It was exactly what I needed: an excuse to stop thinking about Kenny. That sort of getting together between tourists and islanders happens more than you’d think, though not usually with me. Usually it’s one of the boys who puts on his slickers for a lonely housewife from Indiana or South Dakota who thought taking a month-long rental on the island would be just the thing to spark her inner artist. Sometimes the women were single or married but travelling alone and just wanted “a taste of the local seafood,” as Rena liked to put it, and sometimes those things ended up working out, like with Timmy and Etsuko. Usually it didn’t mean anything beyond a few nights of fun. The boys like to joke that you got to break out the fishing pole more during the tourist season than you did when you were actually fishing. Of course, there was also the long-running joke that when the single boys on Loosewood Island weren’t catching lobsters, they were catching crabs. I’d been having a hard go of it.
