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unreadable, behind.
    There were cold spots in the Oceanside house, places the heat seemed never to enter. Hot spots too. And all of his tinkering with thermostats and base heating and filters was just that—tinkering. Like his neighbors’, his house was built as a gesture: two-inch nails instead of four, lightweight roofing guaranteed for ten years instead of thirty, single-thickness panes rattling in their molding. Each year Sandler became fonder of the neighborhood he and Vida had moved away from. She had been right, certainly, to leave Up Beach when they did, before the drought that ended in flood, and she never gave it another thought. As he did almost every day, as now, on a very cold night, longing for the crackle of fire in a stingy potbelly stove, the smell of clean driftwood burning. He couldn’t forget the picture the moon turned those Up Beach cabins into. Here, in this government-improved and -approved housing with too much man-made light, the moon did nothing kind. The planners believed that dark people would do fewer dark things if there were twice as many streetlamps as anywhere else. Only in fine neighborhoods and the country were people entrusted to shadow. So even when the moon was full and blazing, for Sandler it was like a bounty hunter’s far-off torch, not the blanket of beaten gold it once spread over him and the ramshackle house of his childhood, exposing the trick of the world, which is to make us think it is ours. He wanted his own moon again releasing a wide gold finger to travel the waves and point directly at him. No matter where he stood on the beach, it knew exactly; as unwavering and personal as a mother’s touch, the gold finger found him, knew him. And although he understood that it came from a cold stone incapable even of indifference, he also knew it was pointing to him alone and nobody else. Like the windblown girl who had singled him out, breaking out of evening wind to stand between garage light and sunset, backlit, spotlighted, and looking only at him.
    Bill Cosey would have done more. Invited her in to warm herself, offered to drive her where she wanted to go, instead of barking at her, doubting her accuracy. Cosey would have succeeded, too; he almost always did. Vida, like so many others, had looked on him with adoring eyes, spoke of him with forgiving smiles. Proud of his finesse, his money, the example he set that goaded them into thinking that with patience and savvy, they could do it too. But Sandler had fished with him, and while he did not claim to know his heart, mind, or wallet, he knew his habits.
    They were lee, bobbing in a cove, not out to deep sea as he had expected.
    Sandler had been surprised by the invitation, since Cosey usually shared his boat only with special guests, or, most often, the sheriff, Buddy Silk—one member of a family that had named a whole town after itself and gave epic-movie names to its streets. Cosey had approached him in the road where Sandler was parked waiting for Vida. He aligned his pale blue Impala with Sandler’s pickup and said, “You busy tomorrow, Sandler?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Not working?”
    “No, sir. Cannery’s closed on Sunday.”
    “Oh, right.”
    “You need me for something?”
    Cosey pursed his lips as though second-guessing his invitation, then turned his face away.
    Sandler contemplated his profile, which looked like the one on a nickel minus the hairdo and feathers. Still handsome, Cosey was seventy-four years old then; Sandler twenty-two. Cosey had been married over twenty years; Sandler less than three. Cosey had money; Sandler earned one dollar and seventy cents an hour. He wondered if any two men had less to talk about.
    Having come to a decision, Cosey faced Sandler.
    “I aim to fish a little. First light. Thought you might like to join me.”
    Working fish all day, Sandler did not connect catching them with sport. He’d rather shoot than fish, but there was no way to decline. Vida wouldn’t like it,