused. It was a rising anger looking for something to form around, something to be about. Something to beat her fist against.

She walked out to the end of the last dock. It was where the big sailboats were, thirty-footers and up.

One of them had her name on it.

Queen Mary.

The cockpit was open, uncovered. It was a Swan, a beautiful Swan, a forty-five footer. She climbed over the lifeline and into the cockpit. There didn’t look to be any live-aboards in the boats in the neighborhood, but there were voices from somewhere close. Voices over the water, that sound. Jimmy looked until he found them, two or three guys in the cockpit of a Hunter 38 out near the head of the next pier, the glow of a cigar or two and the good smell of it winging over. Here behind the curve of the little bay there was barely any wind. Jimmy stepped over the lifeline onto the boat.

Mary was unlocking the cabin. She slid the panel door up and out of the way and stepped down. After a minute, she reappeared with a bottle of wine and two glasses. Plastic glasses, but stemware, a nice shape. Boat drinks.

“I drink a lot of wine now,” she said and handed him the bottle and a corkscrew to open it with. She plopped down in the seat beside the wheel and pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them. All the years that had passed since they’d been together in L.A. blew away.

Jimmy opened the wine. When it popped, there was a response from the guys on the boat across the way. Maybe, “Cheers!”

“I don’t know them,” Mary said. “They came in a few days ago, sailing down the coast, I think.”

Jimmy got that she was also saying, I wouldn’t be here if I knew them.

But at least she seemed to have lost the anger. “You know what you said yesterday?” she said. “About how it was still so strong?”

He gave her a glass, found a place to stow the bottle, and sat beside her. He didn’t know if it was a question she meant for him to answer or not.

She seemed to finish her own thought by drinking half of the glass of wine. Punctuation.

She took his hand now. He brought their hands up and kissed the back of hers, something he never would have done if anyone could have seen. He was different when they were together. Always.

He tasted the wine. It was a rich Chianti.

“Are you cold?” she said.

“No.”

“People from L.A. are always cold up here, always talking about it.”

“I hate L.A.,” Jimmy said. He didn’t mean it.

“That’s not true.”

“I’m never going back.”

She surprised him by taking him seriously, like the girl she used to be. It was something else she used to do, something else that made her different from all the rest.

“You know, it never stopped for me,” he said.

The sailing-down-the-coast guys laughed loud and rough at something.

Mary moved away from him just enough for him to notice. He followed her eyes. She was looking at the dots of house lights out on the point, above the village, or maybe she was reacting to the intrusion of the guys on the other dock.

“Is the boat yours or his?”

“Mine. He never comes down. He bought it, but he forgets it’s even here.”

There was another laugh from the men across the way, as if her last line was the punch line to the one about the cardiologist and his restless young wife.

Jimmy stood. He put his wineglass in the teak holder next to the wheel and went forward.

Mary thought he was going to say something to the other sailors. “Jimmy,” she said.

But then she saw him kick off his slip-on shoes.

The Queen Mary, this Queen Mary, was stern-out, its back to the Bay. Jimmy stepped off the boat onto the dock with the balance of a dancer, already getting into