Friday morning Joe walked to the farmer’s market and bought onions, bok choy, lettuce, and carrots.  The prices were good; the locals were cheerful; it was a good deal for everyone.  It was late September, and there were fewer tourists around.  A lone conga beat tumbled and surged across Kapiolani Park.  The smell of grilling teriyaki drifted across the 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 and applied to Montpelier.  They accepted me for the semester that starts right after Christmas.”

“Congratulations!”

“Yeah, pretty good, huh?  Joe Burke, software bum, goes for an MFA.  But I’m not sure I should.”

“Why not?”

“Pretty expensive,” Joe said.

“What would it cost?”

“$3800 a semester, times four.”  He frowned.  “I’ve got enough to get started, but I’d run out before the second semester.”

“There’s loan money for graduate school,” Mo said.

“I guess.  It doesn’t make sense from a financial point of view; I’ll never get a teaching job.  But I think I could learn something.”

“You have to make a commitment,” Mo said firmly.

“The winter residency is in Florida.  For ‘housemates preference,’ I requested older women of independent means.”

“They can be difficult,” Mo said.  “How come Florida?  I thought the school was in Vermont.”

“The summer session is in Vermont.  I think it was a faculty decision.  They leased a hotel in the panhandle.”  Joe scratched his head.  “I don’t know.  One way of looking at it is that part of the money would pay for a vacation in Florida.  It’s way over near Alabama.  I’ve never been in that part of the state.”

Mo placed her chopsticks neatly across her plate and wiped her mouth with a napkin.  She began to fidget.

“Well, onward,” Joe said.  “You want to go exploring sometime?  Look at things?”

“Mmm.”  She looked out the window.  “I’m awfully busy for the next while . . . "

He sighed dramatically.  “I’ll just have to go myself.  Maybe when I get back from Florida?”

“Give me a call,” she said.  They left, as usual, in opposite directions on Kapahulu Avenue.  She was like a figure on a Japanese fan, slowly unfolding, then snapped shut.  Let it be, he thought.

He spent the next few days working on a story about the time he and Morgan found a cache of dynamite hidden by the Weathermen, a radical group in the late 60’s.  He described the lost note that led them to a deserted house at the end of a road, the cold cloudy December afternoon, the shock of discovering a duffel bag in the crawl space under the house, the cardboard tubes of explosive, the tangle of blasting caps, and the ominous silence.  But, as he went on to write about the FBI, the local lawyer, and the lawyer’s wife, he began to lose focus.  One thing led to another.  Was he writing a story or a novel?  Again he realized that he had a lot to learn.

He was worried about money, but he put off looking for a job.  He couldn’t decide whether or not to go to Florida?  How many hours could he work if he became a full time student?  One evening, he swung through his door, stood by the blinking red light on his answering machine, and heard Ann say in a sad voice, “Joe, I’m sorry to have to shock you like this.  Your father died-yesterday.  Please call me if you get in by eleven or so, our time.”

“Damn!” he said.  “Damn.”

It was seven-thirty-past midnight, Maine time.  He got a reduced fare to Boston for the following afternoon on an emergency basis and began putting things into his Filson bag and then taking them out.  He couldn’t feel anything.  He gave up packing, lowered himself to his mattress, and waited a long time for sleep.

In the morning, he called Ann to tell her that he would be there the next day in the afternoon.  She said that she’d give him the details when he got there.  His father had died of a heart attack.  He told her to keep her chin up and said that he’d call Kate.

“Kate?”

“Hi, Dad.”

“Honey, I’ve got bad news.  Your grandfather died-the day before yesterday.”  She let out a small cry and was silent.  “I just found out.  Ann called.  I’m going out there for a couple of days.”

“Oh, poor Grandpa.  I had a dream about him last week.  He was standing by the painting he gave me-the one of the woman in the barn door-and he was smiling at me, very loving and kind.  Oh . . . " She sobbed, and her voice got farther away as though she had dropped her arms.

“I’m sorry, Honey.  He had a good life,” Joe said helplessly.

“He pau hana, now,” she said.

“Yeah,” Joe said.  “I call you when I get back, huh?”

“O.K., Dad.”

“O.K.  Bye, Honey.”

“Bye, Dad.”

He packed two changes of clothes, a sweater, and a jacket.  It was nearly November, practically winter in Maine.  “So long, Batman.  Hold the fort.”  It was a relief to trot down the stairs and get moving.

At midnight, Boston time, he emerged stiffly from the plane and walked into Logan terminal.  He rented a small car and stopped for the night at the first motel he came to on Route 1.